Sweden is no libertarian paradise for dealing with COVID
Libertarian and conservative commentators extol Sweden as an alternative model for dealing with the COVID pandemic that steers away from the lockdowns with which we are familiar in the United Kingdom and the United States. Elon Musk and Toby Young,...
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Undermining public law is no way to protect public health
Safeguards on everything from procurement to notifiable diseases, health inspections to freedom of information, are being suspended at a time when accountability is more important than ever. The long dark shadow cast by Coronavirus has provided cover for the demise...
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Face-mask wearing and public health messaging
‘I was in the Co-op and I heard a child ask his father if he could have a face-mask like mine. The father replied, ‘no, don’t be so soft, we’re not doing that!’ There has recently been a major ‘about...
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British inequality: It’s time to trust hungry people
Carl Walker and colleagues make the case for food poverty as a public health emergency and call for concerted response from govt to inequalities only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Pick a number, any number…
In the run-up to the 2019 general election, I wrote a piece about Boris Johnsons’ strategy for dealing with awkward interview questions. This outlined comment from Johnson himself, where he sketched his dead cat strategy. When faced with an impossible...
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The stop-start of collaboration in clinical settings
A post about the difficulties of applied interdisciplinary social science and healthcare collaboration in clinical settings Healthcare organisations and healthcare professionals are under a constant imperative to innovate. Social scientists, in the era of impact, are being asked to play...
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What’s missing from the UK COVID response? Clear communication
If we were playing a game of Just A Minute with the political response to the COVID pandemic, the UK government would have been stopped multiple times for hesitation, repetition and deviation. The phrase ‘this is a war’ would be...
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Internally displaced peoples and COVID-19
Africa’s largest city, Lagos, home for more than 20 million people is as a quiet as never before. As with many other cities in the world, Nigeria’s economic capital, on the 31th of March entered a two-week lockdown to prevent...
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Predictive Genetics For All – Minister Hancock’s big idea
The future of the NHS is in prevention rather than cure. And the mass application of genetics profiling can bring that about say Health Minister Hancock and his new best friend…. There are big changes afoot in terms of the...
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Nudging behaviour is ineffective, naïve and unethical
Interventions to ‘nudge’ people into desirable behaviours have become popular with policy-makers internationally. In the UK, the Behavioural Insights Team – established under former premier David Cameron – are prolific nudgers, designing (amongst many others) inputs to reduce meat consumption, protect...
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Promoting health without promoting stigma?
Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is again under fire for its campaigning on obesity. There was a lot wrong with their most recent posters, which equated obesity with smoking as a cause of cancer. The debates that followed highlighted the vital...
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Laurel and Hardy vs the anti-vaxxers and vaccines