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Welcome to Matt Ridley's Blog

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Matt Ridley is the author of provocative books on evolution, genetics and society. His books have sold over a million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and have won several awards.

Please note that this blog does not accept comments. If you're reading this blog and want to respond then please use the contact form on the site, or comment on his Facebook page. You can also follow him on Twitter @mattwridley.

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Matt Ridley's latest book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, co-authored with scientist Alina Chan from Harvard and MIT's Broad Institute, is now available in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

    Archive for tag: coronavirus

  • A WHO pandemic pact would leave the world at China’s mercy

    Published on: Saturday, 14 May, 2022

    Lessons have still not been learned, so why should we trust the WHO in a future pandemic?

    My article for Telegraph:

    On 22 May, the World Health Organisation meets for the World Health Assembly, an annual summit to which all the world’s countries are invited – except Taiwan, which is excluded at China’s behest. On the agenda is a “pandemic accord” that would greatly expand the WHO’s powers to intervene in a country in the event of a future outbreak.

    The European Union, true to form, pushed for a legally binding pandemic “treaty” instead, but that won’t happen for two reasons: the American Senate would need a two-thirds majority to ratify it; and the Chinese government would not allow even its pet international agency to tell it what to do. But the accord would still have substantial force of international law behind it, to make governments impose domestic lockdowns, for example – despite the WHO’s own figures showing little correlation between lockdown severity and death rates.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, origin-of-covid, china
  • As Shanghai locks down, China is facing its greatest Covid crisis yet

    Published on: Saturday, 26 March, 2022

    My article for Spectator:

    The coronavirus is spreading through Hong Kong, Shenzhen and other cities in China like a bush fire; tens of millions of Chinese have been ordered to stay at home yet again. Shanghai, a city of 26 million souls, has been split in two. Those on the eastern side of the Huangpu River will be locked down until Friday, their west bank neighbours from the start of April.

    It won’t work. Like a new Mercedes, the BA.2 model of the omicron variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus is faster, quieter and 30 per cent more prolific. There is no chance of stopping it with lockdowns, mass testing or social distancing – even in Xi Jinping’s China.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spectator, coronavirus, china
  • How respiratory viruses evolve to become milder

    Published on: Saturday, 26 February, 2022

    My article for Spectator:

    The Queen has suffered ‘mild, cold-like symptoms’ from her Covid-19 infection, according to Buckingham Palace. The wording reminds us that, except in the very vulnerable, the common cold is always and everywhere a mild disease. There are 200 kinds of virus that cause colds and they hardly ever debilitate healthy people, let alone kill them. Yet we were recently told by the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) that ‘it is a common misconception that “viruses mutate to cause less severe disease”’. If that is the case, how did all common colds become mild — and why would Covid not do the same?

    As somebody with a background in evolutionary biology, I knew that Nervtag’s claim (which bizarrely cited myxomatosis, a flea-borne disease of rabbits, to support its argument) was misleading. Surely they were aware that, mostly due to the work of Professor Paul Ewald, the dominant belief in evolutionary theory about disease virulence is that it depends on the mode of transmission? Though sometimes lethal at first, respiratory diseases do evolve to become milder, while sexually transmitted, waterborne or insect-borne diseases (such as myxomatosis) don’t.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spectator, coronavirus, omicron
  • The WHO is complicit in China’s Winter Olympics smokescreen

    Published on: Sunday, 06 February, 2022

    Will Dr Tedros use the Beijing Games to deliver some home truths to China? Probably not

    My article for the Telegraph:

    The news that Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organisation, is to attend the Winter Olympics in Beijing is baffling on a number of levels. Has he not got a day job to do? There is a pandemic on.

    “Sources close to” him say it would be a “political statement to turn down the invitation”, which indicates ludicrous delusions of grandeur: he is a bureaucrat, not a head of state, let alone a “dignitary”.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory?

    Published on: Wednesday, 12 January, 2022

    In private, they said it was plausible. In public, they called it a conspiracy theory.

    My article for Spiked:

    In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spiked, science, biology, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • I was duped by the Covid lab leak deniers

    Published on: Wednesday, 12 January, 2022

    That senior scientists saw evidence for theories that they trashed in public has shattered trust in science

    My article for the Telegraph:

    Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started. It is just about understandable, if not forgivable, that Chinese scientists have obfuscated vital information about early cases and their work with similar viruses in Wuhan’s laboratories: they were subject to fierce edicts from a ruthless, totalitarian regime.

    It is more shocking to discover in emails released this week that some western scientists were also saying different things in public from what they thought in private. The emails were exchanged over the first weekend of February 2020 between senior virologists on both sides of the Atlantic following a meeting arranged by Sir Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust, with America’s two top biologists, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, science, biology, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • SARS-Cov-2 Lab Leak in Taiwan Confirmed

    Published on: Monday, 13 December, 2021

    The infection took place in a Biosafety Level 3 lab

    According to Taiwan News, and since picked up by Western media, a (recent) SARS-Cov-2 lab leak has been confirmed in (the Republic of) China.

    SARS-Cov-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.

    Alina shared the story with us before English-speaking media appeared to have picked up on it.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • The Government is still fighting the wrong war on Covid-19

    Published on: Saturday, 27 November, 2021

    Their hasty over-reaction to the arrival of a new variant reflects just how little we truly understand this virus

    My article for the Telegraph:

    Here we go again, fighting the last war. Because governments are perceived to have moved too slowly to ban flights when the delta variant arose in India, we jumped into action this time, punishing the poor South Africans for their molecular vigilance. But nothing was going to stop the delta going global, and the latest set of government measures to stop the spread of the new omicron variant are about as likely to succeed as the Maginot line was to stop General Guderian’s tanks. The cat is already out of the bag. Just because we can take action does not make it the right thing to do.

    This pandemic has mocked public-health experts. They told us to wash our hands and then realised it was spreading through the air. They told us masks were useless and then made them mandatory. They sent Covid cases to ordinary hospitals where they infected patients.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, biology, coronavirus, origin-of-covid, politics, uk-politics
  • My Latest Book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, Is Now Available

    Published on: Tuesday, 23 November, 2021

    If you don't subscribe to the new newsletter or follow me on Facebook and Twitter, you may not have heard: My new book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, co-authored with the young and brilliant scientist Alina Chan, published this day last week and is now available to purchase.

    Less than a week before that, Alina and I met in person for the first time, which you can watch on my YouTube channel.

