It’s the evening of 31 December 2020, and I am grateful that this year is almost over.  Newspapers, podcasts, etc. are collecting people’s impressions from the year—“lessons learned.” In one Washington Post entry yesterday (30 December 2020), the writer humorously wrote that she had learned that “nine times out of ...  Read this >>

There is a murky grey area between government contracting and looting of the public purse. In the UK, the COVID-19 crisis has seen government and private contractors increasingly operating in this grey area, and with little sense of shame. The repeatedly demonstrated incompetence of the UK government (in particular the government of England) has drawn muc...  Read this >>

Deck the Halls (Pandemic Edition)   Deck the halls with disinfectant, ‘tis the season to be distant, Don we now our new protection, To avoid airborne infection.   See the rising curve before us, This new mutation is contagious, Until vaccines will end this madness, We're living in four tiers of sadness.   Finally this stra...  Read this >>

Dear diary, this week I almost set the kitchen on fire. Apparently, my two oven-related routines of sterilizing masks and baking Christmas cookies got mixed up. After putting in a baking tray of masks I heated the oven up to 180 degree Celsius, which, as the smoke and smell informed me ten minutes later, is 100 degrees too high for masks. Looking at the s...  Read this >>

I know it has been some months, but I am still occasionally surprised by something in our pandemic lifestyles. The new emphasis on drive-in events is one such surprise. Honking car horns are noisy and rude – they generally mean someone is impatient or angry with another driver. I have had difficulty translating that sound into cheerful clapping, eve...  Read this >>

Why have so many more BAME doctors died from COVID in the UK (Razaq et al 2020)? Why are people with learning and mobility disabilities 6 times more likely to die from COVID in the UK? Why did the government write to all care homes encouraging elderly residents to sign a DNAR (“do not attempt to resuscitate”) letter to release NHS resources to...  Read this >>

On April 15, 2020, I wrote a column in TIME magazine on the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines. The good news, I said, is that “ the time from ‘lab to jab’ could be as short as 12-18 months,” which has thankfully turned out to be true. Tomorrow, Britain becomes the first Western nation to start a mass immunization campaign.  Bu...  Read this >>

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has been consistently problematizing official attitudes towards COVID-19 writing in his personal blog and elsewhere. In particular, Agamben has been criticizing the undisguised and continuous violation of fundamental freedoms in the name of public health. The Italian phi...  Read this >>

It has been a bit too long since the last entry having been buried by teaching and marking. The online environment is just a huge amount of work for less quality. Much has changed, and some is just the same. The vaccine announcements of recent weeks have been both staggering and disturbing. It is clear that the worst fears of a pecking order of states gai...  Read this >>