This is great news. But America and the world can’t celebrate unreservedly — because Fauci himself is unlikely to face criminal jeopardy, owing to a sweeping preemptive pardon granted him by President Joe Biden. Yet that doesn’t rule out other forms of accountability for Fauci, such as civil torts. A deeper reckoning, moreover, may shed light on the creepy, long-running nexus between biological research and America’s national-security state.

Last week, Dr. David Morens — a senior adviser to Fauci during the Covid years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health — pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired with two other people to hide evidence and defy public-records laws. The evidence in question: emails between Morens (and other government-linked scientists) and the British zoologist Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that used US government grant money to fund so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a report from the House subcommittee on the pandemic.

Gain-of-function research involves combining different viruses to create dangerous hybrids, justified on the grounds of better understanding future infectious diseases. At least one US intelligence agency — the CIA — has already concluded that the novel coronavirus likely leaked from a Chinese lab doing just such work. And it is also reasonable to at least suspect that the US government’s funding of the EcoHealth Alliance was part of intelligence efforts to keep tabs on Chinese research. 

According to the Department of Justice, Morens and two unnamed co-conspirators agreed “in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.” This was done, as the conspirators themselves made clear, to evade the transparency requirements of the Federal Records Act and the possibility of future exposure under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.

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Among other things, Morens and his conspirators were trying to hide details related to a NIAID grant that helped fund experimentation with bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in China. One of these bat coronaviruses may have been a precursor to the Covid-19 virus, which likely escaped from the WIV in 2019.

Many of the incriminating communications have been posted online by the oversight committee of the US House of Representatives. Numerous emails implicate Fauci himself in the effort to evade public-records and transparency laws. For example, an email from Morens to a group of fellow scientists, including Daszak, dated April 21, 2021, contains the following: “PS. I forgot to say there’s no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Another email, from May 13, 2021, to the same group of scientists discusses having a friendly journalist “interview Tony [Fauci] directly and connect him to our ‘secret’ back channel. He emailed Tony a few days ago.” This suggests rather routine illegal use of private communication systems to coordinate official pandemic messaging, an effort in which Fauci himself was involved.

Daszak — widely suspected but not confirmed to be one of the unnamed conspirators — appears in many of the emails in which avoiding transparency is mentioned. An email dated April 21, 2021, from Daszak to a group of five other government-employed or -connected scientists, reads in part: “Please feel free to share any docs that I’ve sent to you, with Tony [Fauci]. Hopefully you can do that in a way that avoids [the Freedom of Information Act], and if not possible, just show him stuff on screen share on Zoom.”

In another email, Morens, referring to Fauci, tells Daszak; “If he needs further info, it might be best to connect you two, in an off-the-record manner. Would that be OK? We are getting FOIA’d nonstop, so it’s most important that Tony [Fauci] not have anything on the record that could come back to bite.” Daszak responded: “Totally agree. Tell him I’m happy to speak with him at any time and will do so in a way that’s not FOIA-ble.” 

In an email from November 18, 2021, Morens says: “Please pass this on to Peter [Daszak], and I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail, and make sure that what gets sent to my gmail doesn’t have a cc [carbon copy] to another government employee who could be FOIA’d.” There are many more statements of the kind in the public record, thanks to House investigators. 

The scientists’ obsession with secrecy, their fear of public scrutiny, tells us much about the politics of this pandemic. These people are fundamentally authoritarian. They despise democracy. They epitomize the arrogance of scientism: the worldview that treats science not as a means to gather certain kinds of facts, humble in the face of what it doesn’t know and subject to future revision — but as a total worldview, offering definitive answers to all questions, including the nonscientific, and elevating the expert himself to the status of a demigod. 

Their research was reckless. They suspected trouble. And they tried to hide it.

Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance are important in themselves and also because of the larger dynamics they reveal in the history of Covid’s origins. According to Dr. Andrew G. Huff, a former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance-turned-whistleblower, the nonprofit was heavily involved with a USAID program called PREDICT, which ran from 2009 to 2019, and billed itself as an early warning system for zoonotic pathogens that might emerge from nature. 

Parallel to PREDICT, Fauci’s NIAID also wrote a grant for $8 million directly to EcoHealth Alliance so that it could help fund research into bat coronaviruses being conducted by Shi Zhengli, a senior scientist at the Wuhan institute. This research seems to have included gain-of-function enhancements on some of the bat viruses that may have made them more dangerous to people.

To be charitable, if collecting intelligence on China’s infectious disease research was the plan, the US government did manage to get inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was then one of China’s top virology labs. Less charitably, the government did so by using US taxpayer money to fund dangerous research in a sprawling and poorly run lab. While the Wuhan Institute of Virology did have Biosafety Level 4 laboratories in 2019, it also had numerous less secure facilities in the same building; some of the bat-virus research is alleged to have occurred in these lower-safety level labs.

In this light, the pandemic can be seen as the ultimate iatrogenic disaster. In an effort to combat pandemics, a secret arm of the government may well have funded research that inadvertently produced the very thing it was trying to prevent: a massive, deadly, economy-crashing pandemic.

It isn’t too far-fetched to imagine that the Trump administration, and especially health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., are now deeply ambivalent about the nature of the government’s likely efforts to keep track of other countries’ bioweapon research. On the one hand, if such spywork is funding dangerous research in order to get inside foreign laboratories, it can lead to unintended consequences … like a global pandemic. On the other, rival states and private actors do, in fact, conduct dangerous biological research that the US government might want to be apprised of. 

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A better way to mitigate the whole problem would be to refurbish the international treaty against biological weapons. That treaty, which outlaws offensive-oriented biological research and was highly effective in an earlier age, has a gaping loophole that allows high-tech biological research to continue as long as it is done in the name of medicine, public health, and biodefense. In other words, the great powers are still making the active ingredients in would-be weapons, but they are not making or testing delivery systems, nor do they deploy pathogens to the battlefield. However, as highly dangerous biological research advances, those old constraints become less important.

To understand how and why, it helps to revisit history. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, the US government, along with most of its large allies and peer competitors, maintained offensive-oriented biological-weapons programs. During the pandemic, liberal journalists went out of their way to scoff at any mention of “bioweapons,” as if such a thing had never existed. But it did, and it is all a matter of public record.

However, by the late 1960s, American military leaders had turned against these so-called germ bombs, seeing biological warfare as dangerously unpredictable and dangerously accessible. In fact, the US brass referred to biological warfare as “the poor man’s nuke.” A number of accidents, including the mass poisoning of a herd of sheep in the American West, had led to public outcry from not only hippies, but heartland squares as well.

When Richard Nixon arrived at the White House in January 1969, he was met by large and persistent peace vigils demanding an end to US biological-warfare programs. Ten months later, in November 1969, Nixon announced the “unprecedented” unilateral end of America’s biological-weapons program. Quickly thereafter, the United States launched international negotiations aimed at ending bioweapons programs everywhere. In 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention was agreed to. All signatory states were compelled to end their offensive research and to destroy their offensive biological weapon stockpiles by March 1975.

The treaty has mostly been a success. But there was that one loophole. States could continue doing research on dangerous pathogens as long as this was for the creation of “defensive medical countermeasures.” For a long time, this loophole meant little, in part because the barriers to such research were so high. However, by the early aughts, with the advent of the CRISPR gene-editing technology, dangerous tampering with pathogens became much easier and more common.

As more parties began tampering with pathogens, intelligence agencies around the world became increasingly eager to understand what their adversaries were doing. It is this drive that may have led to America’s probable efforts to access the premier virology lab of Washington’s main rival, China.

Diplomacy brought an end to offensive-bioweapons research among the major powers of the planet. But it left open the defense loophole. Real accountability, and a real reckoning with Covid, could, among other things, clear the path for diplomacy between the world’s great powers to amend the 1972 convention, so that the treaty effectively regulates the dangerous and increasingly accessible technologies of the 21st century.

The need to update the 1972 treaty has grown particularly acute in just the last year. Aided by artificial intelligence, synthetic biology is developing faster than ever, and in very dangerous ways. In July, researchers at the University of Minnesota created the first ever artificial life form, a one-celled organism, capable of limited division and replication, called the SpudCell. It is, as yet, unable to evolve or divide over many generations, which is why scientists don’t consider it fully alive. But that could change.

Less complicated and far more dangerous was news in early August that scientists had created a series of viruses that had been designed by AI. Hopes for medical breakthroughs were raised, but so were safety concerns about new synthetic diseases running out of control.

As Dr. Huff, the EcoHealth Alliance whistleblower, told me over the phone: “Universities in all the G20 countries have the capacity to create totally synthetic viruses. We no longer have to go poking around in nature to find dangerous viruses and then do gain of function on them. It’s now possible to create dangerous viruses from scratch.”

We need sunlight and lots of it on the history of Covid’s origins. This is not just about punishing a group of creepy insiders — though they certainly deserve it — it’s also about reining in and restructuring biodefense research of all sorts.

It’s easy to feel squeamish about discussing these matters. The facts, though well-documented, sound conspiratorial and haven’t broken through to the mainstream press, and therefore might hurt your credibility at the next dinner party. But that attitude is adolescent and painfully upper middle class. Now is the time to face the facts, no matter where they lead. A real reckoning on Covid is the first step towards effectively demanding that our governments refurbish the Biological Weapons Convention and take other steps so as to prevent another biomedical disaster.

The alternative may well be masks, lockdowns, censorship, online schooling, shuttered churches, vaccine passports, and exhortations to snitch on neighbors who fail to comply — in short, mass hysteria and authoritarian overreach all over again. 

Six years after a contagion that killed millions and wrecked the global economy, one of the great unanswered questions of Covid is, how did it begin? Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans reject what in 2020 was more or less the official (but outlandish) story: namely, that the novel coronavirus sprang from a wet market in Wuhan, China, and somehow jumped from bats — or pangolins? — to humans. 

This zoonotic theory of Covid’s origins still enjoys the backing of some scientists, but it is bedeviled by questions proponents can’t seem to shake off. For one thing, what was the intermediate animal that supposedly facilitated transmission? Who was Patient Zero? And how was it that the epicenter of the pandemic just happened to be located in Wuhan — one of a few virology labs in China authorized for research on dangerous coronaviruses?

That latter question points to a different hypothesis for Covid’s origins: that it resulted from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers had been conducting cutting edge “gain-of-function” research, combining different viruses to create dangerous hybrids for the purpose of better understanding future infectious diseases. The lab-leak theory has been endorsed by at least one agency in the US Intelligence Community — the CIA.

Yet Americans and the wider world may never know the full truth unless these questions are subjected to a deep and rigorous examination — and a Fauci trial, conducted to the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” may be the only means left for this. 

The justice system already appears to be tending in this direction. The Department of Justice this week charged David Morens — a former senior adviser to Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The government accuses Morens of conspiring against the United States and destroying records related to Covid’s onset, among other crimes (Morens is presumed innocent until proved guilty).