    We explore both natural spillover and lab leak possibilities in depth—and share which we determined, over the course of writing it, to be more likely.It was a challenging, frustrating, intriguing journey.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: biology, coronavirus, origin-of-covid, books
  • It’s a danger to the world that the precise origin of Covid-19 remains a mystery

    Published on: Sunday, 21 November, 2021

    Until we can rule out a laboratory origin for Covid, we must act as if it may have happened

    My article for the Telegraph:

    It is almost exactly two years since the pandemic began. According to an official document seen by the South China Morning Post, the first retrospectively diagnosed case of Covid in Wuhan was on November 17 2019, while genetic analysis points to a similar date, November 18. (The so-called “patient zero” discussed in the media this week has been known about for months and is very unlikely to be the first case even according to the World Health Organisation.)

    In the case of Sars, 19 years ago, and Mers, nine years ago, the first known cases were followed within a couple of months by unambiguous clues as to how the virus jumped from an animal source into people. Both viruses live naturally in bats, which had somehow infected intermediate animal hosts such as palm civets and camels before transmitting into people.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, biology, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • The Covid lab leak theory just got even stronger

    Published on: Saturday, 20 November, 2021

    My article for Spectator:Two years in, there is no doubt the Covid pandemic began in the Chinese city of Wuhan. But there is also little doubt that the bat carrying the progenitor of the virus lived somewhere else.

    Central to the mystery of Covid’s origin is how a virus normally found in horseshoe bats in caves in the far south of China or south-east Asia turned up in a city a thousand miles north. New evidence suggests that part of the answer might lie in Laos.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spectator, biology, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • China is using the climate as a bargaining chip

    Published on: Thursday, 07 October, 2021

    My article for Spectator:

    China’s President Xi Jinping has apparently not yet decided whether to travel to Glasgow next month for the big climate conference known as COP26. That is no doubt partly because he’s heard about the weather in Glasgow in November, and partly because he knows the whole thing will be a waste of his time. After all, the fact that it is the 26th such meeting and none of the previous 25 solved the problem they set out to solve suggests the odds are that the event will be the flop on the Clyde.

    But another reason he is hesitating was stated pretty explicitly by his Foreign Minister, Wang Yi: ‘Climate cooperation cannot be separated from the general environment of China-US relations.’ Roughly translated, this reads: we will go along with your climate posturing if you stop talking about the possibility that Covid-19 started in a Wuhan laboratory, about our lack of cooperation investigating that origin, or about what we are doing to Hong Kong or the Uighur people.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spectator, china, coronavirus, origin-of-covid, climate, energy
  • Dismantling the environmental theory for Covid’s origins

    Published on: Saturday, 28 August, 2021

    My article for Spectator:

    With a laboratory leak in Wuhan looking more and more likely as the source of the pandemic, the Chinese authorities are not the only ones dismayed. Western environmentalists had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Even if ‘wet’ wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in this case, they argued, and the outbreak came from some direct contact with bats, the moral lesson was ecological. Deforestation and climate change had left infected bats stressed and with nowhere to go but towns. Or it had driven desperate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit.

    Green grandees were in no doubt of this moral lesson. ‘Nature is sending us a message. We have pushed nature into a corner, encroached on ecosystems,’ said Inger Andersen, head of the United Nations Environment Programme. The pandemic was ‘a reminder of the intimate and delicate relationship between people and planet,’ said the director-general of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. ‘God always forgives, we forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives,’ added Pope Francis, enigmatically. ‘Climate change is a threat multiplier for pandemic diseases, and zoonotic diseases,’ said John Kerry. Covid-19 was ‘the product of an imbalance in man’s relationship with the natural world,’ said Boris Johnson. ‘Mother Nature… gave us fire and floods, she tried to warn us but in the end she took back control,’ tweeted Sarah, Duchess of York.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spectator, environment, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • A volte face over what caused the pandemic needs explaining

    Published on: Saturday, 31 July, 2021

    Why did scientists suddenly change their minds about the possibility of a leak from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology? Jeremy Farrar offers no good answers

    My article for Spectator:

    Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, writes that ‘the last year has been an eye-opener for me. I thought, probably like most people, that the world works through official or formal channels, but much of it operates through private phone calls or messaging apps’. Hence his book, written with the journalist Anjana Ahuja, is a gossipy, sometimes angry, fast-paced tale, which quotes frequently from his own messages sent to other important people. No holds are barred or formal channels kept to.It is therefore a fascinating and valuable account from somebody who was close to the action, as a member of the famous Sage, and one who played a key role in several important initiatives, including, for example, kicking off the successful Recovery trial of anti-Covid treatments after a chance meeting on a bus. Many of his observations are acute, and some of his suggestions are well made, not least his passionate call for Britain to set an example by sending vaccines to the rest of the world rather than vaccinating the relatively invulnerable young.Farrar is full of praise for some people, such as fellow Sage members and Dominic Cummings, and full of contempt for others, including Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and any lockdown sceptic. He may or may not be right, but after a while the reader begins to feel a little uneasy at a certain double standard. ‘Intermittent lockdowns’ are the answer in chapter 5, but reopening after the first lockdown is a disastrous mistake in chapter 6. Johnson is criticised for not paying attention to the crisis in February 2020 a few pages after Farrar describes his own skiing holiday in... February.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spectator, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • Interview: How Science Lost the Public’s Trust

    Published on: Friday, 23 July, 2021

    From climate to Covid, politics and hubris have disconnected scientific institutions from the philosophy and method that ought to guide them.

    My interview with Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal:

    “Science” has become a political catchword. “I believe in science,” Joe Biden tweeted six days before he was elected president. “Donald Trump doesn’t. It’s that simple, folks.”

    But what does it mean to believe in science? The British science writer Matt Ridley draws a pointed distinction between “science as a philosophy” and “science as an institution.” The former grows out of the Enlightenment, which Mr. Ridley defines as “the primacy of rational and objective reasoning.” The latter, like all human institutions, is erratic, prone to falling well short of its stated principles. Mr. Ridley says the Covid pandemic has “thrown into sharp relief the disconnect between science as a philosophy and science as an institution.”

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: wall-street-journal, coronavirus, interview, science, biology, origin-of-covid
  • Lords Diary July 2021

    Published on: Tuesday, 13 July, 2021

    Last week saw only my fourth visit to the Lords from the north-east since the pandemic began.

