The Hump of the Camel

When I was a GP the drug companies blanket-advertised the wondrous benefits of statins for increasingly normal patients. The NHS guidelines, sadly ultimately under the thumb of Big Pharma, followed suit in incentivising us, with both carrots and sticks, to prescribe them to ever increasing numbers of people with marginal risk factors discovered at increasingly mandated routine checks.

Here’s some material linking The Hump’s early interest in newly understood processes of evolution and the more recent all-pervading influence of COVID policy on what I write. Any really dedicated readers will remember my enthusiasm for the work of James Shapiro a decade ago, which turns out to have relevance in the COVID vaccine story.

Today’s government sales-pitch, according to the Telegraph, is “Play your part” Get vaccinated to Beat Indian variant, PM urges public.

And so the unending cycle continues: this time Boris Johnson warns that lockdown continues (probably) because of the Indian variant, thus proving that as long as micro-evolution exists in Coronaviruses, nothing will stop our lives and economy being put on hold by an ignorant and coercive government. There remains no exit strategy.

There’s a rather significant article on medium.com summarising the evidence on SARS-CoV2 origins here, by Nicholas Wade. It’s around 11,000 words, but you guys don’t come here for sound-bites, after all!

We now know a lot more about COVID than we did last year, which makes it easier to follow the science in health policy, as our government is doing with the help of the country’s leading behavioural psychologists and theoretical modellers. Well, mainly political analysts, actually, guessing what will make them look least like idiots for ruining the economy.