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The Morens indictment mentions “co-conspirators.” Americans must know: was his then-boss, Fauci, one of them? What we already know makes it implausible that he wasn’t. That makes a formal indictment all the more urgent for truth and accountability.

Since the early days of Covid, much of the scientific establishment has been working to discredit the lab-leak theory. As head of NIAID during the pandemic and the face of the government’s response, Fauci was a key player in this effort. Early on, he dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” the notion that Covid might have been created in a lab and leaked by accident. Yet there are reasons to suspect that NIAID under the leadership of Fauci funded the research that may have created Covid.

The case against Fauci, if the Justice Department brings one in the coming days, will likely revolve around charges that he perjured himself in testimony before Congress about this question of research funding and Covid’s origins. At a Senate committee hearing in May 2021, Fauci categorically stated in a tense exchange with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that the NIH and NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. 

“You are entirely and completely incorrect,” Fauci snapped at Paul. “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” At a follow-up hearing in July 2021, Fauci got into it again with the Kentucky senator, saying he didn’t retract his May statement about gain-of-function funding. At one point, he jabbed a finger at Paul and shouted, “If anybody’s lying here, senator, it is you!”

But this week’s indictment of Morens for concealing federal records related to the pandemic has revived the debate about Fauci and created new pressure on the Trump DOJ to revisit Fauci’s truthfulness before Congress. 

The records in question have to do with precisely what Fauci has repeatedly denied: gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — funded by an NIH grant. According to the indictment, Morens pledged to help “Co-Conspirator 1,” described in the indictment as the head of a US-based nonprofit, restore a canceled NIH grant for “Company #1.” The canceled grant was titled, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, and it was canceled amid allegations that Covid came from the Wuhan institute.

The descriptions of Co-Conspirator 1 and Company #1 point directly to Peter Daszak, former head of the now-defunct EcoHealth Alliance, which subcontracted a 2014 NIH grant to the Wuhan lab for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. (Neither Daszak nor EcoHealth Alliance are named in the indictment, but reporting in The New York Times and elsewhere imply that they are indeed the person and entity referred to in the indictment). 

What’s more, the indictment alleges that these co-conspirators gave Morens “illegal gratuities” and wine for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.” As Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche put it in a statement: “Morens … allegedly identified an official act that he could perform to ‘deserve’ the gift, which was a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that Covid-19 had natural origins.”

To put the dots together: The government’s case against Morens suggests that the NIH did approve a grant that funded precisely the kind of research that could have created Covid, in the very city where Covid first appeared. Once the pandemic broke out and EcoHealth Alliance lost its NIH funding, Morens allegedly tried to help restore this funding in his official capacity as a senior NIH official, but concealed his efforts to do so. It follows that Fauci’s statements before Congress categorically denying such funding were false.

The indictment also corroborates a statement by NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak, who at a 2024 House committee hearing admitted that the US government funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Asked directly by then-Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) whether NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth Alliance, Tabak said: “It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research. If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”

Splitting hairs over what exactly constitutes gain-of-function research, or what the accepted definition of the term is, was a recurring feature of Fauci’s sparring in Senate hearings with Paul and other lawmakers during the pandemic. At a Senate hearing in November 2021, Paul brought up the gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses that EcoHealth Alliance subcontracted to the Wuhan lab through its 2014 NIH grant. Fauci responded by calling Paul’s line of questioning an “egregious misrepresentation,” and insisting that his characterization of the research didn’t meet the NIH’s definition of gain of function, which was formalized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in January of 2017.

Yet Fauci’s own past statements uphold Paul’s definition of gain of function. In a June 2021 letter, Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan — then the Republican ranking members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Committee on the Judiciary, respectively — asked Fauci to reconcile his past statements with his May 2021 assertion under oath that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. 

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The letter quoted Fauci at a 2012 conference on gain-of-function research at which he said: “what historically investigators have done is to actually create gain of function by making mutations, passage adoption, or other genetic techniques, such as reverse genetics.” The letter then quoted the 2014 NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which allowed it to “test predictions of [coronavirus]…transmission…using reverse genetics…” In other words, NIH was contracting research that fit Fauci’s own definition of gain of function. 

“Using your own definition,” wrote Comer and Jordan, “it appears the NIH funded gain-of-function research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology].” They closed their letter by asking Fauci to “explain the apparent discrepancy in your recent testimony.”

Fauci, who once claimed to personally embody science, has been widely criticized for playing fast and loose with the facts. In addition to his shifting statements about masking and social distancing protocols during the pandemic, he was secretly involved in a widely cited March 2020 paper published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine on the “proximal origins” of Covid. The paper was designed specifically to discredit the idea of a lab leak. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors stated. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Fauci mentioned this paper to White House reporters in April 2020 as evidence against the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin — without revealing that he had been involved in its creation, as emails released in a congressional inquiry eventually revealed. RealClearInvestigations journalist Paul Thacker uncovered that Fauci admitted during a multiday deposition by the House Oversight Committee in 2024 that he had indeed read multiple drafts of the paper, and even emailed with the authors about it. Yet Fauci had previously told The New York Times that he wasn’t sure if he ever got around to reading the paper.

It’s easy to dismiss all this as water under the bridge. The pandemic is over, Fauci is out of the government. In the words of that infamous 2022 essay in The Atlantic, can’t we just declare a “pandemic amnesty” and move on?

In a word, no. As RealClear’s Thacker has noted elsewhere, while “dissembling to the media is not a crime, lying to Congress is illegal.” More than any other single person, Fauci was in a position to shed light on the origins of Covid at the moment the pandemic arrived on American shores. It might have required coming clean about what the NIH and NIAID had been funding in China on his watch, and it might have even required him to resign in disgrace over the scandal such an admission would cause.

But it would have been the right thing to do. In addition to helping government officials and medical providers better understand what we were dealing with, possibly even saving American lives, it would have opened up space for a reckoning about what US tax dollars had been paying for overseas. Later, there might have been a chance at accountability for those responsible for funding reckless gain-of-function research.

 Instead, Fauci dissembled about what he knew, the government’s role, and the part he himself played in all of it. There is still a chance to hold him at least partially accountable. But time is running out.

Every week is like this. Perhaps we should be used to it by now: the weirdness began in earnest six years ago, when the first Covid cases were reported in Wuhan, China. In short order, this triggered the worldwide lockdowns that forced everyone online, with economies in freefall and cultures into a pervasive state of low-level derangement. 

Some of that first and loudest wave of Covid-era internet derangement seized upon the World Economic Foundation’s “Great Reset” program. The influential Davos talking-shop attracts an elite circle of businesspeople, financiers and their hangers-on (including in Labour), and has long been a bête noire for radicals across the political compass. The patrician “Great Reset” proposal to treat the pandemic as a social-engineering opportunity rapidly became a byword for every imaginable flavor of conspiracy. 

The program’s proponents, not least the Blofeld-esque WEF founder, German economist Klaus Schwab, celebrated it as an exciting new dawn for humanity. What was it really? And were the conspiracists right? As is often the way, the answer is: literally, no, but poetically: not far off.

The Great Reset called for coordinated global action by governments to “revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions”. On the face of it, that sounds utopian; but it proved, to say the least, unpopular. Why? Well, the WEF’s own website acknowledges that, to work, a Great Reset would call for a “level of cooperation and ambition” that “is unprecedented”, requiring “stronger and more effective governments” along with “private-sector engagement every step of the way”. 

And if Covid taught us anything, it’s that competence of this sort is not guaranteed. Quite the contrary: for most, the experience was both of a spike in high-tech control measures, such as drone surveillance and digital tracking, and a concurrent plunge in the quality of basic stuff, such as road surfaces or waiting times for a driving test or a GP appointment. Nor have things improved since. Labour may have been elected to restore competence after a string of hopeless Tory leaders, but even now the stories of state ineptitude come thick and fast, wreathed each time in a fog of cover-up and sometimes outright lying. We spend millions on fish discos and bat tunnels, while nothing gets built. There’s that Avanti train. And so much more! 

In the last year the number of prisoners released early by mistake has run into the hundreds, including very high-profile offenders such as the Epping sex attacker. The Home Office was recently forced to admit having lost track of 53,000 asylum seekers. The military emailed a spreadsheet of Afghan collaborators to half the planet, then tried to hide it by smuggling the list members into Britain under a super-injunction. I doubt the WEF actually are lizards in human suits or whatever. But given the manifest incompetence of our leadership class, the WEF haters are surely right to resist any further power-grabs (such as, for example, the recent return of Blair’s cherished digital ID scheme). Who in their right mind would entrust the kind of sensitive high-tech work envisaged by a “Great Reset” to the sort of clowns who make mistakes of this kind? They can’t even lie and manipulate effectively: their propaganda efforts and secretive “misinformation units” keep being spotted and denounced, only to resurface again with the next round of cock-up and cover-up.

But why is it like this? Why is everything now run by numpties? Nothing is ever monocausal, but the media theorist Marshall McLuhan might have argued that it’s not just falling birth rates, or MPs’ low pay (though this doubtless doesn’t help). It’s also the way our technologies are changing us. McLuhan argued, all the way back in the Sixties, that the objectivity, logical thinking, and technical wizardry that gave us the modern age was in important ways a byproduct of widespread print literacy. And this age had already been superseded by electricity. 

McLuhan claimed that this exit from the print to the electric age was driving a decline in rationality and technical competence, and return to tribalism and magical thinking. And perhaps we can point to the first use of “dumbing down” by Hollywood executives in the Thirties, to describe adjusting a film’s content for less intelligent people. Or we could note that especially beginning in the Sixties, when McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy, electronic media were indeed competing ever more vigorously with books for public attention. Against this, though, international IQ scores went on rising over the 20th century. So for all that Starmer admits he doesn’t read, or at least doesn’t read novels, there is surely more to our now woefully thin political talent pool than just electric media dumbing everyone down.

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More recently, though, commentators have begun to warn that another factor accelerating this “more” may be the shift to digital reading. As Nicholas Carr warned in 2005, this activates the brain in ways quite different to reading things in print, with the effects including the degrading of concentration. And this, others argue, is driving our having apparently passed peak IQ in the early 21st century. Perhaps the culprit is our distracting smartphones, or — increasingly — the use of AI. (Labour MPs have been accused of reading out ChatGPT-generated speeches.) 

So what does it mean for our technocratic overlords if the world is getting dumber? The strongest argument in favor of technocracy was always that modern states are too complex to be managed by elected non-specialists, and should be left in the hands of super-competent experts. But what if the technocrats are also doomscrolling, and it’s making them stupider too? 

If so, you might expect to see (for example) tribal thinking and emotional logic coming to infect even technocracy, resulting in large-scale, top-down social engineering programs that don’t work as expected, or at all. Imagine. In response, then, you might also see supporters of such programs beginning to question their value. You might, in fact, see even such high-profile figures breaking ranks as Nicole Shanahan, ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin and erstwhile powerhouse philanthropist. 

In an interview this week, Shanahan lifted the lid on the clique of Silicon Valley “tech wives” whose money was, in her words, “used to set the groundwork” for “The Great Reset”. Shanahan no longer considers this a good use of philanthropic money. She admits: “I really believed I was giving black communities a chance to rise up out of oppression”. Now, though, she’s reviewed how those grants are performing and has concluded in fact “the problems of the community have gotten worse”. But nor can we hold out hope that the Right will save us from motivated reasoning, corruption or numpties. Remember literally everything the Tories ever did, in their 14 years in power. Are there really enough ultra-competent Reform-aligned people out there to form a government, should Farage win next time? I hope so; but I worry.

The central problem with the “Great Reset” was essentially the same as Reform’s, but on an even greater scale: the fact that there aren’t enough technocrats who are as detached, ethical, and competent as such a program would have needed for it work as intended. So does this mean the end of technocracy? Perhaps; but that should raise two cheers, at the most. It’s true that Schwab has left the WEF, and quit shilling the Great Reset. Indeed, the circumstances of his departure make him a vivid illustration of precisely that central problem. Schwab didn’t just retire; he resigned, following whistleblower allegations that he embezzled money, manipulated WEF reports, and booked “private massages” in hotel rooms. 

Now, he’s launching something called the “Schwab Academy” from what appears to be a garden shed. He’s also published a new book, titled Thriving and Leading in the Intelligent Age. But when you map the shift from “Great Reset” to “Intelligent Age” onto Shanahan’s loss of faith in top-down social engineering, something worrying emerges: a sense that the technocrats have given up on the public, and are now quietly building an ark.

For the unspoken small print to Schwab’s “Intelligent Age” is how we define “intelligence”. Schwab tends to oscillate between the human and machine kind, as if these needn’t be distinguished sharply from one another. And were this right, we might say: a new “intelligent age” in public life would make a nice change, so bring it on. But Emily Bender and Alex Hanna have recently argued that this isn’t right. So-called “Artificial Intelligence” is a con: it is not, and will never be, intelligent in the human sense. It’s far more accurately described not as “intelligence” but “automation”.

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And one of the side-effects of automation is de-skilling. The more shoe factories, for example, the fewer skilled cobblers. So if AI automates at least some aspects of thought, it follows that in embracing it we’ll de-skill ourselves. I suspect that Schwab sees this, and is carefully leaving it unstated, on the basis that the much smaller group of people he considers worth trying to save already know. He and his buddies are just planning for their own survival in a future of universal post-literacy.

The real vibe shift, then, may not be a swing Left, or Right, at all. Rather, I suspect it’s a swing within the class that endorsed the first Great Reset, away from even trying to make things better for everyone. Silicon Valley’s “tech wives mafia” has fallen out of love with progressive social engineering, for the simple reason that it doesn’t work. We can likewise expect the utopian justification for other tech-authoritarian policies to fall by the wayside too. The last great wealth transfer happened in the name of “flattening the curve”, drowning small businesses as Amazon boomed. Perhaps the next won’t even bother with a justification.

The real Great Reset, then, was always the post-literate collapse in intelligence. It’s already rendered large-scale technocracy unworkable. Now, the class that not so long ago dreamed of a global transformation are retreating to their bunkers instead, sometimes literally. The rest of us had better hold onto our loved ones; there is no one else coming to save us.

Within hours, tributes began to circulate. On Reddit, strangers tried to figure out what had happened, with some assuming it was related to his bout with “long Covid”, while others believed, reasonably under the circumstances, it was suicide (YB didn’t reply to my requests for comment). On YouTube, podcasters eulogized Lee. And across X, the platform where he spent so much of his last five years, the reactions carried a stunned grief. 

I expected to feel ambivalent. I had known Lee only through a couple of antagonistic exchanges online this year. In our final exchange in August, I blocked him after I refused to debate him about Covid on his show, Struggle Session. But I could only muster sadness and pity for him. The “Zero Covid” or “Covid cautious” community he helped sustain had hardened into something like an emotional pandemic, long after the biological one had faded into the background of American life.

To understand that movement, we have to return to 2020.

The institutional failures of the early pandemic are well documented: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s infamous mask flip-flop; the agency’s fixation on surface transmission; missteps on testing; mixed messages about risk; and a possible coverup of the origins of the novel coronavirus. For many Americans, the CDC’s credibility cracked. For people already predisposed to distrust institutions — especially on the far Left and Right — it shattered.

Into that breach stepped the so-called People’s CDC, a self-appointed, grassroots alternative. It was a coalition of activist scientists, public-health researchers, and highly online progressives, united by the belief that only a bottom-up, morally pure movement could save the marginalized. They were united by a shared belief that the official CDC no longer “followed the science” and had been corrupted by MAGA and capitalist institutions, which demanded everyone go back to work to shore up the corporate bottom line. The People’s CDC began issuing biweekly “risk maps” that almost always seemed to point toward continued caution, regardless of the data. 

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Even after vaccines arrived, even as hospitalizations fell, even as scientists updated their understanding of risk, the People’s CDC preserved the emotional realities of early 2021: masks were always necessary, indoor gatherings were inherently suspect, and any attempt to resume normal everyday social life was problematic. The group wanted the United States to be on full lockdown like China, even as the Middle Kingdom abandoned its hard-line Zero Covid policies. For many, this alternative CDC filled an emotional void or offered clarity during a bewildering moment. For others, it became something more — an identity.

The Zero Covid movement’s nerve center is a 32,000-member-strong subreddit called ZeroCovidCommunity. The members are convinced that the pandemic never truly ended, that the emergency has become a permanent condition. The radical edge of this community codified itself into what some observers half-jokingly called COVIDTELPRO, a quasi-ironic name evoking the FBI’s secret surveillance program of the 1960s. This group primarily targets Left-wing organizers, journalists, union members, and anyone else who dares to propose a future that includes socializing, bars, or maskless joy. The result is a constant churn of denunciations, loyalty tests, and ritualistic online shaming of those who don’t wear N95 masks in public.  

I encountered them firsthand. In February, I wrote a brief essay urging young adults — Gen Z, in particular — to revisit offline social life, to resist the isolation that had become endemic. I intended to push against the extreme safety-ism that had metastasized among the Left and young people since 2020. Humans are inherently social animals, as Aristotle taught, and meeting others face-to-face is a fundamental aspect of physical, mental, and even political health. But in the eyes of Zero Covid activists, I had committed an inexcusable offense — telling people to get a life. 

One of the most persistent of the Covid-cautious commentators was Leslie Lee. He had a career long before his activism swallowed him. He taught high-school English, wrote for the Huffington Post and other progressive outlets, and co-hosted a number of Lefty podcasts. 

In the late 2010s, Lee was sharp, blunt, funny, and often pugnacious — an online personality who knew how to provoke. Then Covid struck; for him, the “long” variety. On his GoFundMe page, he described brain fog, excruciating migraines, constant fatigue — all of which made his once-fluid creative process painfully slow: “one show every month or two,” he admitted. What he did have energy for, at least publicly, was venting endlessly about “Covid deniers” like me. Once Lee put me in his crosshairs as the enemy on X, I received hundreds of angry tweets from those in the movement — including from Seventies actress Morgan Fairchild and the forever-masked influencer-journalist Taylor Lorenz, arguably Zero Covid’s biggest icon. 

What surprised me most during the weeks-long harassment wasn’t the volume; it was the emotional intensity. My opponents posted as if they lived in a perpetual emergency, and I was part of the problem. Many of these people were polite in private over direct messages or phone calls, including Lorenz. But in public, they wanted a pound of flesh from me, a groveling apology, even as they threatened real-life harm. The rhetoric kept escalating. Disagreement meant harm. Harm became violence. Violence turned to genocide. I was an “ableist” and eventually accused of being — yes — Hitler for the immunocompromised. One wrote: “People like you make it impossible for me to exist in public spaces.” 

I was far from the only one on the receiving end. Activists told me they were tired of every event photo being ammunition for the Covid-cautious to scream bloody murder at the sight of unmasked faces. A national newspaper columnist contacted me privately to say she had endured 18 straight months of being called “a murderer” and worse for her positions on lockdowns and school closures. “I just want you to know you aren’t alone,” she wrote.

As political journalist David Weigel has observed, these online crusades have been disastrous for the Left. Progressive spaces — activist meetings, book talks, union gatherings — became some of the last places in America still requiring masks, vaccine cards, or elaborate safety rituals years after the broader public abandoned them. Many simply stopped showing up, and a movement already known for its internal fragmentation became more physically and emotionally atomized. A rally in 2024 or 2025 featuring a sea of N95s doesn’t project seriousness; instead, it signals an inward-facing subculture that pillories dissent. 

Yet the Zero Covid crowd viewed this online invective as necessary and themselves as noble martyrs burdened to save the world from a crisis that everyone else had forgotten. Another prominent community member, Alice Wong, embodied such thinking. Wong, who coincidentally also tragically died this month, was a MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, best known as the founder of the Disability Visibility Project. She reportedly died of an infection in a California hospital at the age of 51, not long after her Teen Vogue disability column got canceled. 

Just as segments of too-online progressive spaces once espoused that black women were inherently magical (Remember #BlackGirlMagic?), or that autism imbues people with superhuman powers, Wong called herself an “oracle” due to her experience with muscular dystrophy. She co-founded the Society of Disabled Oracles, which framed disabled people as holy priests possessing what she called prophetic perception: an ability to sense power dynamics others can’t see, and to perceive hidden knowledge from the past or the future. “Disability is a generative force. It’s magic,” reads a banner on the group’s site.

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This might all sound like a harmless New Age-y fantasy, but the reality is that these delusions do not appear to be making anyone happy. On ZeroCovidCommunity, where Wong was revered as a visionary, you can see the emotional consequences of this cosmology laid bare. A recent thread titled “Does anyone else struggle with life feeling…” reads like a collective diary of people trapped in a state of self-victimization.

The responses are chilling. Posters describe losing friends, losing hobbies, losing whole years. A few confess they no longer feel connected to their own bodies — that masking and hypervigilance have rewired how they relate to themselves and to others. One admits that the mask has become a psychological crutch — not for safety, but because it provides “a barrier between me and other people”, a permission structure for avoidance. Some say the pandemic ruined their 20s or 30s; and now the Zero Covid community has become the only place that recognizes their pain. But recognition is not the same as healing. 

The pattern becomes clear: the Covid-cautious online community didn’t merely attract people with existing vulnerabilities. It amplified their fear, rewarded their withdrawal, endowed their anxiety with moral weight, and continues to tell them they are righteous for feeling this way, that they are saving countless lives. It is a feedback loop between individual fragility and a worldview that says fragility is wisdom. 