    From the "Lords Diary" feature at PoliticsHome:I wandered the ghostly corridors of Westminster hoping to spot a few colleagues and got lost in a one-way system. This hybrid Parliament seems to have made the government’s job more time-consuming, as we all drone on from home, but less challenging, as the cut-and-thrust of debate atrophies: the worst of both worlds.On the day I came to London I had finished writing a new book: always a moment of relief mixed with anxiety about whether it could be better. This time it was especially difficult to sign off the last edits because the topic is a moving target – the origin of the virus that caused the pandemic. New information keeps breaking.Also for the first time I am co-authoring, with Alina Chan, a brilliant young scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. I was warned that co-authors often fall out, and we have never actually met in person, but we only really disagreed over one word. I refuse ever to use the word “blueprint” as a metaphor for a genome. It’s inaccurate, because it implies that each bit of a genome maps onto each bit of a creature’s body; and it’s unfamiliar. Who even knows what a blueprint is these days? I prefer “recipe”.As I argued in the Lords the next day, whether the virus jumped species in a wildlife market or a laboratory is an urgent question requiring a full and independent investigation – because, if we don’t find the answer, we risk a repeat. Both kinds of jump have happened in the past, and viruses of precisely this kind were being collected, brought uniquely to Wuhan (more than 1,000 miles away) and experimented on by scientists, so it was wrong of some scientists and the World Health Organization to try to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak prematurely.A laboratory accident is by definition not a “conspiracy theory” and science needs to demonstrate it can investigate itself or its enemies will do so instead. Fortunately, the mood has changed in the last two months, partly sparked by an open letter in the journal Science, calling for a full investigation, signed by 18 scientists and initiated by my co-author.Later I supported Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville’s amendment to the environment bill on the topic of fly tipping. About once a week a new load of rubbish appears overnight in one of the gateways on my farm. Cameras in favoured spots would help, but you have to put up signs saying they are there. My other bugbear is birthday balloons. They are the only form of litter on remote moorland in the Pennines. We should insist that each one carries a manufacturer’s address so you can return to sender.Gareth Southgate’s redemption since his penalty miss in 1996 is a wonderful story. A faster reversal of reputation came to my newly and deservedly en-damed friend Kate Bingham. I asked how it felt like to be widely admired now after being denounced and vilified last year with the help of bad mouthing from her enemies. Memories are fading of how much of the media were determined to bring her down.I told her of a call from a journalist who asked me to comment on the fact that a) Bingham had hired as a PR consultant b) a woman who is married to c) a man who has sat on the board of a small charity with d) the father of e) the wife of f) Dominic Cummings. My answer was to laugh, but Kate reminded me the Financial Times actually ran that story as if it implied corruption. The more we find out about the negotiation she did to acquire vaccines, and the contrast with how other countries did it, the more remarkable the story becomes.

    Share your comments on Matt's Facebook (/authormattridley) and Twitter (@mattwridley) profiles.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: PoliticsHome, biology, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • "Virulent" Does Not Mean "Infectious"

    Published on: Tuesday, 29 June, 2021

    Respiratory viruses tend to evolve to be more transmissible but less virulent

    This blog post was adapted from this Twitter thread:

    Articles often claim that the Delta variant is more virulent, e.g. "Citing the spread of the more virulent Delta coronavirus variant in the United Kingdom". Earlier in the year the same was said about the Alpha (Kent) variant, that it was more "virulent". That was untrue. Virulent means "harmful", not "infectious".If anything, the evidence suggests that the Delta variant may be less virulent, but more transmissible/infectious—although it is hard to be sure this is true, given that the vulnerable old are now protected by vaccines."The suggestion that the Indian variant is more pathogenic needs to be taken with a big dose of salt. The same was initially suggested for the Kent variant but was later shown not to be true" writes Professor Ian Jones.Respiratory viruses tend to evolve to be more transmissible but less virulent: they do better if you go out and about meeting people. This is not true of insect-borne or water-borne viruses, which don't care how sick you are: insects or water do the going out about about for you.

    Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus
  • Flawed modelling is condemning Britain to lockdown

    Published on: Monday, 21 June, 2021

    Again and again, worst-case scenarios are presented with absurd precision, and the problem goes further than Britain's slow reopening

    My article for The Telegraph:

    Britain leads the pack on vaccination, but lags far behind America, Germany and France on liberation. A big reason is that our Government remains in thrall to a profession that has performed uniquely badly during the pandemic: modellers. The Government’s reliance on Sage experts’ computer modelling to predict what would happen with or without various interventions has proved about as useful as the ancient Roman habit of consulting trained experts in “haruspicy” – interpreting the entrails of chickens.

    As Sarah Knapton has revealed in these pages, the brutal postponement of Freedom Day coincided with the release of a bunch of alarmist models predicting a huge new wave of deaths. The most pessimistic, inevitably from Imperial College, forecast 203,824 deaths over the next year. It did so by assuming just a 77-87 per cent reduction in hospitalisations following two vaccinations, despite the fact that real world data shows two vaccinations to be between 92 per cent (AstraZeneca) and 96 per cent (Pfizer) effective in preventing hospitalisation. That would cut the Imperial forecast of deaths by a gob-smacking 90 per cent to 26,854.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus
  • The Covid lab leak theory is looking increasingly plausible

    Published on: Saturday, 29 May, 2021

    My article for Spectator:

    In March last year, it was widely agreed by everybody sensible, me included, that talk of the pandemic originating in a laboratory was pseudoscientific nonsense almost on a par with UFOs and the Loch Ness monster. My own reasoning was that Mother Nature is a better genetic engineer than we will ever be, so something as accomplished at infection and spread could not possibly have been put together in a lab.

    Today, the mood has changed. Even Dr Anthony Fauci, the US President’s chief medical advisor, now says he is ‘not convinced’ the virus emerged naturally. This month a letter in Science magazine from 18 senior virologists and other experts — including a close collaborator of the Wuhan lab at the centre of the debate, Ralph Baric — demanded that such a hypothesis be taken seriously. Suddenly, too, journalists have woken up and begun writing articles admitting they might have been hasty in dismissing a lab leak as a Trumpian conspiracy theory last year. CNN reported this week that the Biden administration shut down the State Department’s investigation into this.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spectator, biology, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • We no longer need to fear Covid

    Published on: Saturday, 24 April, 2021

    Officialdom’s absurdly cautious approach is now impossible to justify given the success of vaccines

    My article for the Telegraph:The whole aim of practical politics, said HL Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

    It is hard to avoid the impression that officials are alarmed rather than pleased by the fading of the pandemic in Britain. They had a real hobgoblin to hand, and boy did they make the most of it, but it’s now turning into a pussy cat. So they are back to casting around for imaginary ones to justify their draconian – and deliciously popular – command and control over every detail of our lives. Look, variants!

