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Lockdowns may actually prevent a natural weakening of this disease
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Why mRNA vaccines could revolutionise medicine
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Matt Ridley
The West needs to go nuclear My article for National Review: If you judge by the images used to illustrate reports about energy, the world now runs mainly on wind and solar power. It comes as a shock to look up the numbers. In 2019 wind and solar between them supplied just 1.5 percent of […]
The power of science has delivered the best possible news in a ghastly year
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Was Covid beginning to peak before the second lockdown?
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Ten reasons why Boris’s green agenda is just plain wrong
Matt Ridley
While climate change is a real issue and must be tackled, the prime minister’s 10-commandment plan is not the way to go about it My article for The Telegraph: Our fearless leader has descended from the mountain with a 10-commandment plan for a green industrial revolution. At a cost of £12 billion, he will have […]
Temper your excitement about the Covid vaccine
Matt Ridley
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 […]
The second wave peaked before lockdown began
Matt Ridley
A range of statistics suggest the number of cases was under control before Thursday’s nation-wide shutdown My article for The Telegraph: There is now little doubt that the second wave of the virus crested before the lockdown began on Thursday. On Friday the Government announced that the number of new positive tests over the previous […]
Six reasons the new lockdown is a deadly mistake
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Students who catch COVID may be saving lives
Matt Ridley
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 […]