Lee and Wong deserve our sympathy, as do many of the Zero Covid die-hards. But it is difficult to read their words without feeling the weight of what the movement has done — perhaps not maliciously, but inevitably. A political identity built around a permanent emergency can’t shepherd people out of an emergency. It can’t guide them back to the world. It can only freeze them in the moment when everything first went wrong, and prevent them from re-entering a world they no longer trust — with devastating consequences for well being. 

The brainchild of Tim Gray, a professional podcaster with over 600,000 followers on Instagram, the Summit’s watchword is a concept called “biohacking”. Gray himself simply describes the idea as health optimizing, but others see it as using technology to “hack” the natural body, while some regard it as a transhumanist endeavor littered with futuristic tech to escape mortality. Regardless, biohackers belong at this conference, where nutritionists, wellness influencers and DIY scientists all show off, and ultimately hope to sell, technology that’ll let you live forever, or at least a few years longer.

This is new. For years, biohacking was the domain of billionaires, who’d happily splash out millions in an attempt to extend their lives indefinitely, using their wealthy bodies as test subjects. Bryan Johnson, probably the world’s most famous biohacker, is known mostly for injecting himself with his 19-year-old son’s blood, and monitoring the length and strength of his erections. At the conference, toys for the billionaires aren’t hard to find. One hyperbaric oxygen chamber I spotted costs a sweet £200,000. Fully customizable, it features a bench press and a TV.

As the presence of the gym bros implies, however, biohacking has now come for the masses. Technology is clearly part of the appeal here, and certainly helps explain how the sector reached the $24 billion mark last year. In the end, though, I couldn’t help returning to those humdrum attendees, and how biohacking feels just as much a displacement exercise as their up-to-date LinkedIns. Far from helping you live forever, the Health Optimization Summit is more about enduring the here and now — especially as its precepts only continue to enter the mainstream.

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The underlying philosophy behind biohacking is a skepticism, depending on who you ask, towards an underfunded NHS; a greedy pharmaceutical industry; or the entirety of Western medicine. Regardless, this flouting of the health industry’s norms leans towards a radical, unorthodox practice. Quite aside from the gyros and the saunas, this was clear in the Summit’s talks. At one point, a speaker promised they could “reverse” incurable diseases. Elsewhere, someone gave a talk on why peptides, the building blocks of protein, demolish the fraudulent history of mainstream medicine.

Where did this manic blend of conspiracy, commerce and healthcare ultimately stem from? Most vendors I speak with have been selling their products for around a decade, but all agree that the pandemic propelled the biohacker movement into the limelight. Since Covid, says Kayla, hawking her wares at an IV-drip stall, “people want to be the best version of themselves”. She isn’t alone. Indeed, in a sense the entire conference feels like a symptom of Long Covid, as every attendee points to 2020 as the moment that catapulted their niche field to prominence.

Yet if Covid was the spark, the divisive legacy of lockdown suggests this is about something more than mere medicine. Consider, for instance, talks with names like “Ten Relationship Tools to Maximize Compatibility and Avoid Conflict” or “Finding Your People: How to Attract Relationships that Match Your Growth” — hardly topics your GP can help with. To me, at least, it all suggests a desperate attempt to reassert not health so much as control. Facing climate change, financial instability, and even just the bewildering future itself, many here seem to be turning inwards, with the technology merely a means to an end.

I get the same impression from Gray himself. In his mid-40s, covered head to toe in Boohoo menswear, his salt-and-pepper hair somewhat contradicts his claimed biological age of 24. His supposed biological youthfulness is thanks to his meticulous biohacking routine, which includes drinking hydrogen-infused, reverse osmosis water, and blood tests every 10 to 14 days. Yet throughout our interview, the Summit’s founder seems equally keen to distance himself from some of the more radical technology on display. He talks in staccato phrases, but repeatedly offers a straightforward message: “Eat well, sleep well, hydrate well, sun well, ground well.”

A fair point. But with the cage gyro whirring nearby, that only begs another question. For if Gray is right, and biohacking is more about routine than revolutionary technological change, do I really need blue light-blocking glasses before bed, or should I just avoid using my phone? Do I really need a hyperbaric oxygen chamber in my flat — or should I just do more morning stretches?

It’s a contradiction that arguably runs through the whole biohacking scene. A simple message of improving daily life becomes absorbed by corporations, and spat out in the form of pricey red-light face scrubs. And if there’s a clear financial aspect at work here — turning big tech into a must-have is good news for firms hawking £4,000 vibrating mattresses — the longer I spend at the Health Optimization Summit, the more the machinery blurs into the background: replaced, again, by that desperate need of control, whether independently or as a larger collective.

I’m thinking, here, of the presentations, which seem to transcend the whys and wherefores of aging to become almost religious events. There’s murmuring agreement, nodding at every line, and desperately taking photos of every slide. As Gary Eckles, a pal of Joe Rogan revered for his supposed miracles solving chronic health issues, begins his hour-long talk on how genetics and supplementation can optimize your health, one chap seems overwhelmed. “Let’s go!” he cries, amid roars of applause.

It goes without saying that mainstream medicine is unimpressed by all this. Critics cite the lack of scientific accountability, a modern-day snake oil industry, without the scientific rigor and clinical trials typically required for health practices. When I ask Gray about this, he distances himself from some of the more extreme views of his speakers, explaining that Western medicine and the pharmaceutical industry do, in fact, serve a purpose. The pharmaceutical industry and biohacking, he says, “go hand in hand like this” — as he clasps his hands together.

Gray is similarly cautious when it comes to politics, snapping that he’s “not interested in discussing that” when the topic comes up. Not everyone is so diffident. Across the Atlantic, after all, health has become closely linked to the political Right. Robert F. Kennedy and his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement are supported by many US biohackers, including Dave Aprey, whose policy in the Trump administration is based on much of biohacking’s anti-Big Pharma sentiment.

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And at the Summit itself, the fervor of MAHA’s manosphere-adjacent podcasters is palpable. Attendees are eager to tell me how much they admire Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, and UK-leading voice Steven Bartlett. Yet if Aprey, a friend of Gray’s, invested in the conference, there is no real overt political sentiment to the event in most of the talks I listened to. Certainly, no British politicians openly support the biohacking movement.

Could this change? The numbers are suggestive, with many Britons increasingly mistrustful of mainstream medical science. As far as politics is concerned, the obvious comparison to make with America, given its populist frontman and the anti-establishment sentiment, is the Reform UK party. At their latest conference, RFK adviser Aseem Malhotra gave a speech titled — you guessed it — “Make Britain Healthy Again”: where he claimed mRNA vaccines could alter genes and that the World Health Organization had been captured by Bill Gates. In the event, though, the party soon distanced itself from its guest speaker, stating it doesn’t endorse his radical views.

It’s hard to imagine the pint-loving Farage taking up biohacking, let alone railing against mainstream healthcare. Quite aside from his own common-sense persona, Britain’s obsession with the NHS means that if Reform might flirt with privatization, the party’s leader ultimately knows that attacking the saintly caste of doctors and nurses would backfire.

In other words, then, British biohacking will likely remain a medical rather than a political project, especially when new variations are constantly appearing. With obesity-management jabs like Ozempic increasingly popular for managing weight, they’ve also become the latest frontier in DIY science, complete with a thriving black market and counterfeit prescriptions. Combined with the continued popularity of cold plunges and breathwork — and, yes, those famous gyros — it seems clear that biohacking will only seduce more of the sort of people I saw at the Summit: regular folk, whether corporate girlies or gym bros, eager for that elusive sense of control. And what could be more normal than that?

In fact, argues Dan Wang in his first book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, the two political rivals are very similar. Pragmatism, crude materialism, a can-do attitude, fascination with the technological sublime, and elites distrustful of “the people” — all these examples bring them closer than we think. And yet, after spending years exploring China’s technological rise, Wang argues that one key difference nonetheless separates the two nations. While the highest offices in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are staffed with engineers, Washington is the capital of a lawyerly society — a distinction that could yet decide our century.

According to Breakneck, the rise of America’s lawyers begins in the Sixties. This narrative can be anchored in data. As Jonathan Rauch notes in The Growth of the Parasite Economy, the proportion of lawyers in the general population remained stable from 1870 to 1970. Then it doubled. This is precisely the period when, according to thinkers as varied as Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel, the “great stagnation” begins: an erosion of America’s productive forces that set the stage for a retreat into virtual worlds and a narrowing of technological progress to advances in software.

A lawyerly society excels at obstruction. The dynamism seen in China is impossible in America’s vetocracy, which is bent on blocking any new innovation. Yet if the US lawyered itself into stagnation, China grew at breakneck speed. Since the Eighties alone, it has built the equivalent of two American highway systems. Its high-speed rail network is 20 times larger than Japan’s. Shanghai, where Wang spent most of his time in China, added between 2003 and 2013 as many subway tracks as the entire New York City system. This relentless pace is hard to imagine for Westerners. “When my parents emigrated,” Wang explains, “China’s economy was growing above 10% a year. If they had stayed in [their home town of] Kunming, they would have felt like they were living in a new city roughly every seven years — that’s how long it takes for the economy to double”.

The dominance of lawyers also shapes how the US conducts its relations with China. The so-called tech trade war didn’t take the form of export controls out of nowhere. Rather, Wang explains that “America reacted to China’s technological rise with a series of legalisms” — from tariffs and export controls to “investment restrictions from previously sleepy offices deep in the bowels” of government. This lawyerly approach had unintended consequences.

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For if it cut China’s leading tech firms off from their American chip suppliers, it ultimately encouraged self-sufficiency. “Beijing has long crowed about achieving technological self-sufficiency,” Wang tells me. “For the most part, Chinese companies had brushed off these enjoinders: after Trump, they grew more committed to self-sufficiency to save their own operations.” Washington went all in on a legalistic trade war, while Xi doubled down on filling the Politburo with engineers. In the end, the effects of this legalistic offensive on China’s technological momentum were questionable — if not the very opposite of what was intended.

According to Wang, meanwhile, concentrating the fire of sanctions on cutting-edge chips is misguided. This is a rare view in the United States, where what remains of economic dynamism flows downstream from data centers. But as Wang warns, the idea that progress in AI will translate into decisive advantage on the geopolitical chessboard isn’t necessarily true. “Beijing is always pursuing a portfolio approach to technological competition,” he explains. “They never target a single technology or industry. Made in China 2025 targeted 10 major industrial segments. While they catch up on AI, they are also doing everything that includes industrial robotics, advanced electronics, unmanned vehicles, and everything else that might be useful for warfare.”

Though the American establishment tries to convince itself that nothing is more important than achieving AGI before China does, in other words, Wang suggests that, from Beijing’s perspective, this race is only a sideshow — especially as “America’s weaknesses in manufacturing continue to deepen”. One is almost tempted to go further: Trump’s reindustrialization agenda is faltering precisely because investment pours into AI instead of manufacturing.