    And yes, the pandemic is fading fast. The vaccine is working “better than we could possibly have imagined”, according to Calum Semple, of the University of Liverpool, based on a study which found that it reduced hospitalisation by 98 per cent. With deaths from the virus now falling by more than 20 per cent a week and with overall mortality from all causes now below the long-term average, “we’ve moved from a pandemic to an endemic situation”, according to Sarah Walker, Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at Oxford and Chief Investigator on the ONS’s Covid-19 Infection Survey. The UK’s covid positivity rate at 0.2 per cent is now the fifth lowest in the world and lower than Taiwan and Israel.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus
  • Britain is in danger of repeating its post-war mistakes

    Published on: Saturday, 17 April, 2021

    My article for Spectator:

    In search of wisdom about how an officious government reluctantly relaxes its grip after an emergency, I stumbled on a 1948 newsreel clip of Harold Wilson when he was president of the Board of Trade. It’s a glimpse of long-forgotten and brain-boggling complexity in the rationing system. ‘We have taken some clothing off the ration altogether,’ he boasts, posing as a munificent liberator. ‘From shoes to bathing costumes, and from oilskins to body belts and children’s raincoats. Then we’ve reduced the points on such things as women’s coats and woollen garments generally and... on men’s suits.’

    Does this remind you of anything? One day in November, George Eustice, the environment secretary, uttered the immortal words that a Scotch egg ‘probably would count as a substantial meal if there were table service’, only for Michael Gove to say the next day that ‘a couple of Scotch eggs is a starter, as far as I’m concerned’, later correcting himself to concede that ‘a Scotch egg is a substantial meal’. This is the sort of tangled descent into detail that central planning always causes. We have seen it again and again over the past year. What is essential travel? Is a picnic exercise? Can you go inside a pub to get to its outside space? Ask the man from the ministry.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: the-spectator, coronavirus, economics
  • The unexpected history and miraculous success of vaccines

    Published on: Friday, 19 March, 2021

    My article from Warp News:

    At a time when the miraculous success of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 has transformed the battle against the pandemic, it is fitting to recall that the general idea behind vaccination was brought to the attention of the western world, not by brilliant and privileged professors, but by a black slave and a woman.

    His name was Onesimus and he lived in Boston, as the property of Cotton Mather, a well-known puritan preacher. Her name was Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, the literary wife of the British ambassador to Constantinople.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: warp-news, coronavirus, vaccination
  • The World Health Organisation's appeasement of China has made another pandemic more likely

    Published on: Monday, 15 March, 2021

    The WHO has now wasted a year failing to investigate properly the origins of Covid-19

    My article for The Telegraph:

    It is a year ago last week since the World Health Organisation conceded, belatedly, that a pandemic was under way. The organisation’s decisions in early 2020 were undoubtedly influenced by the Chinese government. On 14 January, to widespread surprise, the WHO was still echoing China’s assurance that there was no evidence of person-to-person spread: “it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission,” said an official that day. Within days even China conceded this was wrong.

    Later that month the WHO director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said his admiration for China’s speed in detecting the virus and sharing information was “beyond words”, adding “so is China's commitment to transparency and to supporting other countries”. At the time China’s government was punishing whistleblowers, taking down databases, censoring scientists and ordering samples destroyed.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, biology, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • Did the Covid-19 virus really escape from a Wuhan lab?

    Published on: Sunday, 07 February, 2021

    This is a more detailed version of the article co-written with Alina Chan on the origin of the virus causing the Covid pandemic which was published in the Telegraph on 6 February.

    "Viral" by Matt Ridley is coming later this year. Sign up for his newsletter and follow him on Facebook and Twitter to learn when it arrives.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • Stresses and Strains

    Published on: Saturday, 06 February, 2021

    The evolution of Covid is not random

    My article for The Spectator:

    In the genetic diaspora of an epidemic, there is ferocious competition between strains of virus to get to the next victim first. That leads to apparently purposeful outcomes, as if the virus had a mind. One of the things people find hardest to grasp about evolution is that it appears purposeful but the mutations on which it feeds are random. How come dolphins evolved to swim if all they had to work with were random changes in genes? Viruses also mutate at random — but most people talk as though the rise and fall of these mutant versions is mainly down to chance or luck. It’s not.

    Mutations occur all the time in RNA viruses; what matters is which ones find favour in natural selection. The champions of ‘Darwinian medicine’ have been calling for their colleagues to take evolution and adaptation more into account for years, and one of them, Paul Ewald of the University of Louisville, has something very relevant to say about this pandemic. Years ago, Ewald came up with a theory of why some diseases are lethal and others are mild. He argues it is all about the mode of transmission. Infections that you catch from coughs and sneezes are mostly mild; we get more than 200 different kinds of common cold virus and on the whole none of them puts you in bed, let alone kills you. Yet insect-borne diseases such as malaria, plague and yellow fever, and water-borne diseases such as cholera and typhoid, seem quite content to kill you.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: the-spectator, coronavirus
  • The World Needs a Real Investigation Into the Origin of Covid-19

    Published on: Saturday, 16 January, 2021

    A team of WHO researchers has arrived in China but won’t investigate the possibility that the coronavirus originated in a lab.

    My article for the Wall Street Journal, with Dr. Chan:

    In the first week of January, scientists representing the World Health Organization (WHO) were due to arrive in China to trace the origins of Covid-19. The team membership and terms of reference were preapproved by the Chinese government, yet at the last minute Beijing denied entry to the investigators. This prompted WHO to take the rare step of criticizing China, which relented and allowed the group to enter the country this week.

