pandemic

The churches must stay open

26 December 2021 6:00 pm

Hooray for Cardinal Vincent Nichols, who used the one day of the year when his pronouncements are amplified by the…

Sage modellers start to accept that Omicron is milder

23 December 2021 6:00 pm

Public health officials in Britain and South Africa were on different planets for about a fortnight. While those in South Africa…

Is Omicron now falling in South Africa?

21 December 2021 4:09 am

Man makes Covid predictionsand God laughs. Yet with the stakes this high in Britain, every bit of real-world data is…

Omicron is now Britain’s dominant Covid strain

18 December 2021 5:41 am

If you test positive for Covid now in Britain, the odds are that it’s Omicron: it’s now the dominant strain…

High life

11 December 2021 9:00 am

New York Imagine a European country today in which a newspaper in its most populous city launches a mendacious project…

Should we be scared of the Omicron variant?

11 December 2021 6:47 am

Why is the government so scared of the Omicron variant? So far, most of the evidence we have for transmissibility…

Boris takes his colleagues for fools

9 December 2021 7:15 am

Is Boris Johnson really deploying a ‘diversionary tactic’ in announcing vaccine passports on the day he has had to perform…

What’s the evidence for England’s vaccine passports?

9 December 2021 6:02 am

The Prime Minister has just announced Plan B. Working from home has been all but mandated and large venues —…

Omicron: cause for hope?

7 December 2021 1:31 am

It will be weeks before we know just how worried we should be about Omicron — but the first indications seem…

High life

4 December 2021 9:00 am

New York   It’s party time in the Bagel, and it’s about time, too. Good restaurants and elegant nightclubs are…

Unless Omicron changes everything, Covid is on the way out

2 December 2021 4:00 am

There are good reasons to be concerned about the Omicron variant. For starters, this strain has 50 mutations, twice as…

Do masks really halve the risk of Covid? A note on the evidence

29 November 2021 11:40 pm

‘Most of the trouble in life comes from misunderstanding’ as Willy Loman said in Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece An Inspector Calls.…

Partying through the pandemic

20 November 2021 9:00 am

It is, as you’ve possibly noticed, a tricky time for old-school American liberals, now caught between increasingly extreme versions of…

The vaccine cheer is gone

19 November 2021 6:55 am

I am 45, which means I’ve now had my third Covid vaccine. The experience of getting that injection crystallises a…

Did Covid first emerge at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

3 November 2021 7:49 am

The net around the Wuhan Institute of Virology continues to tighten. A letter from Lawrence Tabak, principal deputy director of the…

Why did we decide that Covid was over?

25 October 2021 12:45 pm

Look, I don’t know much epidemiology. Can’t pretend to. So what follows is, necessarily, a personal finger to the wind.…

No. 10 moves to kickstart the booster campaign

23 October 2021 10:12 am

In a move that as important as any in the recent Cabinet reshuffle, Emily Lawson is returning to run the…

Why Covid means the big state is back

15 October 2021 9:31 am

History suggests that when the state expands in a crisis, it doesn’t go back to its pre-crisis level once the…

The Covid blame game

25 September 2021 9:00 am

Are you ready to relive 2020? That’s what Adam Tooze is offering as he tells the story of Covid-19 through…

Javid avoids Tory Covid powers fightback – for now

15 September 2021 7:34 am

Tory MPs were not happy when Sajid Javid unveiled the Covid winter plan in the Commons this afternoon. They’re dissatisfied…

Why isn’t the vaccine UK approved for 12- to 15-year-olds?

4 September 2021 10:20 am

This afternoon, the JCVI has essentially passed the buck on vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds. It has declared that the health benefits…

A stunning revelation

31 July 2021 9:00 am

Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, writes that ‘the last year has been an eye-opener for me.…

Can Boris and his ministers agree on the point of the Covid app?

21 July 2021 7:51 am

What is the point of the Covid-19 app? Ministers seem to be as in the dark about the answer to…

Trouble in store

5 June 2021 9:00 am

What just happened? Some 15 months after the pandemic first struck, it’s still horribly unclear, which is perhaps why there…

High life

6 February 2021 9:00 am

Gstaad Imagine a beautiful, sexy woman, an Ava Gardner or a Lily James, with a wart on the end of…