All the while, Wang argues that China’s engineer-minded elite consciously chose to reject “technology with American characteristics” — the “fictitious” economy of digital platforms and finance. What many commentators in the West assail Xi Jinping’s “tech crackdown”, then, the President himself interprets these actions as part of a contest between two models: the CCP’s effort to reorient the economy away from innovation in virtual and financial domains, and to ensure that the brightest students pursue engineering rather than careers in profitable but unproductive quant funds.

Despite all this, Wang remains an optimist about America’s ability to recalibrate. “There’s no reason that we cannot gradually increase the share of engineers or economists within the top ranks of the American government,” he says. “In fact, the share of lawyers in the US Congress has already steadily declined over the past century.” And even if there’s no way to escape the lawyers’ clutches, he nonetheless suggests that America’s legal culture can be shifted. When FDR ruled America, after all, lawyers were “dealmaker types” — ambitious radicals who built the Hoover Dam and rearmed for world war.

And if the US needs to correct course, the Chinese engineering state is not without flaws. In the Seventies, when an influential CCP rocket scientist returned from the West, he carried with him the blight of environmental doomerism. Convinced that the population bomb could destroy China, he persuaded Communist leaders “that population trajectories could be as firmly controlled as missile trajectories”. This was the beginning of the one-child policy. Hundreds of thousands of forced abortions ensued, along millions more sterilizations.

Regional officials had their quotas and hitting them became the only thing that mattered: women were handcuffed and transported to clinics where the children were ripped from their bodies. “One-child policy and zero-Covid are the expected outcomes of an engineer-run state,” Wang says. “The engineers were terribly literal-minded when they allowed a missile scientist to help design population policy, and then to order mass abortions in order to stop families from having more than one child. There’s also a literal-mindedness when they prohibited people from leaving their homes in order to halt the transmission of a virus.”

I ask Wang if such monumental missteps could impact the long-expected invasion on Taiwan. “For the most part,” he responds, “the literal-mindedness has been a restraint against miscalculations abroad. It is fully fair to say that Beijing has displayed little bellicosity for nearly the entirety of the past five decades. Xi in particular has displayed a considerable degree of strategic patience as well as a willingness to beat the occasional tactical retreat. So I expect that Beijing’s interventions will deliver greater suffering to its own people than to others”.

Over the years, we’ve heard much of China’s coming collapse. The narratives change, but the prognosis remains the same. Whether it’s the demographic slowdown, the crisis in the real estate sector, or, lately, industrial overcapacity, the commentariat’s pessimism may actually make Western leaders less alert to the scale of the challenge. Wang, for his part, is clear: Chinese technological momentum is unstoppable, and trade restrictions cannot halt it, as its industrial ecosystem is just too vast and displays extraordinary ability to adapt. The UN projects that within five years, 45% of the world’s industrial capacity will be concentrated in the People’s Republic.

Yet if China looks unassailable from without, there is something rotten in the state of Xi. The phenomenon of “rùn” — moving out of China to escape the unpredictability of the CCP — is an unmistakable sign of malaise. Some view this trend as limited to a particular slice of the millennial generation in major cities, squeezed by tanking real estate values and the influx of Gen Zers into the job market. Wang disagrees. “There are three groups of Chinese who have been obviously disgruntled by the regime over the past few years”, he says. The first are the wealthy, who resent having their businesses “smashed” and their properties devalued. Considering thousands of millionaires may have left the country in 2022 alone, it’s a fair point.

The second unhappy tranche, Wang continues, are “creative types” — “who have seen their art or journalism strangled by the censors, and who are hanging out in Thailand smoking dope.” But perhaps the most telling group are those Chinese willing to fly to Ecuador before crossing into the US on foot. “One of the most incredible facts,” Wang adds, “is that the United States was apprehending up to 40,000 Chinese nationals at its southwestern border in certain months in 2024”.

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How, in the end, to explain this unhappiness — as purely a function of economics or the feeling that the “Chinese Dream” is being crushed by the inhuman hand of the engineering state? “It’s hard to say how the broader masses of people in China feel,” Wang responds. “But I think it is still striking that many Chinese wish to take leave of the great rejuvenation that is undertaken in their name.”

There’s an irony here. If China is so strong as some describe it, then there is no point in competing. Yet if it’s ridden with problems that will lead to inevitable collapse, then we can just sit back and watch events unfold. Both perspectives converge on apathy. One of Breakneck’s merits is Wang’s ability to lead us back to the narrow path of realism. Yes, engineering states may instill pride with its capacity to build, but their lawyerly rivals are less prone to cruel aberrations. The first drains creative impulses out of society, the second stimulates them.

Even so, there is one area where nuance is a luxury America can scarcely afford. Capacity to build is decisive on the battlefield, a place without room for lawyerly deliberation. In war, hardware matters more than software. Recent years starkly remind us of this truth. The war in Ukraine exposed shortages in munitions production that would not allow the US to sustain a protracted conflict. For a superpower that protects the oceans in the name of free trade, the collapse of shipbuilding is astonishing: in 2022, China had 1,500 ships under construction, while the Americans had only five. The America of “Freedom’s Forge” — when broad engineering competence enabled total industrial mobilization to defeat both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan — feels very distant now.

Still, Wang remains an optimist when it comes to America’s future. After all, China’s astonishing development is a reflection of strengths that America has lost, but may yet recover. He is far less sure about that third potential power: Europe. “On the one hand,” he says, “I see that China will deindustrialize Germany. China is moving into many of German industry’s core competencies, especially in the automotive sector, and we can see that its exports to China have been shrinking. On the other hand, I expect that American companies in finance, services, and tech broadly speaking will outcompete their European counterparts as well.” As for the Europeans themselves, Wang suggests, they’ll be left hawking luxury goods to our century’s winners, whoever that turns out to be.

My father died at a nursing home in Long Beach, and my mother died at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset after contracting Covid-19 in her senior-care residence in Far Rockaway. Her passing was recorded as a hospital fatality. We would later find out that my mom’s death along with thousands of others would be undercounted by the former governor as he infamously said, “Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died.”

Now, as Cuomo tries to revive his political career as the next mayor of New York City, I feel duty-bound to recall his lapse in judgment, and what it did to my family.

I first began tracking Covid in December 2019 as part of my job as a battalion chief with the Fire Department of New York City. My family was visiting my mother-in-law in Canada over the Christmas holiday, and even though I was on vacation, I couldn’t help looking at the news feeds. I read that another “flu-like” virus was causing illnesses in China, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary.

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By late January 2020, it was obvious that Covid wasn’t your ordinary “flu-like” virus from the People’s Republic like SARS, say. Covid-19 was a disease that no one could hide from. It was a pandemic that would turn all our lives upside down and, in my case, result in an unbearable tragedy.

By early March, Covid was no longer an abstraction. Universities were closing. My oldest son’s concert for the Long Island String Festival Association was canceled two days before the performance. Masks became commonplace in grocery stores and other public settings. Rumors swirled of sweeping lockdowns to come, including at nursing homes like the ones my parents lived in.

The last time I had a conversation with my father was probably 7 March, based on a photo I took from the window of the care center, which shows massive waves crashing along the Long Beach coastline. We talked about the waves, the winter storm that sent the swell, the weather in general.

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Dad had competed in road races since the 1970s as a way to stay and fit and socialize, and he was always aware of what was going on outside. I don’t recall what else we discussed, but I had no way of knowing this was to be our last chat. I visited him one more time, before the lockdowns kicked in, but he was napping, so I decided not the wake him.

I sat at his side for about 15 to 20 minutes, then tidied up his area the best I could, got a quick update from the desk nurse and left. Looking back, I was relieved that he was sleeping, because one-on-one conversations had become more taxing as his dementia progressed. I thought I was getting a one-time reprieve, and the next time I would bring Mom, who lived at a different facility nearby. The poor state of my father’s health precluded him from leaving nursing home-rehab for my mother’s senior care living center, but the plan was to get my dad well enough to join his wife in the double room that we had secured for both of them in the assisted living residence.

I had no idea that I missed my last opportunity to talk to the man who raised me and instilled in me a love of history, athletics for sake of wellness, and personal accountability. I carry that guilt to this day.

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Before the lockdown, it was hard to get my father to eat. But we had no way of knowing how much his health deteriorated behind the closed doors of the lockdown and away from the watchful eyes of visiting family members.

Daily phone calls from staff were cold and inadequate (Dad was incapable of using the phone on his own). I do remember a call I received near the end of March letting me know they were moving my father to a different floor. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. But looking back on it now, I believe it was to make room for the Covid-positive patients, as mandated by Cuomo’s orders. As for Mom, it was much easier to say in touch; she still had her cellphone and we remained in constant contact.

The living center that we chose for Mom was close by, and they agreed to accept Dad when he was released from rehab (Dad’s health was not good enough to be accepted at most other centers). Tragically, they were never reunited, since my father suffered a urinary-tract infection in the summer of 2019, which was the same illness that brought my mother to the hospital a month after Dad.

On 29 March, at around 11 a.m., I received a call from a doctor at Dad’s nursing home explaining that he was running a low-grade fever and that he was lethargic. Three hours later, the same doctor called to tell me that my father had died. The call was professional and brief. To be clear, we don’t blame these facilities. They were following the governor’s health orders.

One of the hardest things I ever had to do was to call my mother and tell her that her husband of 60 years had passed. Another pressing issue was that my father’s body had to be removed within a certain number of hours, or they would be forced to send his remains to the county morgue; the clock was ticking.

Our deus ex machina came in the form of a friend from the old neighborhood in Flatbush, Brooklyn: Frankie. He was a funeral director on Staten Island and was closer in age to my older sister, Donna, who put in the call. Frankie promised to get Dad out of there before he was sent to the morgue, which was significant, because these facilities were already overwhelmed with Covid patients who succumbed to the illness, and there was no way of knowing how quickly we could have gotten him out of there for a proper service.

By the early evening, Frankie let us know his nephew was going to pick up Dad and take him back to Staten Island. My sister Donna and I decided to meet him there. I called my good friend Mark, a fellow fireman, who lived nearby, and asked him to come by with whatever uniform he could muster on short notice.

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I found an official FDNY sweatshirt in my house and headed over myself. We weren’t pretty, but this meant my father had an honor guard. We waited in front of the nursing home for Dad to come. We gave my father a proper salute and made sure to put his body bag in the van ourselves — a final show of respect for a man who was a military veteran and a retired member of the Fire Department, having served during one of the busiest eras of fire duty in urban history.

My dad told my mom a while back that he wished to be cremated, so Frankie handled it, and even took my dad home with him, saving me a trip to Staten Island until we figured out what to do with his ashes. An appropriate resting place for my father became available within two weeks.

I got some flowers and headed over to Mom’s care center a couple of days after Dad passed. When I arrived, they were kind enough to let me into the lobby, as there were still no visitors allowed. I handed Mom the flowers, but didn’t hug or kiss her, as I didn’t want to infect her nor anyone else there.