    The brief standoff highlights a more serious problem: the inadequacy of WHO’s current investigative framework for exploring all plausible origins of Covid-19. The world needs an inquiry that considers not just natural origins but the possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, escaped from a laboratory. The WHO team, however, plans to build on reports by Chinese scientists rather than mount an independent investigation. Given that Chinese authorities have been slow to release information, penalized scientists and doctors who shared clinical and genomic details of the novel coronavirus, and have since demonstrated a keen interest in controlling the narrative of how the virus emerged, this is not a promising foundation for WHO’s investigation.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: wall-street-journal, coronavirus, origin-of-covid
  • Bio-Britain is leading the world in the science of Covid

    Published on: Sunday, 10 January, 2021

    The list of our achievements in biology is extraordinary for a country with just one per cent of the world's population

    My latest article, for The Telegraph:

    Britain probably leads the world in self-criticism. So maybe we don’t always notice when the country leads the world in something a bit more useful. During the pandemic a lot has been done badly here – the modelling, testing and lockdown policies have been harmful, clumsy, and chaotic – but it’s worth reflecting on what we have done well, especially in science.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: , telegraph, coronavirus
  • Lockdowns may actually prevent a natural weakening of this disease

    Published on: Tuesday, 22 December, 2020

    Tough restrictions keep the virus spreading mainly among the very ill, meaning more lethal strains can dominate milder ones

    My article for The Telegraph:

    Boris Johnson's fondness for the metaphor of the US cavalry riding to the rescue is risky: ask General Custer. With the vaccine cavalry in sight, and just when we thought we had earned a Christmas break, the virus has ambushed us with a strain that seems more contagious, and which is rapidly coming to dominate the epidemic in south-east England.

    It is now a race between the virus and the vaccine as to which can get into your bloodstream first.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus
  • Why mRNA vaccines could revolutionise medicine

    Published on: Saturday, 19 December, 2020

    My article for Spectator:

    Almost 60 years ago, in February 1961, two teams of scientists stumbled on a discovery at the same time. Sydney Brenner in Cambridge and Jim Watson at Harvard independently spotted that genes send short-lived RNA copies of themselves to little machines called ribosomes where they are translated into proteins. ‘Sydney got most of the credit, but I don’t mind,’ Watson sighed last week when I asked him about it. They had solved a puzzle that had held up genetics for almost a decade. The short-lived copies came to be called messenger RNAs — mRNAs – and suddenly they now promise a spectacular revolution in medicine.

    The first Covid-19 vaccine given to British people this month is not just a welcome breakthrough against a grim little enemy that has defied every other weapon we have tried, from handwashing to remdesivir and lockdowns. It is also the harbinger of a new approach to medicine altogether. Synthetic messengers that reprogram our cells to mount an immune response to almost any invader, including perhaps cancer, can now be rapidly and cheaply made.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spectator, coronavirus
  • The power of science has delivered the best possible news in a ghastly year

    Published on: Wednesday, 02 December, 2020

    A technical fix should bring the Covid nightmare to an end where so many other strategies have failed

    My article for The Telegraph:

    Happy Christmas! The BioNtech/Pfizer vaccine’s approval, with others to come, is the best possible news at the end of a ghastly year. Vaccination is humankind’s most life-saving innovation, banishing scourge after scourge from the face of the earth. It is a technology that is so counterintuitive as to seem magical, but when it works it is unbeatable. The extinction of smallpox in 1977 was probably science’s greatest achievement.

    Britain has been among the most incompetent countries at managing the pandemic, taking far too top-down and centralised an approach, but it will be the first to get vaccinating, weeks before America and a month before the lumbering bureaucratic dinosaur across the channel. We can thank Kate Bingham, our brilliant biologists and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. I recall being told by somebody with insider experience long before this that the European Medicines Agency added very little to what we do domestically, except duplication and delay. 

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus
  • Was Covid beginning to peak before the second lockdown?

    Published on: Tuesday, 24 November, 2020

    My article for Spectator:

    'I don’t think that word means what you think it means,’ says the Spaniard Inigo Montoya in the film The Princess Bride, when Vizzini keeps saying it is ‘inconceivable’ that the Dread Pirate Roberts is still on their tail. I muttered those words to myself during a parliamentary debate just before the start of the latest lockdown, when the minister twice said that the wave of infections was increasing ‘exponentially’. 

    Far from increasing, let alone exponentially, the data showed that the wave was faltering if not cresting already. The lockdown came in on a Thursday. The very next day data from three reliable sources – the Office for National Statistics, the government and the Covid Symptom Study – showed slight falls of the number of positive cases or some levelling off. The fall was steep in some places such as Liverpool. The cynic in me wondered whether the haste with which the government had rushed to bring in the national lockdown, at the urging of its questionably sage advisors, was so that lockdown could be credited with the fall that was coming.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus
  • Temper your excitement about the Covid vaccine

    Published on: Saturday, 14 November, 2020

    My article for The Spectator:

    Ever since Giacomo Pylarini, a physician working in the Ottoman Empire, sent a report to the Royal Society in 1701 that Turkish women believed pus from a smallpox survivor could induce immunity in a healthy person – and was dismissed as a dangerous quack – inoculation has been as much an art as a science. But it has proven to be the greatest life-saver of all time, eliminating smallpox and suppressing many other diseases. In Pylarini’s prescient words, it is 'an operation invented not by persons conversant in philosophy or skilled in physic, but by a vulgar, illiterate people; an operation in the highest degree beneficial to the human race.'

    It looks like a vaccine is probably going to work against Covid. That was never guaranteed: it’s been decades since scientists started seeking a vaccine for malaria and HIV, with no luck so far, and flu vaccines only last for a limited time before the virus mutates. But the announcement last week that the German firm BioNTech’s vaccine, developed in partnership with Pfizer, seems to prevent Covid infection is encouraging news. Kudos to Kate Bingham for spotting it early.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, spectator
  • The second wave peaked before lockdown began

    Published on: Saturday, 07 November, 2020

    A range of statistics suggest the number of cases was under control before Thursday's nation-wide shutdown

    My article for The Telegraph:

    To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter!

    My new book How Innovation Works is available now in the US, Canada, and UK.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus
  • Six reasons the new lockdown is a deadly mistake

    Published on: Saturday, 31 October, 2020

    I supported shutting down the country last spring, but we are in a very different situation now

    My article for The Telegraph:

    I was in favour of a national lockdown in the spring. I am not now, for six main reasons.

