Category Archives: Medicine

Over the last three years there has been an unprecedented pandemic. But not of virus infections – they have happened regularly throughout history and COVID-19 is only unusual in the hype surrounding it. OK, and in its apparently being manufactured in a lab too, I suppose. And in the use of novel mRNA drugs, and the declaration of other long-established drugs, that seemed to help, as dangerous… No, the pandemic I’m thinking of is the alarming and unique proliferation of conspiracy theorists across the world.

I hope you clocked the questioning of Janine Small, president of international developed markets at Pfizer and apparently forty years in that corporation, about the question of whether they had tested their COVID vaccine for prevention of transmission before rolling it out. You’ll also remember that the entire superstructure of coercion, vaccination of the not-at-risk, vaccine passports and so on depended – and still depends – on that prevention of transmission, now belatedly proven to be non-existent.

To my surprise, my pharmacist friend missed the news last week that depression has (if we believe the latest research!) been shown not to be caused by abnormalities in serotonin. So maybe you missed it too. The general press picked up on the implication that SSRIs (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) like the famous Prozac have instantly lost their therapeutic rationale. Given how widely they’re prescribed now, that’s big news.

The Next Thing, Ukraine now being sidelined because Russia is winning and many countries are refusing to play ball with the suicide sanctions, is of course the next pandemic, of a rare and generally mild disease called monkeypox. It does, however, have the psychological edge over COVID-19 of looking like a real plague, with yucky blisters and all.

Imagine that, in a journal with a name like “Climate Science,” you saw a paper which began, “Before the widespread use of fossil fuels much of the earth was covered with vast ice-sheets thousands of feet thick. But through the use of coal, oil and gas we now have a climate that, for most, is warm, productive and pleasant.”