The World Health Organisation’s appeasement of China has made another pandemic more likely

Matt Ridley

The WHO has now wasted a year failing to investigate properly the origins of Covid-19 My article for The Telegraph: It is a year ago last week since the World Health Organisation conceded, belatedly, that a pandemic was under way. The organisation’s decisions in early 2020 were undoubtedly influenced by the Chinese government. On 14 […]

The EU’s petty isolationism is wrecking Europe

Matt Ridley

Like the Ming empire before it, bureaucratic tyranny is immiserating a beautiful and cultured place My article for The Telegraph: There is something rather apt in the coincidence of an Italian ban on vaccine exports to Australia and the negotiation by Liz Truss, the trade secretary, of lower tariffs on trade with the United States. […]

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Innovation is a Geographically Localized and Temporary Phenomenon

Matt Ridley

China may now be the most innovative place on earth, but India may soon replace it as the world’s innovation leader My article for Discourse: Innovation is the “main event” of the modern age. It’s the reason why after millennia of comparative stagnation, the last several hundred years featured sudden, dramatic improvements in technology and […]

Stresses and Strains

Matt Ridley

The evolution of Covid is not random My article for The Spectator: In the genetic diaspora of an epidemic, there is ferocious competition between strains of virus to get to the next victim first. That leads to apparently purposeful outcomes, as if the virus had a mind. One of the things people find hardest to […]

The World Needs a Real Investigation Into the Origin of Covid-19

Matt Ridley

A team of WHO researchers has arrived in China but won’t investigate the possibility that the coronavirus originated in a lab. My article for the Wall Street Journal, with Dr. Chan: In the first week of January, scientists representing the World Health Organization (WHO) were due to arrive in China to trace the origins of […]

Bio-Britain is leading the world in the science of Covid

Matt Ridley

The list of our achievements in biology is extraordinary for a country with just one per cent of the world’s population My latest article, for The Telegraph: Britain probably leads the world in self-criticism. So maybe we don’t always notice when the country leads the world in something a bit more useful. During the pandemic […]

Britain will thrive if we side with innovators

Matt Ridley

The government can kickstart a 2020s boom by giving entrepreneurs fewer rules, simpler taxes and cheaper energy My article for The Times: Tomorrow Britain starts to set its own rules, free of the directives of imperial Brussels. Boris Johnson said recently that his government kept deliberately quiet in 2020 about how it would unleash the […]

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Lockdowns may actually prevent a natural weakening of this disease

Matt Ridley

Tough restrictions keep the virus spreading mainly among the very ill, meaning more lethal strains can dominate milder ones My article for The Telegraph: Boris Johnson’s fondness for the metaphor of the US cavalry riding to the rescue is risky: ask General Custer. With the vaccine cavalry in sight, and just when we thought we […]

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