    Covid is not a very dangerous disease for most people. The death rate is probably around 0.2 per cent of those infected, and most who die are elderly and suffering from other medical conditions. The mortality of those in hospital with Covid has almost halved for the over 80s since the start of the epidemic as treatment has improved.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, telegraph
  • Students who catch COVID may be saving lives

    Published on: Saturday, 17 October, 2020

    There is no course that involves zero suffering. It’s a question of minimizing it

    An expanded version of my article for Spectator:

    It is counterintuitive but the current spread of Covid may on balance be the least worst thing that could happen now. In the absence of a vaccine, and with no real prospect of eradicating the disease, the virus spreading among younger people, mostly without hitting the vulnerable, is creating immunity that will eventually slow the epidemic. The second wave is real, but it is not like the first. It would be a mistake to tackle it with compulsory lockdowns (even if called ‘circuit breakers’), whether national or local. The cure would be worse than the disease and it won’t work anyway.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: , coronavirus, spectator
  • A New Approach to Covid-19

    Published on: Saturday, 10 October, 2020

    Letter from 12 Conservative peers to The Times:

    Sir, It is now clear that a policy of lockdown failed to bring the virus under control while having crippling economic and social side effects. Sweden has achieved a lower death rate from Covid-19 than the UK, with far less economic and social damage, despite being a slightly more urbanised society. If lockdown were a treatment undergoing a clinical trial, the trial would be halted because of the side effects. We suggest the government try a new approach, more in keeping with the Conservative philosophy of individual responsibility. Anyone who wishes to be locked down, whether because they are vulnerable or for other reasons, should be supported in doing so safely. Anyone who wishes to resume normal life, and take the risk of catching the virus, should be free to do so. The choice would be ours.

    Lord Ridley; Lord Cavendish of Furness; Lord Dobbs; Lord Hamilton of Epsom; Lord Howard of Rising; Lord Lamont of Lerwick; Lord Lilley; Lord Mancroft; Baroness Meyer; Baroness Noakes; Lord Robathan; Lord Shinkwin; House of Lords

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: the-times, coronavirus
  • What the Pandemic Has Taught Us About Science

    Published on: Friday, 09 October, 2020

    The scientific method remains the best way to solve many problems, but bias, overconfidence and politics can sometimes lead scientists astray

    My article for the Wall Street Journal:

    The Covid-19 pandemic has stretched the bond between the public and the scientific profession as never before. Scientists have been revealed to be neither omniscient demigods whose opinions automatically outweigh all political disagreement, nor unscrupulous fraudsters pursuing a political agenda under a cloak of impartiality. Somewhere between the two lies the truth: Science is a flawed and all too human affair, but it can generate timeless truths, and reliable practical guidance, in a way that other approaches cannot.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: wall-street-journal, coronavirus
  • Correcting Britain's Vitamin D deficiency could save thousands of lives

    Published on: Saturday, 26 September, 2020

    A groundbreaking new study points to a cheap, safe, effective way of tackling Covid

    My article with MP David Davis, for the Telegraph:

    As we face six tough months of curfews, isolation and economic misery, with vaccines a distant hope, testing struggling to control the virus, and the hospitalisation rate once again rising, it’s surely time to try anything reasonable to slow the pandemic down. There is one chemical that is known to be safe, known to be needed by many people anyway, known to have a clinically proven track record of helping people fight off respiratory diseases, and is so cheap no big firm is pushing it: vitamin D. It is not a silver bullet, but growing evidence suggests that it might help prevent Covid turning serious in some people.

    In May, arguments on the link between Vitamin D deficiency and its association with poor Covid outcomes started to gather pace. That month, the Health Secretary’s attention was drawn to two studies showing a strong association between the incidence and severity of Covid-19 with vitamin D deficiencies in the patients. Vadim Backman of Northwestern University, one of the authors of one of those studies, said about healthy levels of vitamin D that “Our analysis shows that it might be as high as cutting the mortality rate in half.”

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, telegraph
  • 5 reasons why the coronavirus nightmare may soon be over

    Published on: Saturday, 25 July, 2020

    From vaccine triumphs to leadership learning curves, we can finally dare to hope for a breakthrough

    My article for The Telegraph:

    Like the ancient mariner, the virus refuses to leave us alone. Resurging in Blackburn, Spain, and America, it is still going to be around here when the winter comes. As we head indoors, it will be back for a dreaded second wave, disguised among a host of colds and flus. Yet I am now optimistic that the nightmare will end this year or at least by the spring. Here are five reasons.

    First, vaccine trials were promising. Having proved safe and capable of raising both a T-cell response and an antibody response, Oxford University’s vaccine, developed in collaboration with Astrazeneca, is now more likely to succeed than to fail, so long as its side effects are manageable in the elderly. And behind it comes a stream of other vaccines, some of which will surely work.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus
  • Forget the doom and gloom. The retreat of Covid-19 is a great cause for optimism

    Published on: Saturday, 20 June, 2020

    Provided we learn the lessons of the first wave we will have little to fear as we reopen our economy

    My article for the Telegraph:

    It is now three weeks since thousands of protesters first gathered in Trafalgar Square, and two weeks since London filled with even larger crowds, few of whom wore masks or kept two metres apart, and some of whom got involved in fights, resulting in arrests and injuries: a perfect recipe for spreading the coronavirus. Yet there has been a continuing decline in new cases of the disease and no uptick in calls to 111 or 999 about suspected Covid-19. By now, some effect should have shown up if it was going to. In June, London has seen fewer deaths from all causes than in a normal year. Why is this?

    While respiratory viruses nearly always evolve towards lower virulence, essentially because the least sick people go to the most meetings and parties, this one was never very dangerous for most people in the first place. Its ability to kill 80-year-olds in care homes stands in sharp contrast with its inability to kill younger people. Fewer than 40 people under the age of 40 with no underlying conditions have died in Britain. On board the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, 1,100 sailors tested positive, many had no symptoms and only one died.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus
  • Incentives for Innovation Will Eventually Defeat COVID-19

    Published on: Monday, 15 June, 2020

    My article for the Inside Sources network:

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, inside-sources
  • Has the British scientific establishment made its biggest error in history?

    Published on: Saturday, 06 June, 2020

    A strange obsession with mathematical modelling has compromised the country’s covid response

    My article for The Telegraph:

    The scientific establishment in this country has had a bad war. Its mistakes have probably made the Covid-19 epidemic, as well as the economic downturn, worse. Britain entered the pandemic late, with lots of warning, so we should have done better than other countries. Instead we are one of the worst affected in Europe and one of the last to begin to recover.

    Not all the mistakes were driven by science. The decisions by Public Health England not to go out to the market for testing, protective equipment and logistics, to cease testing almost completely in March and to send people to care homes from hospitals affected by the virus – these were just bureaucratic bone-headedness. But the obsession with mathematical modelling lies behind other mistakes and continues to this day with the ridiculous fixation on a meaningless generalisation called R.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus
  • Could the key to Covid be found in the Russian pandemic?

    Published on: Friday, 05 June, 2020

    From lethal pandemic to common cold: what we can learn from the events of 1889-90

    My article for Spectator:

    The killer came from the east in winter: fever, cough, sore throat, aching muscles, headache and sometimes death. It spread quickly to all parts of the globe, from city to city, using new transport networks. In many cities, the streets were empty and shops and schools deserted. A million died. The Russian influenza pandemic of 1889-90 may hold clues to what happens next — not least because the latest thinking is that it, too, may have been caused by a new coronavirus.

