Has there been a moment in modern history where so many people in free societies have believed such damaging lies? It’s easy to point to the US, where nearly 90 per cent of people who voted for Donald Trump believe Joe Biden’s election victory was not legitimate. No...
Is bionic duckweed a dire threat to our health and prosperity? It just might be. But lest you fear that it is a fresh torment to test us alongside Covid-19, wildfires and murder hornets, I should reassure you that it is not a Triffid-like killer plant. Bionic...
Will it ever end? In November, we were celebrating the announcement that the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine seemed to be highly effective against Covid-19, followed with bewildering speed by similar claims for the Sputnik V, Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines. Nearly...
The Florence Nightingale Museum in London, devoted to the pioneering 19th-century nurse, is closing its doors, indefinitely. The museum director, David Green, describes the plan as “hibernation”; the collection will remain on site at St Thomas’s Hospital. The timing...
In February 2014, London’s Underground was partially shut down by a strike that forced many commuters to find new ways to get to work. The disruption lasted just 48 hours, but when three economists (Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch and Tim Willems) studied data from the...
What a difference a couple of weeks makes. In mid-December, I asked a collection of wise guests on my BBC radio programme How to Vaccinate the World about the importance of second doses. At that stage, Scott Gottlieb, former head of the US Food and Drug...
Here’s a holiday quiz question for you: what do puzzles, poker, and misinformation have in common? The answer is at the bottom of this column. Let’s try an easier question first. In Santa’s workshop, if it takes five elves five minutes to wrap five presents, how long...
Tom Kelley is a sensitive soul. Shortly after sending the manuscript of his first book, The Art of Innovation, to his publisher, he visited Kepler’s, his local bookshop in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley. “I literally started to cry,” he confessed to a group of authors...
A few weeks ago, Toby Young, the editor of the Lockdown Sceptics website, tweeted: “New study suggests more than five million Britons have had the coronavirus. Given that ~50,000 people have died from it, that means an IFR [infection fatality rate] of <0.1%.” There...