“Why aren’t the mainstream media covering this protest?!?!” It’s a refrain one sees fairly often from people perplexed that their favourite cause hasn’t attracted the attention it deserved. This weekend’s splendidly vague anti-lockdown marches in central London were no exception. Twitter hummed with anti-lockdown ‘Smiley’ types complaining that there wasn’t more news coverage of the […]
Here was the year of Covid chaos in full technicolour from the ultimate fly on the wall. Part personal vendetta, part faux-humble self-laceration and part excoriating critique of a failed British state, Dominic Cummings’ seven hours of answers were riveting, even for those like me who usually find events that obsess Westminster rather anti-climactic. Whether […]
The Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous was created in 1935 pretty much by chance. A former stockbroker, six months sober, ruined by the Wall Street Crash and on the rough end of a business deal gone wrong, walked into a hotel bar intending to drown his sorrows. Instead, he came to a realisation: that he could […]
What will be the economic legacy of this pandemic? The IMF believes US GDP will now be larger by the end of 2022 than predicted back in 2019 – in other words, there will be no persistent impact from this past year’s turmoil on American output. The Office for Budget Responsibility, of course, is still […]
Michael Lewis’s protagonists see things that other people miss. In The Big Short, it was the small group of investors who anticipated the financial crisis. In Moneyball, it was a coach at the Oakland Athletics who harnessed the power of statistics to upend the conventional wisdom of baseball scouting. In The Undoing Project, it was […]
The expropriation of Covid-19 vaccine patents will not lead to a single additional jab. This simple fact, sadly, has not prevented the Biden Administration from throwing their weight behind a proposal to waive intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organisation. Patents are not the bottleneck to producing more vaccines. There are […]
The BBC reports today that 20 million Britons are now living in areas that did not report a single Covid death in April. Despite that arresting statistic, the entire population of the United Kingdom is still living under restrictions that, even in March last year, would have seemed unthinkable. It is still a criminal offence […]
Searching the CapX archives for articles on the EU and AstraZeneca, words ike “fiasco” and “mad” appear with alarming regularity. News that the Commission is now suing the drugmaker for allegedly failing to fulfil its contract is somehow both gut-wrenching and completely unsurprising. Never mind that AstraZeneca produced an effective, safe vaccine within a year, and supplied […]
As of last week, there have been 127,000 deaths in a little over a year – a tragic outcome by any measure. If those are the kinds of numbers we can expect every year, then clearly the most drastic measures will be necessary to keep Covid under control. But unless some dramatic and unexpected twists […]
“I would be amazed if it was done in less than, say, seven or eight years from the start, but that’s a pure guess not based on anything at all. It could take substantially longer.” Those calling for a public inquiry into the UK’s Covid response would do well to heed the warning this week […]
There is a great paradox at the heart of British politics. On the one hand, the drinking culture is pervasive, and much of life in SW1 revolves around alcoholic beverages. On the other, most drinking establishments in Westminster are appalling. The pubs near Parliament are, with no exceptions, wildly overpriced and not very pleasant to […]
As lockdown lifted in England this week there was a palpable sense of joy. Not everything is back to normal, we can only eat and drink outside and it is unseasonably cold, if mercifully dry. However the jubilation felt by ordinary people was not felt by the anti-obesity lobby — their aim is for a […]
At face value, it seems highly plausible that SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – could behave seasonally, being more prevalent in winter and less so in summer. The four other coronaviruses that commonly circulate in humans behave in this way. We’ve also seen Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths spike over winter in the […]
Today’s reopening of non-essential retail is very welcome. But the damage that the pandemic has caused to Britain’s shopping malls and high streets is not going to be repaired soon, if ever. We know that households have accumulated significant savings during lockdown. According to the Bank of England, private savings accounts were up by £125 […]
The benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine are exceedingly high and the risks astonishingly low. The latest US trial results put it at 76% effective at preventing Covid-19 and 100% effective at preventing serious disease. The UK’s overall vaccination programme, which was largely dependent on AZ, has already prevented 6,000 deaths in the first three months […]
At the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, it seemed as if Germany was coping better than the UK, the US and lots of other countries. Its testing system was feted by analysts in other countries wondering why their own governments could not match the fabled ‘German efficiency’. In recent months, though, the exact opposite has […]
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