    In addition to the new diseases of Sars, Mers and Covid-19, there are four other coronaviruses that infect people. They all cause common colds and are responsible for about one in five such sniffles, the rest being rhinoviruses and adenoviruses. As far as we can tell from their genes, two of these coronaviruses came from African bats (one of them bizarrely via alpacas or camels), and two from Asian rodents, one of them via cattle.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spectator, coronavirus
  • So Where Did the Virus Come From?

    Published on: Friday, 29 May, 2020

    Research into the origins of the new coronavirus raises questions about how it became so infectious in human beings

    My article for the Wall Street Journal:

    New research has deepened, rather than dispelled, the mystery surrounding the origin of the coronavirus responsible for Covid-19. Bats, wildlife markets, possibly pangolins and perhaps laboratories may all have played some role, but the simple story of an animal in a market infected by a bat that then infected several human beings no longer looks credible.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus
  • The Solution to the Current Crises

    Published on: Wednesday, 20 May, 2020

    The solution to the current crises is more innovation, not less.

    My blog post for Human Progress:

    When you think about it, what has happened to human society in the last 300 years is pretty weird. After trundling along with horses and sailboats, slaves and swords, for millennia, we suddenly got steam engines and search engines, and planes and cars and electricity and computers and social media and DNA sequences. We gave ourselves a perpetual motion machine called innovation. The more we innovated, the more innovation became possible.

    It’s by far the biggest story of the last three centuries—the main cause of the decline of extreme poverty to unprecedented levels—yet we know curiously little about why it happened, let alone when and where and how it can be made to continue. It certainly did not start as a result of deliberate policy. Even today, beyond throwing money at scientists in the hope they might start businesses, and subsidies at businesses in the hope they might deliver products, we don’t have much of an idea how to encourage innovation at the political level.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, how-innovation-works
  • The growing evidence on vitamin D and Covid

    Published on: Monday, 18 May, 2020

    My latest article for Spectator:

    The argument that vitamin D deficiency may contribute to more severe cases of Covid is gaining ground. It is now reaching the point where it is surprising that we are not hearing from leading medical officials and politicians that people should consider taking supplements to ensure they have sufficient vitamin D.

    This is not the same as arguing that vitamin D is a magic bullet that will cure the disease. Vitamins are not medication, the taking of which will have positive effects on everybody. They are top-ups: things that hurt you when you don’t have enough of them in your system but do no extra good when you have enough. Indeed, with many vitamins, including D, taking too much can be toxic.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus
  • Is the chilling truth that the decision to impose lockdown was based on crude mathematical guesswork?

    Published on: Sunday, 10 May, 2020

    My article with MP David Davis for The Telegraph:

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus
  • We know everything – and nothing – about Covid

    Published on: Saturday, 09 May, 2020

    It is data, not modelling, that we need now

    My article for The Spectator:

    We know everything about Sars-CoV-2 and nothing about it. We can read every one of the (on average) 29,903 letters in its genome and know exactly how its 15 genes are transcribed into instructions to make which proteins. But we cannot figure out how it is spreading in enough detail to tell which parts of the lockdown of society are necessary and which are futile. Several months into the crisis we are still groping through a fog of ignorance and making mistakes. There is no such thing as ‘the science’.

    This is not surprising or shameful; ignorance is the natural state of things. Every new disease is different and its epidemiology becomes clear only gradually and in retrospect. Is Covid-19 transmitted mainly by breath or by touching? Do children pass it on without getting sick? Why is it so much worse in Britain than Japan? Why are obese people especially at risk? How many people have had it? Are ventilators useless after all? Why is it not exploding in India and Africa? Will there be a second wave? We do not begin to have answers to these questions.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spectator, coronavirus
  • It is time to take seriously the link between Vitamin D deficiency and more serious Covid-19 symptoms

    Published on: Sunday, 03 May, 2020

    There has long been evidence that a sufficiency of vitamin D protects against viruses

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus
  • The contenders – and challenges – in the race to cure Covid

    Published on: Saturday, 25 April, 2020

    There are reasons to be optimistic about the therapies being tested

    My article for The Spectator:

    A striking feature of Covid-19 is how medieval our response has had to be. Quarantine was the way people fought plagues in the distant past. We know by now that it will take many months to get a vaccine, whose job is to prevent you getting the disease. But what about a cure once you have caught it: why is there no pill to take? The truth is that, advanced as medical science is, we are mostly defenceless against viruses. There is no antiviral therapy to compare with antibiotics for treating bacteria.

    Arguably, virology in 2020 is where bacteriology was in the 1920s. At the time, most of the experts in that field — including Alexander Fleming and his mentor, the formidable Sir Almroth Wright (nicknamed Sir Always Wrong by his foes) — thought a chemical therapy that killed bacteria without harming the patient was a wild goose chase. Instead, they argued, theway to fight bacteria was to encourage the body’s immune system. ‘Stimulate the phagocytes!’ was the cry of Wright’s semi-fictional avatar Sir Colenso Ridgeon in George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma (referring to white blood cells). Vaccines should be used to treat as well as prevent infections, thought Wright and Fleming. Fleming then turned this theory upside down with his discovery of penicillin in 1928.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, the-spectator
  • The Bats Behind the Pandemic

    Published on: Thursday, 09 April, 2020

    From Ebola to Covid-19, many of the deadliest viruses to emerge in recent years have the same animal source.

    My article for The Wall Street Journal:

    RaTG13 is the name, rank and serial number of an individual horseshoe bat of the species Rhinolophus affinis, or rather of a sample of its feces collected in 2013 in a cave in Yunnan, China. The sample was collected by hazmat-clad scientists from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan that year. Stored away and forgotten until January this year, the sample from the horseshoe bat contains the virus that causes Covid-19.

    The scientists were mostly sampling a very similar species with slightly shorter wings, called Rhinolophus sinicus, in a successful search for the origin of the virus responsible for the SARS epidemic of 2002-03. That search had alarming implications, which were largely ignored.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, wall-street-journal
  • WHO must answer serious questions before it is trusted with leading a Covid-19 inquiry

    Published on: Friday, 03 April, 2020

    My article for The Telegraph:

    When the pandemic passes, which it will, there will be a reckoning to determine who could have stopped it early and did not. Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, has suggested that it would have to be carried out by the World Health Organisation: "Obviously, after the crisis has abated I think the time will be right to conduct a kind of 'lessons learned' [inquiry] and I'm sure the World Health Organisation will be at the forefront of that.”

