WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

Thanks to your help, my new book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, co-authored with MIT scientist Alina Chan, is picking up a lot of steam in America. As I have mentioned before, I co-authored Viral—which tells the fascinating and heroic story of those searching for the origin of the pandemic, despite the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]