Day: 15 November 2020

AIDS and Covid

by Nick Macleod    Bertrand Russell wrote: There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action. Eerily prescient, but it doesn’t tell us precisely how such nonsense overpowers our common sense. Why did the world stop turning in the face of a virus where the official advice for victims is to go home for a few days and wait for it to pass, while taking care to exercise only in their own gardens? I don’t know the answer, but all too frequently, the first response to a novel threat has been to find a reason to panic – often as a result of a computer projection – and to stick with it, rejecting all evidence that undermines the doomsday thesis. That may appear to be vaguely justified by the better-safe-than-sorry principle, but ill-considered and heavy-handed ‘no choice’ remedies generally do more harm than good. It might be better to study the history of past health scares and learn from it, rather than continuing to fall into the same old traps. As a starting point, we might compare how early-stage forecast errors and their subsequent amplification by the media, and – more surprisingly – by the healthcare establishment itself, have manifested themselves in two particular epidemic crises: AIDS, as ...

Latest News

The Story Behind the Number 10 Bloodbath The power behind the throne The Sunday Times's Tim Shipman has written one of the best pieces about Dom's departure from Downing Street for today's papers, as you'd expect. Shipman has authored two books about the Brexit drama and is working on a third and it's clear that Dom is one of his main sources. But to be fair to Tim, he's clearly been briefed by both sides and his piece is fairly balanced. In Tim's telling, the conflict between Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain on the one hand, and Allegra Stratton and Carrie Symonds on the other, is a battle for Boris's soul. What kind of Prime Minister is he going to be? At its simplest, it was a division between the Vote Leave faction of Brexiteer buccaneers – led by Cummings and Cain – who guided Johnson to his victories in the 2016 EU referendum, the Tory leadership contest and last year’s election – and others, led by Symonds and Stratton, who remember more fondly the consensual figure who twice won the London mayoralty in a Labour city.In the end, Johnson decided he quite liked that version of himself too. As one Cabinet minister put it: “Boris has finally decided that he wants to be the Prime Minister rather than a ...

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