Tag: covid-19
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Evidence suggests vaccination does cut spread of Omicron
Earlier this week I noticed that some anti-vax propagandists have a new line of attack – they aren’t denying that vaccination protects you against severe illness from Covid, but they are saying that it is false to claim that vaccination limits the spread of the disease and hence its also wrong to insist that people…
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Getting Covid
The Government won’t tell you this – so I will – it wants (most) of us to catch Covid. And this week I complied. The Government aren’t out to get most of us infected because they are evil and want people to die. Instead they (I assume) see something like the following as good reasons…
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Winning the evolutionary war?
Earlier this week I wrote that there appeared to be no evolutionary biological reason to think the corona virus would evolve at present to be less deadly. It’s starting to look like I was wrong. In fact it looks as though the vaccines have driven selection of changes in the virus’s spike (to evade vaccination-driven…
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Covid: what do we do now?
(I need to start this by saying I have no medical or epidemiological qualifications and I’m not a statistician, though I do have some knowledge there – so if anyone who is any of these things spots an error, let me know.) Around this time last year I was telling people that I thought Covid-19…
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The long haul
Far too much debate in the UK about responding to SARS-CoV-2 has been about short-termist responses. So, for instance, just as every lockdown has begun to have real effect it has been lifted in the name of the economy. The result has been we are now in the longest lock-down of all, we’ve got the…
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After neo-liberalism: back to Bell Labs?
In general I hate the term “neo-liberal” – as in the last decade it has become a fashionable way for some people on the left to say “things I don’t like” whilst giving their (often irrational) personal preferences a patina of intellectual credibility. Glen O’Hara looks at the accusation that the last Labour government was…
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The missing link and closing schools
London, where I am writing this, is now perhaps the global centre of the covid19 pandemic, thanks to a mutation of the virus that has allowed it to spread more easily. This mutation may not have come into existence in the South East of England but it has certainly taken hold here, and about 2%…
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Honesty about vaccination
I am not medically qualified or a statistician or epidemiologist so this is not expert opinion, but I cannot help but feel that there has been a lack of honesty in the public discourse about what vaccination against covid-19 will achieve. First of all, I think the effort to find a vaccination will succeed and…
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Beards and spandrels
One of the least important ways in which the current world-wide crisis over covid-19 is going to affect many of us is the state it is going to leave our hair in. Barbers and hairdressers are closed or closing – either under orders, because custom has dried up or because concerns about staff and customer…
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Progress is not the only option
The global pandemic of covid-19 is, in its way, a triumph for the scientific method: scientists warned for a long time of the danger of a pandemic caused by a novel virus and so it has come to pass. But in the crisis we shouldn’t forget all the other issues science warns us about –…
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