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We spoke through masks from 10 feet away for a few minutes, and I left. As I drove home, the song “Mickey” by Dick Robertson played on SiriusXM’s 40’s Junction station. I couldn’t remember the last time I heard that song. I would not expect Dad to be dramatic, but you never know.

As with the nursing-home rehab facility my father had been living in, Andrew Cuomo would also direct Covid-positive patients into assisted-living facilities like the one my mom was at.

About a week after I saw Mom, she said that she wasn’t feeling well. Her symptoms worsened, and she was admitted to the hospital. The day she arrived, we talked several times from her cellphone as she waited in the emergency room or transfer area for a room to open up. On the evening of her second day there, we had our final conversation. The last thing she said to me was to make sure my two boys were given Easter presents on her behalf. The next day, the hospital called to say that my mother had passed away. It was 14 April.

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Frankie continued his work as our angel of mercy. He organized everything he could for us. A church funeral service was out of the question with all the restrictions in place, but he was able to arrange for a burial service at Holy Cross Cemetery in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where my family has had plots for many generations. What I didn’t anticipate was that my mother needed a dress for the burial.

Returning to the apartment where I grew up, on the top floor of the four-story walk-up, felt like strolling through a mausoleum. It was quiet and stuffy. I had been there many times since my parents entered care homes, but this visit felt suffocating. I picked out a dress and some jewelry and made my way to Frankie at his Staten Island funeral home. We hadn’t seen each other in many years, but that neighborhood bond remained strong.

The graveside burial service was held on 18 April. The sky was gray and undecided. Flashes of light briefly broke through the clouds but never held, bathing everything around us in a sepia tone. Donna, my sister, was able to secure a priest from nearby Good Shepherd Parish to perform the service (within days, it would be close to impossible to get a priest, what with so many people dying).

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Frankie also arranged for two US Air Force airmen to attend the service and present an American flag to my family. Donna, my brother, Michael, and I decided that our niece Danielle (Donna’s daughter) should accept the flag. Danielle spent a great deal of time with my parents growing up, and it just made sense. After the service, there was no collation. We couldn’t have a lunch where we could unwind and console each other. We retreated to our respective cars, still wearing our masks, and returned to our homes. It was the best goodbye we could have hoped for, given the circumstance.

Dad and Mom were always “MickeyandDee”, as if they were one entity. The last six months of their lives in care facilities was the only time they were ever separated. Fittingly, Frankie got approval from the director of the cemetery to place Dad’s ashes in Mom’s casket. In the end, they were reunited, and they would spend eternity together, the same way they lived their lives.

Five years later, it’s important to remember that then-Gov. Cuomo’s 25 March nursing-home directive willfully brought disease to the group least prepared to defend themselves against the novel coronavirus. Their only chance was isolation. Nursing homes and similar care centers were the keep in the castle for these seniors. They had nowhere else to run. Instead of putting up barricades and putting up a final defense, Covid was helped through the front by a decree from the man who now wants to lead Gotham.

The arc of Grey’s is the arc of American television in more ways than one. From monoculture to micro-culture, from a time of shared institutional trust to one of reflexive distrust, you can see the shift from Dr. Meredith Grey’s primetime debut on a March night during George W. Bush’s second term, to the show’s post-Covid whimpers. The era of medical soaps and detective shows has given way to streaming juggernaut Taylor Sheridan’s more cynical, less gauzy renderings of American institutions.

Wikipedia’s synopsis for the pilot episode of Grey’s Anatomy describes it like this: “Meredith Grey wakes up after a one-night stand to start her first shift as a surgical intern. The first shift for Meredith and the new surgical interns … proves eventful and backbreaking. While working, Meredith realizes that the man from her one-night stand is Dr. Derek Shepherd, her attending physician. Derek enlists the interns’ work to solve the case of a teenage-girl baton twirler who has seizures. Meredith and Cristina realize that she has an aneurysm that was burst by a fall”.

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The plot is almost too perfect: a high-achieving woman in a major city — post 9/11 Seattle — shows up to work and finds out she slept with her new boss the night before. She solves problems with her colleagues.

Derek, of course, was played by Patrick Dempsey. Along with Pompeo and Katherine Heigl (who played Izzie Stevens), Grey’s launched stars who were inescapable throughout the aughts. Shonda Rhimes, creator and head writer of the show, started Shondaland — the name of her production company and her vast universe of TV series — thanks to the blockbuster success of Grey’s. “At her most prolific”, a writer for Time noted in 2022, “Rhimes was responsible for producing around 70 episodes of TV across up to four ABC dramas each year”. Rhimes’ career, like those of her female protagonists from Bridgerton to Scandal, is its own topic of fascination for culture writers tracking the rise and fall of #GirlBoss feminism and the crescendo of Peak Woke.

One trend is impossible to ignore: Rhimes began her career on ABC. By 2017, she’d moved to Netflix, like most younger people in her audience. When the deal was re-upped in 2021, Rhimes reportedly got somewhere between $300 to $400 million. Yet no individual show today has the power Grey’s enjoyed in 2005.

That May, the Grey’s season finale drew 22 million viewers. That’s higher than last year’s September presidential debate. It’s roughly the audience of a Sunday-night football game these days. It’s impressive for a fictional series to garner anywhere close to 10 million viewers; last week’s episode of Grey’s got 2.39 million.

Welcome to the micro-culture, where success is measured in single-digit ratings. This is good and bad news for consumers and artists. The good news is that consumers get more niche content, and artists are under less pressure to create content for literally everyone. The bad news: consumers get more niche content and artists are under less pressure to create content for literally everyone.

The contrast between Stephen Colbert and Johnny Carson illustrates the effect of this dynamic on popular culture. Colbert was the king of late-night TV during President Trump’s first term, despite being the least funny and most partisan guy in the game. Carson didn’t avoid politics, but he avoided alienating one side or the other. During Carson’s run, of course, NBC needed to maximize the appeal of his show to draw the most ad dollars it possibly could. During Colbert’s run, the way to win the rating game is to cultivate a niche base of loyal supporters — and a great way to do that is with culture-war fodder.

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Rhimes, a prominent activist for Democrats in the Trump years, is still a woman of the monoculture. “I don’t like to be preached at, and I’m not interested in preaching”, she said in 2022, when preaching was Hollywood’s top currency. Yet Rhimes resigned from the Kennedy Center board in protest of Trump’s takeover last month. She told Time she pivoted from the cutthroat White House saga of Olivia Pope and Scandal to the fantasy world of Netflix favorite Bridgerton, “when it felt like the world had caught up to the stories we were telling”.

Pope had an abortion in 2015. On Grey’s, Cristina Yang got one in 2011. Rhimes, interestingly enough, told Vulture she “let go” of a similar plot line during the series’ first season amid objections from the network. Planned Parenthood has since credited Rhimes with helping to “Flip The Script On Abortion In Television”. By 2011, though, Rhimes’s audience for Grey’s had been cut nearly in half. The abortion episode pulled in about 10 million viewers, which wasn’t nothing for ABC but wasn’t 2005 either.

The highest-rated Grey’s episodes of all-time are somewhat infamous. The first episode in a two-part special that aired after the Super Bowl in 2006 managed to pull in nearly 40 million viewers. Its self-seriousness is so amusing to revisit now that a doctor’s 2022 reaction video to the episode has more than 7 million views. Entertainment Weekly described the plot like this: “After surgically removing a bomb from a man’s torso, Meredith Grey hands it over to defuser Dylan Young — and it blows up before he even makes it out of the [operating room]”. If you can even make it through that description without laughing, congratulations on clinging to your innocence.

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Every once in a while, scenes from the special go viral on social media, evoking something like disbelief that we actually sat on the edge of our seats, snacking on Super Bowl scraps, watching Kyle Chandler (spoiler alert) get blown up by a torso bomb.

And yet. Taylor Sheridan’s universe is thriving. From Yellowstone and its many spinoffs to Tulsa King, the man is a machine — not unlike Shonda Rhimes. His shows are just as soapy.

If you had the good fortune of missing the viral scene from Sheridan’s new series Landman in which Billy Bob Thornton’s teenage daughter explains how she avoids getting pregnant when sleeping with her boyfriend (it’s a bold strategy), the drama is a reminder that Americans are still glued to soaps. Landman isn’t bad. Perhaps like the torso bomb, in the context of the full episode, the scene’s jaw-dropping levels of cringe actually flow more naturally — though Sheridan still writes women like they live perpetually in the opening scene of a pornography movie.

Sheridan’s universe, like Shonda’s, is pure soap. It’s soap for men, to be sure, but it’s soap nonetheless. And, with the exception of football, it’s the closest TV comes to monoculture now. We don’t have clean apples-to-apples metrics to compare the streaming era with what came before it, but Paramount says Landman reached around 15 million households in its first four weeks. That seems to be a record, though Sheridan’s projects routinely pull in big numbers.

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Shonda versus Sheridan is a fascinating study in contrasts. Books could be filled with analyses of how each writer treats men and women, and how those choices reflect cultural shifts. (Rhimes presaged the #GirlBoss ascent, Sheridan presaged the male backlash). Rhimes shook up the procedural drama dominated by classics like Law & Order, ER, and Baby-Boomer favorite Blue Bloods.

Where Sheridan and Shonda are both masters in the high art of television drama, what’s changed in the culture from 2005 to now is Americans’ relationship to authority: doctors, law enforcement, politicians. According to Gallup’s annual tracker, trust in the medical system is down 12 points since Grey’s premiered. The same is true of trust in the police. Trust in the presidency is down 18 points, and trust in Congress, big business, and banks is hovering near record lows.

Rhimes got dark. Grey’s got dark. But her shows were fuzzier than Sheridan’s. Their edges were blunted by optimism and redemption. Sheridan’s universe is cynical. It’s undeniably gorgeous, capturing Yellowstone like Bierstadt, electrifying new generations with a lust for the American frontier. But his institutions are dark and corrupt, and his protagonists are rough. (And not in a one-night-stand-with-Patrick-Dempsey kind of way.) Their redemption arcs take much more work, if the audience can even get there with the characters.

Maybe Sheridan’s post-Trump soap operas are what Shonda’s were post-9/11. Yellowstone is the Shondaverse for a generation with lower institutional trust, that finds its catharsis in escapism committed to depicting people as they are, not as we want them to be. There are merits in both, to be sure, but as Grey’s hits the 20-year mark in a new economy and new culture, it’s funny to think our appetites for soap operas haven’t changed, but our appetites for their heroes have.

Lockdown was meant to be a great cultural moment, and — with furlough to smooth everything over — an economic non-event. It was the reverse. March 2020 to February 2022 saw no period of quiet reflection or creative flourishing. Half a decade out there has been no definitive lockdown novel, or film, or stage play.

