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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

My article with MP David Davis for The Telegraph: Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College “stepped back” from the Sage group advising ministers when his lockdown-busting romantic trysts were exposed. Perhaps he should have been dropped for a more consequential misstep. Details of the model his team built to predict the epidemic are emerging and they […]

There has long been evidence that a sufficiency of vitamin D protects against viruses My article for The Telegraph: A suggestive set of numbers was published online in April by a medical scientist in the Philippines, Dr Mark Alipio. Of 49 patients with mild symptoms of Covid-19 in three hospitals in southern Asian countries, only […]

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 […]