Category Archives: Science

The leader of the UK opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, was quoted on the BBC news today as saying that if there is any increase in the Coronavirus “R-number” it will be the direct fault of the government. And therein lies much of the cause of the current fear pandemic across the world.

YouTube algorithms gave me a “blast from the past” last week, in the form of videos by Dr Vernon Coleman. Vernon was writing for the same medical periodicals as I was back in the early eighties, though he started five years before me, and because he gave up clinical practice, was also writing for the major newspapers and producing books long after I eased off on that aspect of my career.

That slogan, together with “Stay Home,” has been dropped from England’s political messaging, but it’s an interesting one to focus on a little in the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 saga.

This is really just recycling the work of others, but since such stuff gets little consistent press coverage, it’s worth pondering on the day when Boris Johnson is set to announce Lockdown v1.02. By all accounts this is more or less the same except for asking the airlines to function under a two-week visitor quarantine rule, and public transport to cover its costs with only 10% of its usual passenger numbers. The new normal, it seems, will have everybody walking and cycling to their old folk’s lunches. Who needs to leave the villages anyway, when the roads are in such disrepair because Road-tax dries up?

It’s the poor wot gets the blame. I’m increasingly of the opinion that the “precautionary principle” that’s so prevalent in the current crisis, and in many other recent public applications of science, is a highly dangerous one.