Economically, it was a silent revolution. Lockdown effected the greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history, the end of the era of low interest rates, unheard of levels of state borrowing. It is almost entirely responsible for the current rash of inflation in Britain, which had already reached 5.1% months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rising gilt yields; the deficit; the cost of living; the increase in PIP claims; mass economic inactivity; the “decline of the high street” — these are impossible to explain without recalling that the British state borrowed £400 billion to lock the population indoors for two years. The Britain of 2025 has a very different political economy to the Britain of 2019; yet the only thing that really distinguishes one from the other is this singular disruption.

A frenzy of borrowing lockdown made “austerity” seem like a bad joke. Yet it has made any alternative to austerity impossible. There was a time when Britain could have attempted a drive for growth through state-led investment, and it was in the decade before 2020, when gilt yields were at a historic low. When Rachel Reeves now borrows large sums to invest in infrastructure, she is betting the farm on a model for growth that disappeared five years ago. With a much higher cost of borrowing, the only route to growth lies through supply-side reforms and cuts to public expenditure — which is what the Government is now increasingly defaulting to. Labour’s dreams of “securonomics” have only been lockdown’s latest victim.

But of course the Government is out of ideas. Lockdown discredited liberal ideas; the failure of lockdown discredited statist ones. All ideologies came out of it shabby and condemned. It showed that the British center-right did not care about fiscal prudence, personal liberty, or small business. It showed that “neoliberals” did not care about globalization or transnational supply chains. Witnessing the virtual end of work, communists did not bestir themselves to agitate for the end of wage-labor. In pleading the cause of the furloughed stakeholder over the minimum-wage employees that delivered things to them, the British center-left revealed itself to be little more than the lobbying arm for the public sector. Lockdown showed that all these factions, when they were really up against it, only cared about two things: human rights maximalism, and money for the old. (The winter fuel allowance is a fiscal trifle compared with the triple-lock, which all parties have pledged to defend.) Not since July 1914 has so much been decided with so little debate.

The bad parts were bad and the good parts were worse. Insofar as there was a great social coming-together during lockdown its main effect has been a decline in responsibility and standards. British institutions — everything from the railways to local government — used the initial outpouring of goodwill towards key workers as a general license to give up: as late as December 2022 public services were still fobbing people off with “Covid disruption”. To this we can also add the rulers’ new creepy overfamiliarity towards the ruled, manifest in garish PR stunts like “Can you look them in the eyes?”, or, latterly, “maaate”. This is not how adults ought to address one another.

It was a last hurrah for every outmoded social force. Unreformed Whitehall, the courts, the monarchy and the BBC — all were given an artificial lease of life. Lockdown briefly revived the prestige of Britain’s broadcast media, which was achieved in part by a simultaneous crackdown on online “misinformation”, including the now-vindicated lab leak theory. Plans for a reform to Whitehall had been well in train, even during lockdown itself. But in this atmosphere of cheap moralism and recrimination, there was a general rallying to established institutions, and the plans did not survive Cummings’ fall. Lockdown sparked the counterrevolution in British institutions that had its climax with the brief regency of Sue Gray — who hoped to put these institutions, at last, beyond effective democratic control. This is something that’s only now being rowed back on — at least rhetorically.

If we don’t acknowledge lockdown and its effects, then the problems of mid-Twenties Britain will continue to confound us. The refusal to recognize the stakes involved, to have some honest accounting of which groups were being asked to sacrifice something for the benefit of others, has led us to this state of general amnesia and low-level resentment. It’s still taken as strange, in a country where the right to leave your house was suspended for two years, that the public might now be deaf to “liberal norms” and that the young are flirting with dictatorship. Why are so many avoiding work and claiming to be disabled, or phoning it in at “lazy girl jobs“? Because they were shown exactly how far hard work and gumption would carry them: to be a tax farm for pensioners and illegal migrants. Why did so many get rich off dodgy contracts? Because the economy was brought to a halt except for a list of key suppliers. Such conditions were almost guaranteed to produce a class of well-connected Covid spivs — of whom Matt Hancock is the spiritual chief.

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But there was only one true avatar of lockdown Britain, and it arrived in the person of Keir Starmer. The man and his credo, Starmerism, were both made by lockdown and were the fullest expression of its spirit. Like Starmerism, lockdown sidestepped all social and economic questions in favor of a vague sense of decency. Like Starmerism, lockdown sought to subsume all politics into the jargon of rights. Like Starmerism, lockdown meant a trembling reverence for clapped-out institutions. Partygate was when Keir Starmer was truly in his element, and it remains his beau idéal of politics: no “Condition of England” questions, just personal corruption and the law. Insofar as he’s now been forced to depart from this mode, then it’s only because of the insoluble material problems that lockdown created.

Lockdown was the great sinkhole: of time, memory, money. It is the true “Black Hole” of our age. It will live in history as a lurid and bizarre dreamworld, much better off forgotten. There was no resolution. There was no catharsis. Nothing was learnt, except this: that appeals to Humanity and Human Decency should always be treated with great suspicion, and that “social trust” is something that should be undermined.

It seems as if nothing will change his mind. The current outbreak of measles in Texas and New Mexico — which now counts 250 cases and two deaths, one of a child and one of an adult — has been Kennedy’s first test in his new role. So far, he has confirmed the worst fears of his opponents. While he’s acknowledged that the measles vaccine does prevent transmission of the disease, he has not urged people to get it. Instead, he’s enthused about the effectiveness of Vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatments.

It just so happens that Vitamin A and cod liver oil is the measles treatment of choice of the so called “crunchy moms” who are widely credited with powering Kennedy’s ascent. The crunchy moms are reacting online to the measles outbreak with defiance. They generally believe that measles is no more serious than the chicken pox, and even that it’s beneficial to catch it. They refuse to be cowed by what they see as an agenda-driven media circus. “Measles outbreak headlines = paid advertising,” wrote influencer Braci Dutton on Instagram last month. “The real headline? Your immune system was designed to handle life. Fear is the real virus. Sunshine, movement, and real food are the cure.”

The crunchy moms’ fervor on such matters has turned them into a potent political force, one that forms a critical part of Donald Trump’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. They have managed to make the day-to-day business of motherhood — what their children are eating, what kind of medical care they receive, what products they use — a key political issue. And their Covid era-fueled suspicion of the medical and scientific establishment has become a defining tendency on the Right.

If you’re a mother on Instagram, it’s almost impossible to avoid this crunchy content. I became aware of the moms even before I had my son early last year. The algorithm, having picked up on the fact that I was pregnant, funneled them into my Instagram feed. They were having “wild pregnancies” with no prenatal care at all, and even “freebirthing” at home with no medical professionals present. When their babies arrived, their conflict with the medical system intensified. There would be no “pokes” or “cupcakes” — code for vaccines, used online to avoid social media filters. Checkups at the pediatrician were best avoided completely. Formula was full of dangerous chemicals, as was sunscreen, as was most processed food available in the supermarket; milk pasteurization was unnecessary, even harmful; homeschooling was a must. Every detail of home life and childrearing was a battleground, under threat by nefarious forces.

“The personal is political” was the slogan of Left-wing feminists in the Seventies, but today it has no better inheritor than the MAHA moms. In the last few decades, the Right has successfully claimed ownership of the politics of motherhood, and neatly merged them with the Covid era’s upswing in hostility to medicine and expertise. It has made space for a politics centered on motherhood as an identity and on the granular concerns of moms.

The Left, meanwhile, has taken the opposite approach, ignoring the deeply political nature of homemaking altogether. Vice President JD Vance’s remark equating Democrats with “childless cat ladies” may have been unfair, but it reflects a real sentiment that has provoked the rightward swing of the crunchy moms. On paper, during the last election, the Democrats were the pro-woman party, with a female candidate and pro-choice policy. But preoccupied by the girlboss ethos, they failed to include women whose focus is on their home and family. As a result, the kind of mothers who once may have gravitated to the “granola” Left have now completed a hard Right turn.

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This mass desertion wasn’t inevitable. The Left used to concern itself more with the domestic realm; take the Wages for Housework campaign, begun in the Seventies, which sought equal recognition for women’s work in the home. Then there was Alix Kates Shulman’s “Marriage Agreement” essay from 1970, which delineated the arrangement she and her husband made to split housework equally, and which included as its first principle: “We reject the notion that the work which brings in more money is the more valuable.” More recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s influential 2004 book, The Two-Income Trap, argued that the decline of stay-at-home motherhood had had a deleterious effect on American families. But the overall tendency of mainstream feminism today has been to portray homemaking and care work as a kind of prison — Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name” — and urge women to succeed in the workforce just as a man would. This tendency, culminating in the frenetic Lean In-style corporate feminism of the 2010s, is what the crunchy moms are reacting to.

The MAHA moms on social media often allude to their disillusionment with feminism. “I wish the ‘mainstream feminism’ would also include mothers in their advocacy instead of contributing to the anti motherhood/children culture — further promoting the undervaluing of women’s domestic labor & refusing to acknowledge that the well-being of our children lays the groundwork for the future of society,” read an Instagram video by user “radical.gardenn” earlier this year.

But if feminism is considered one dragon to slay, Big Pharma is another. Twenty years ago, the word “crunchy” evoked NPR-listening New England or West Coast liberals who shopped at health food stores and did yoga. Today, it calls to mind Right-wing homesteaders who eschew vaccines. In a typical crunchy mom reel last week, the account “empowered.mama.nest” wrote: “They lied about thalidomide. They lied about DDT. They lied about tobacco. They lied about asbestos. They lied about mercury. They lied about opioids. They lied about covid. They are lying about vaccines too. You know who doesn’t have the incentive to lie? Mothers.”

Covid and the authorities’ heavy-handed vaccine implementation has much to do with this shift, drawing the battle lines definitively between Left and Right on vaccines and driving any skeptics into the arms of the anti-vaccine movement. But a deep distrust of Big Pharma was simmering well before then — and, again, it was moms at the forefront. Kennedy has said that moms of autistic children who attributed their child’s condition to vaccines inspired his initial interest in the vaccine issue, which has formed the cornerstone of his career. His running mate in 2024, Nicole Shanahan, is a self-described “autism mom” who believes her daughter’s autism stems from vaccines.

These two issues intersect in the online aesthetics of this movement. Crunchy mom content ranges from the gauzy and tradwife-inflected — women in prairie dresses kneading sourdough — to the militant, often by the same accounts. One minute you’re looking at someone’s video about co-sleeping, and the next you’re watching a woman drinking out of a jug of raw milk and talking about chemtrails. The crunchy moms seem to have it all figured out; for every thorny parenting dilemma, they have an answer. It’s easy to see why so many women have sought refuge among them amid motherhood’s flurry of anxiety and decision-making.

