Author Archives: Jon Garvey

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.

Old before their time

Boris Johnson says that any further COVID lockdown will be a disaster for Britain, and that he will go “to any lengths” to prevent it. So far that seems to entail greater degrees of restriction working up to the planned disaster gradually. But I have a useful suggestion for him: Boris, if you will go to any lengths to prevent a disastrous lockdown, then why not go to the length of not imposing a lockdown? Problem solved at a non-stroke, and in accordance with the science that increasingly shows lockdowns have done no good whatsoever, and a whole heap of harm.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

Alpha and Omega

It is important to understand that popular theologies, like popular sciences, are subject to fashion. A long life in Christ (mine is currently 55 years), like a long medical career, makes one very aware of this, and ought to lead to constant re-examination of one’s easy assumptions about health matters, as also the teaching and practice of one’s particular church or wider church “movement.”

Posted in Theology | Leave a comment

Always winter, never Christmas

Another round of draconian restrictions has been introduced in the UK, restricting all social gatherings to six people, with threats of dictatorship-style curfews in future. This causes mayhem to our newly re-introduced church services, if we have to gather in (socially distanced) groups of six. And it cancels the restart of my saxophone choir, my only musical activity to have survived lockdown. Christmas too, just as in Narnia under the wicked Queen, looks like being cancelled for the sake of … well, we’ll see.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 6 Comments

Now Charles Darwin cancelled by BLM

My thanks to Extinction Rebellion, whose blockading of newspaper offices because they are insufficiently fanatical about climate alarmism has enabled me to read an entire piece in the Telegraph online. The Telegraph has made it free until tomorrow morning in the interests of free speech.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

More on lived experience

Last month I did a piece comparing the insistence of critical race theory, and intersectionality in general, on accepting “lived experience” as definitive, with the liquidation of the kulaks in Soviet Russia. In both cases, I argued, lived experience could easily be conditioned by careful propaganda.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

Information on misinformation (or vice-versa)

How do you decide which sources from two fairly well-demarcated sides in a disputed situation are more likely to be truthful? You go on the basis of what can be tested, don’t you?

Posted in Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

Children, young and old

When the NHS was, in effect, closed down in March to make it a dedicated COVID-19 Health Service, it could be predicted (and was, even by me) to result in many excess deaths from other under-treated illnesses. There have already been official and academic reports on excess coronary disease and cancer deaths, as well as articles on the enormous waiting times in what, even before COVID, was an under-performing service.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

False positives unpacked

Here’s an interesting extract from the official UK government website:

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 3 Comments

Equality

The ongoing process of subverting our culture partly involves inventing a wholly new set of deadly sins in which the old culture (including all of us) is implicated. Some are exaggerations of old sins (“racism” being the uniquely Christian “Love your neighbour as yourself” restricted to the realm of skin colour and then deprived of its moral content by making it institutional), and others are new-minted to outlaw any criticism of what were formerly considered evils (such as “homophobia,” “cis-normalism” etc) or of alien ideologies (such as “islamophobia,” or in its current usage “fascist” (meaning non-Marxist).

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment

Stop Press: how the models worked out in data

There has been surprisingly little mention in the news (ie none that I have seen) of the first major analysis of the world data from the COVID-19 pandemic, published in The Lancet on July 21st, before H.M. Government started to panic over increased positive PCR tests, executed local lockdowns, and threatened national ones if the “R-number” virtual canary begins to look green around the gills.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments