Category: Health

  • Screening saves lives

    Inclusive language is a favourite topic of right-wingers and bigoted authors: look at what the silly minorities are demanding now! But the reality is that inclusivity can really be a life or death matter. Writing in the i Paper, Patrick Strudwick talks to deputy House of Lords Speaker Ian Duncan about the death of his…

  • Glasgow to exit lockdown in 2093

    I know it’s necessary but I’m long past the point of expecting Glasgow’s COVID restrictions to be lifted any time soon: that’s us going into week 38 of the temporary 2-week restrictions that we’ve been living under since September. As Fraser Stewart pointed out on Twitter, there are Glaswegians who fell pregnant at the start…

  • A global hate campaign

    The horrific new anti-women legislation in Poland, a near-total ban on abortion, is already harming women. The country already had some of the strongest anti-abortion legislation in Europe, and it has now removed the exception for foetal abnormalities. According to the New York Times, 1,074 of the 1,100 abortions performed in Poland last year were…

  • 100,000 grieving families

    You don’t need me to tell you that Boris Johnson lied when he said the UK government had done everything possible to minimise the COVID-19 death toll. There is a reason we have a death toll exceeding 100,000 while New Zealand has 25, Vietnam 35 and Taiwan 7. As Devi Shridhar writes in the Guardian,…

  • Conspiracy magnets

    Something that’s become really apparent in the final days of the Trump administration is that cranks of a feather flock together. If you believe that the US election has been stolen, chances are you also believe that the COVID vaccine contains microchips, and that furniture shop Wayfair traffics stolen children. Thanks to Twitter I discovered…

  • COVID year two

    Ed Yong is one of the best science reporters we have, and his COVID reporting for The Atlantic has been superb. He’s just published his final piece of 2020: Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us. It’s for a US audience but it’s relevant to many other countries too. How does a country…

  • Mistakes were made

    As far as I’m aware, The New Yorker has only devoted its entire issue to a single story once before, for reporting on Hiroshima. And now it’s done it again for this incredible piece of journalism, The Plague Year. It’s very long, very detailed and very powerful. There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe…

  • Happy days are (nearly) here again

    It’s hard to be optimistic in these dark days (I don’t just mean metaphorically: I live in Scotland, where the sun doesn’t so much rise at this time of year as send a few expletives into the sky before going back to bed). And it’s harder still with more serious COVID restrictions about to come…

  • “Some of us felt you leave”

    A powerful Twitter thread by writer and academic Alice Tarbuck: I have been schooling my tongue, but I would just like to say: for those of us living alone, COVID feels like a sudden ‘stop’ in a game of musical chairs. There are those who found a seat, already found spouses, had children, acquired pets.…

  • Wait until tomorrow

    Some of my songs are about people who are struggling, either because of the situation they’re in or because of the chemistry in their heads. It’s a subject close to my heart because I struggle too, and some days are considerably harder than others. Our song A Moment of Clarity is about that. It clearly…