    This is a terrible idea. WHO is full of good people with good intentions, but as a body it has very serious questions to answer about its own conduct before we trust it with looking at that of others.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, telegraph
  • As research progresses, the nature of our enemy is becoming ever clearer

    Published on: Sunday, 29 March, 2020

    My article for The Telegraph:

    ‘This pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick” wrote Giovanni Boccaccio of the Black Death, in his preface to The Decameron. The trouble with the coronavirus is almost exactly the opposite – it is transmitted to the sick by contact with the healthy. The people most at risk of dying are those who already suffer from underlying illnesses. And evidence is accumulating that the virus is passed on very early in the progression of the disease, often when you are still without much in the way of symptoms.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, telegraph
  • Watch: Coronavirus and Lessons on Innovation with Yaron Brook

    Published on: Friday, 27 March, 2020

    I spent an hour talking to philosophy expert, business expert and Ayn Rand Institute Chairman Yaron Brook about my upcoming book, and the painful yet important lessons that the epidemic is teaching us about innovation.

    Please check it out, and consider sharing and subscribing:

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, innovation, yaron-brook
  • The curious age discrimination of coronavirus

    Published on: Thursday, 26 March, 2020

    Why does it affect the generations differently?

    My article for Spectator:

    The generational effect of the corona-virus is cunning and baffling. By often being so mild in the young and healthy it turns people into heedless carriers. By often being so lethal in the old and sick, it makes carriers into potential executioners of friends and neighbours

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: spectator, coronavirus
  • Delay to UK Publication of How Innovation Works

    Published on: Monday, 23 March, 2020

    Now Coming 25th June

    Because of the global coronavirus crisis, I have agreed with my publisher's request to delay publication of the UK edition of my new book How Innovation Works from 14 May till 25 June.

    The US edition will be published on 19 May as planned, because printing has already begun.

    The book already includes a chapter on public health and the role of innovation in the battle against epidemics of smallpox, polio, typhoid, whooping cough, malaria and cholera. But I will now add a short section for the end of the book about this year's pandemic and its implications for our attitude towards innovation. (Spoiler: we need more, not less.)

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: coronavirus, how-innovation-works
  • A vaccine for coronavirus isn't going to ride rapidly to our rescue

    Published on: Sunday, 22 March, 2020

    My article for the Telegraph:

    In 1934, in their spare time, two American biologists, Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering, developed a vaccine for whooping cough, then the biggest killer of children in the United States. Within four years their vaccine was being used throughout Michigan and within six it was being used nationwide. Whooping cough rapidly retreated.

    Since then there have been spectacular advances in biology, including the identification of the genetic material, the ability to read its code, an understanding of the structure of viruses and the proteins from which they are made, plus knowledge of how immunity works. So why are we facing a wait of at least a year, maybe much more, for a vaccine for coronavirus? It has been one of the shocks of recent weeks to realise how little progress vaccine development has made. It’s still a bit of an art.

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    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus
  • We are about to find out how robust civilisation is

    Published on: Saturday, 21 March, 2020

    The hardships ahead will be like nothing we have ever known

    My article for Spectator:

    On Sunday, lonely as a cloud, I wandered across a windswept moor in County Durham and passed a solitary sandstone rock with a small, round hollow in the top, an old penny glued to the base of the hollow. It is called the Butter Stone and it’s where, during the plague in 1665, coins were left in a pool of vinegar by the inhabitants of nearby towns and villages, to be exchanged with farmers for food. The idea was that the farmer or his customer approached the rock only when the other was at a safe distance.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: the spectator, coronavirus
  • Optimism and Innovation During the Coronavirus Pandemic

    Published on: Friday, 20 March, 2020

    This is a real threat. But we will beat this. And we'll go on to make an even better life for people in the years ahead.

    I took a deep dive into the Covid-19 epidemic, how to manage risk, solutions to past health crises, innovation in public health, and much more in a candid one hour interview with my energetic social media consultant:

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: appearances, coronavirus, rational-optimist
  • Coronavirus is the wolf on the loose

    Published on: Tuesday, 10 March, 2020

    This time the warnings are not overdone

    My article for Reaction:

    In Aesop’s fable about the boy who cried “Wolf!”, the point of the tale is that eventually there was a wolf, but the boy was not believed because he had given too many false alarms. In my view, the Covid-19 coronavirus is indeed a wolf, or at least has the potential to be one. Many people, including President Trump, think we are over-reacting, because so many past scares have been exaggerated. I think that’s wrong.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: reaction, coronavirus
  • We all need to change how we live our lives to fight this generation of pandemics

    Published on: Sunday, 01 March, 2020

    Culture and practice can change without putting Big Brother in charge

    My article for The Telegraph:

    In the 19th century Ignaz Semmelweis was vilified and ostracised when he tried to make doctors wash their hands after doing autopsies on women who had died from childbirth fever before going straight upstairs to deliver more babies. We have come a long way since then in public health, but we can go much further still.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: telegraph, coronavirus, innovation
  • Why have so many of our recent viruses come from bats?

    Published on: Friday, 21 February, 2020

    Coronavirus is far from the first disease they've passed on to us

    My article from The Spectator:

    I’m no Nostradamus, but 20 years ago when I was commissioned to write a short book about disease in the new millennium, I predicted that if a new pandemic did happen it would be a virus, not a bacterium or animal parasite, and that we would catch it from a wild animal. ‘My money is on bats,’ I wrote. We now know that the natural host and reservoir of the new coronavirus, Covid-19, is a bat, and that the virus probably got into people via a live-animal market in Wuhan.

    This is not the first disease bats have given us. Rabies possibly originated in bats. So did, and does, Ebola, outbreaks of which usually trace back to people coming into contact with bat roosts in caves, trees or buildings. Marburg virus, similar to Ebola, first killed people in Germany in 1967 and is now known to be a bat virus. Since 1994 Hendra virus has occasionally jumped from Australian fruit bats into horses and rarely people, with lethal effect. Since 1998 another fruit-bat virus, Nipah, has also infected and killed people mainly in India and Bangladesh. Sars, which originated in China in 2003, is derived from bats, though possibly via civet cats. So is Mers, a similar bat-borne coronavirus that’s killed hundreds of people and camels in the Middle East since 2012.

    Read Full Post
    By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: the-spectator, biology, coronavirus
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