WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

Three years after the pandemic began, we still don’t know the origin of COVID. A strange lack of curiosity has stifled the debate. KEY TAKEAWAYS The “lab leak” hypothesis for the origin of COVID has been fueled by a continuous trickle of new revelations, many of them driven by freedom of information requests or leaks. A […]

If you are a bird, any kind of bird, the current pandemic of avian influenza rampaging through your kind is far more terrifying than anything the hairless apes on the ground below experienced in 2020 and 2021. Britain’s seabirds – guillemots, gannets, gulls, kittiwakes and skuas – have been hardest hit because they breed in […]

Last week my business demolished a derelict brick building used by glue sniffers and fornicators. It took several years to get planning permission to do so and predictably the last hurdle was bats. We had to wait till the summer to do two costly bat surveys, which as expected found no bats, let alone rare […]

The Lancet Commission is the latest to highlight how seeking the truth has come second to other considerations   The Lancet Commission into “lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic”, written by 40 scientists and public health experts, and chaired by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, has concluded that “the origin of the virus remains […]

You’ve just become prime minister. The public finances are in a mess, the Bank of England has stoked inflation, cutting taxes may make it worse, energy prices are through the roof, people are hurting so you can’t cut social spending, the Health Service is lengthening its waiting lists despite record budgets. What can you do? Given that […]

We have lost a unique and truly independent mind. The father of the Gaia thesis grew to mistrust modish greenery The death of James Lovelock on his 103rd birthday brings to an end one of the most original lives this planet has seen. He filled his century on Earth with ingenuity and never wasted a […]

There doesn’t seem to be a smoking gun in the latest ‘evidence’ The BBC carried a story this week with the headline ‘Covid origin studies say evidence points to Wuhan market’. Bizarrely the paper in Sciencethey are referring to, by Michael Worobey and colleagues, says no such thing. It says: ‘the observation that the preponderance of early cases […]

An obsession with organic farming ‘in sync with nature’ triggered an unsustainable but predictable economic crisis My article for The Telegraph: Sri Lanka’s collapse, from one of the fastest growing Asian economies to a political, economic and humanitarian horror show, seems to have taken everybody by surprise. Five years ago, the World Bank was extolling […]

The revised and expanded paperback edition of my newest book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, co-authored with the brilliant scientist Alina Chan, is now available to purchase in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. It was a privilege to help Alina write Viral, and a privilege to create this […]

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 […]