Society

Prior to 19 March 2020, the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was quietly doing pretty much what it had been doing for the previous 75 years.  Its antimalarial properties had been known for much longer.  Originally derived from the bark of the Cinchona Tree and sometimes referred to as “the Jesuit powder,” …

In the early 2000s an organisation I worked with, conducted a survey among Britain’s doctors.  “With the internet growing as a source of information,” they asked, “how important will it be to your practice?”  The subtlety was that they asked the first group of doctors about its value in providing …

Ordinarily when dealing with conspiracy theories it is best to take the advice of science fiction writer Carl Sagan – “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  The fact that someone said it on YouTube or that an increasingly detached pseudo-news outlet like CNN or the Daily Mail reported it doesn’t really …

Whatever else he may be, Boris Johnson is a remarkably lucky politician.  Unlike Labour’s last prime minister – who saw the economy melt down just weeks after bottling out of calling “the election that never was” – Johnson is getting his crisis in early; leaving him more than four years …

If only Jeremy Corbyn had won the December 2019 general election, the Covid-19 crisis would have been entirely different.  At least, that is what the Facebook sages on the left of the political spectrum are currently claiming.  This, though is just the usual political theatre in which the red team …

In 1965 a group of psychologists studying conditioning in dogs stumbled across what they were to call “learned helplessness.”  In their experiment, they took a puppy and put it in a cage.  Once the puppy got used to his surroundings, the experimenters rang a bell.  So the puppy thinks to …

In the early 1940s, my dear departed mother had all of her teeth removed in a single sitting.  Even by the standards of today’s NHS dental service – which is a pale shadow of the comprehensive pre-Thatcher service – the reasons for this will be considered barbaric.  My mother had …

New Zealand has put a stop to community transmission of SARS-Cov-2; Yeah!  It is a victory of sorts, and one which was hard won.  As the BBC explain: “The country brought in some of the toughest restrictions in the world on travel and activity early on in the pandemic, when …

One person is responsible for the devastating spread of Covid-19 through your community.  That person is YOU!  That, at least, is the line that the establishment media has been taking from the very beginning.  As each new problem – largely the result of a failure of planning by the government …

You might be forgiven for thinking that the world is in the grip of a SARS-Cov-2 pandemic crisis.  That is only partially true, though.  The real crisis is in the neoliberal system which left us so desperately unprepared to meet what was a known threat.  The UK government’s own Operation …