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And so far, their tactics seem to be working. The Food and Drug Administration, the crunchy moms’ nemesis, lost hundreds of workers during the Elon Musk-led DOGE purge. The National Institutes of Health, also under Kennedy’s purview, announced it was cutting research grants related to vaccine hesitancy. The Centers for Disease Control, another organization in the Department of Health and Human Services, is reportedly going to perform a large-scale study investigating whether there is a link between vaccines and autism (a notion that has already been studied extensively and is not supported by evidence).

Victory goes to the crunchy moms, but they may find that it’s a pyrrhic one. They want nasty ingredients and dyes out of the food supply, they want clean water and soil, and they want sterner oversight of pharmaceuticals — but they support an administration that is dismantling the federal agencies that oversee these areas. And if they hope that the Trump administration will remain steadfast against big business to defend their children’s health, they may find themselves disappointed. Kennedy’s latest move was to endorse the fast-food burger and milkshakes chain Steak ‘n Shake because it has stopped using seed oils.

This could be the moment for liberals to somehow reach out to the crunchy moms, but so far they’ve shown no interest in speaking to them on their terms — or in general, addressing the large swathes of Americans who have lost trust in the medical establishment. These women are trying to protect their children, and they think they’re doing so — even those who don’t vaccinate for measles. As long as “trust the science” is the only answer to a worried mom who has questions about the vaccine schedule, those moms will gravitate towards the side that embraces them — whether it ultimately benefits them or not.

Today, we live in a curious age of skepticism, not merely towards the authority of expertise, but also towards promises of social change. Unreasonable attachment to our own ideas often sits alongside an unwillingness to consider the arguments of others, even as we’re often cynical about their motives. In this context, Adam Kucharski asks an awkward question. What, he wonders, in his new book Proof: the Uncertain Science of Uncertainty, does it mean to be convinced of something? More to the point, what does it take to convince you — what kind of evidence, and what kind of reasoning?

Not everything can be proved with mathematics and logic. Well done, Euclid, for using proof by contradiction to show that, if two angles in a triangle are equal, the sides opposite the angles will be equal too. But does that help me decide if a defendant is guilty, whether to get vaccinated, or how likely a social media post is to be true? Unlikely.

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Proof is not the argument-ending rubber stamp that internet pedants lust for. Standards of proof, in science, medicine, or the law, did not fall, ready-made, from heaven. Ideas like “beyond reasonable doubt” or “statistical significance” were developed by humans to answer important questions within the constraints of what they had to hand: evidence, people, technical resources and time.

Today, we take for granted that any new medical treatment will have been through a standard array of tests, including randomized controlled trials (RCTs), analyzed with statistical methods now mostly performed by computers. All these tools were invented by researchers and statisticians to answer specific questions. Do babies thrive better on cow’s milk or mother’s milk? Does streptomycin cure tuberculosis? Which type of barley makes the best Guinness?

Nature, like a guilty defendant, does not generally crack under interrogation and deliver a full confession. Measuring the effectiveness of a treatment, or identifying the factors that influence outcomes, is equally a job for detectives: piecing together evidence, eliminating misleading or irrelevant clues, and working out ways to test a hypothesis. Even then, researchers may conclude that one thing seems to cause another, but they don’t really know why.

Does this matter? After all, as Kucharski points out, we use very effective medical techniques, such as defibrillation, every day without understanding why they work. We board airplanes without worrying that mathematicians still can’t explain exactly how the flow of air over the wings keeps them aloft. At some point, we just accept the evidence of results — without understanding causes. That’s especially true when familiar statistical methods are turbocharged by AI and fed by industrial-scale data, meaning social as well as medical interventions are often based on this kind of correlation, rather than a clear understanding of causation.

Even leaving aside the real problem of unintended consequences, however, there’s a drawback to this approach. Observing correlation lets us predict what happens if we do more of the same. But understanding causality allows us to conjure something new. Kucharski cites the philosopher Judea Pearl’s “ladder of causality” — rising from association, through intervention, to counterfactuals — to imagine an alternative version of reality. What would happen if we did X instead of Y? And, perhaps more controversially, what would have happened, had we not done Y?

As a medical mathematician, involved in advising the UK government during Covid as part of SAGE, Kucharski was at the sharp end of this kind of “what if?” modeling. He has more practical experience than most would want in using incomplete data to build scenarios of what might happen in the future — or, rather, in different futures. For Kucharski, after all, variables included not only natural factors, like how contagious different Covid strains would turn out to be, but also how people would behave, and how different government policies might affect that behavior.

Decisions made on the basis of these models, as Kucharski and his colleagues were well aware, would affect millions of lives. There was no laboratory in which to test alternative policies, only mathematical models with many assumptions baked in. The stakes were high, time and information were limited, and public debate was highly politicized.

Kucharski is careful to distinguish factual disputes from mere policy disagreements. As he puts it, “deciding what is true and false is not the same as deciding what is socially right and wrong.” He rightly criticizes the disingenuous claim that governments were just “following the science” approvingly quoting Austin Bradford Hill, best known for discovering the link between smoking and lung cancer. “‘It was no part of our job to tell the public how to behave with regard to smoking…To become propagandists would ruin us as scientists and make us “biased” presenters of further material’.”

Still, given the profound disagreements that emerged about the nature of Covid, and how to prevent and cure it, you might expect Kucharski’s book, like Brecht’s poem, to attack those who “don’t believe” in the facts. You’d be wrong. After all, if we are aware of what it takes to be convinced that something is true, should we not also think about what it takes to convince others? We ourselves are not machines, absorbing data and outputting hypotheses. We weigh evidence and argument, testing new theories about the world against all our existing knowledge and assumptions. It’s reasonable to assume that others do the same.

Kucharski’s personal experience of vaccine-hesitant friends and family was that they had varying reasons for doubt. Some felt they didn’t know enough. Others were deeply skeptical of pharmaceutical companies in general. The author found he could only convince them that vaccination was a good idea by “taking the time to understand why they doubted, then finding ways to address these specific doubts.”

This should be obvious to everyone, in a pluralist, democratic society. But we live in a world where “proof by intimidation (‘the evidence is clear’)” is too often invoked by those who regard the public as beneath rational argument. Ironically, research shows this kind of approach is not effective — and indeed tends to backfire. “Public trust,” warns Kucharski, “is eroded as problems are brushed away with appeals to authority.”

This points to a deeper problem with the widespread attitude that evidence, or proof, is merely ammunition for propagandists of every stripe. Those on the receiving end lose faith, not just in specific pieces of evidence, but in the very methods and institutions they should be using to weigh and test the arguments.

Kucharski quotes Jules Henri Poincaré, the French mathematician and philosopher, writing in 1908: “To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.” To rephrase, healthy skepticism gives way to fatalistic cynicism, what Brecht calls “the doubt which is a form of despair”.

Despite its title, “In Praise of Doubt” also targets those who doubt “not in order to come to a decision but to avoid a decision”. Writing in 1939, exiled from Nazi Germany and disillusioned by Stalinist Russia, he points the finger not only at those who fail to ask questions, or who suppress dissent — but also at those who don’t want to face the reality of their situation, or take responsibility for action.

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Fair enough. Public discourse today too often falls into lazy sloganizing, personal character attacks, and sloppy invocation of highly selected or dubious facts. We should all expect better standards of reasoning and evidence, and in turn deploy better arguments when trying to convince others. But political argument is generally not susceptible to the kinds of proof in Kucharski’s book. Types of evidence and reasoning appropriate to a laboratory, a court of law, or a philosopher’s musings, can only go so far.

Abraham Lincoln, fascinated by Euclid’s methods of mathematical proof, used “proof by contradiction” to show that one person could not legitimately enslave another. His capacity for logical argument against his opponents probably helped his election as President, but it did not end the practice of slavery. In the end, it took more than evidence and proof to change that social reality. It took both doubt that the existing state of affairs was the best (or only) possible world — and positively imagining an alternative reality. Yet it also meant convincing others that change was possible. And that, as Kucharski says, “is not just about data or research; it is a matter of psychology, politics and prior beliefs.”

In the end, nobody can prove in advance that it’s possible to convince enough people to change their minds. At some point, you just have to act on the strength of your conviction.

There are plenty of candidates here. Tuition fees and burgeoning student numbers are two obvious examples, together encouraging universities to compete for an unsustainable market of teenage “customers”. More recent changes haven’t helped either, particularly a national insurance hike set to cost higher education some £372 million. In the end though, these challenges only became existential after one single event: Covid. Amid all the hand-wringing over the sector’s current crisis, its failure to rise to the challenge of the pandemic has provoked curiously little attention.

During the first lockdown, universities, like schools, were legally required to treat students as germs on legs. They were first closed down, then subjected to a range of bizarre “social distancing” requirements that made large in-person lectures impossible. But as the months went on, and government guidance promoted the importance of face-to-face teaching, many institutions dragged their feet. Having been forced to push through strategies of emergency remote teaching, it seemed safer and easier to stick with it. That’s despite having exhorted a new intake of freshers to move to campus so they could take up (read: pay for) a “student experience” that effectively meant being locked up in their rooms.

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From a hard-nosed business perspective, the desperation to retain students as fee-paying bodies, even while providing an experience that was neither educational nor social, was the logical outcome of a policy approach that sees students primarily as units of funding. It was also, ironically, the outcome of an attitude to university governance that has long prioritized safety and satisfaction over robust education and academic freedom.

Universities have spent so long pandering to the idea that their role is to give the student-consumer “what they want” — higher grades for less effort; the gamification of learning in place of reading books; safe spaces in which they can be shielded from uncomfortable ideas — that they couldn’t compute why bedroom learning was not, in fact, any kind of education at all.

This was not what students wanted. Remember the scenes from the University of Manchester, with angry teenagers tearing down the steel “cages” built around their accommodation? Or what about the angry scenes of kids trapped at a party when the fire alarm went off? The door was faulty, but the safety messages reissued by the university emphasized that “illegal” large gatherings were putting students’ health and safety at risk. Nor, of course, was Manchester the only university to turn its campus into a student-funded quarantine camp, even if others showed slightly more flexibility. For my part, I largely taught in person outside of formal lockdowns. The masks, visors and distancing made it very weird, but at least I got to know students by their eyebrows.

For over a year, at any rate, the central purpose of higher education was subsumed beneath a veil of hysterical safetyism, eagerly fueled by the main academics’ union. The University and College Union (UCU) set its face against on-campus teaching, warning that asking students back would turn them into the “care homes of the second wave”. No less telling, it also briefed its members about the dangers of arguing that “staff are required to work on campus and/or deliver face-to-face teaching or services”. When your own union claims your job is inessential, you might not be surprised if a wave of redundancies follows — especially when the same union decides that the biggest threat to academics’ health is freedom of speech.

How else to explain the attacks against anyone who questioned the wisdom of lockdowns, with many academics finding themselves subject to vicious smear campaigns from colleagues and government officials alike? In this time of dangerous uncertainty, when societies were dealing with literal matters of life and death, there was an urgent need for academic collaboration and debate. Instead, debate was stifled, with similar attitudes soon spreading to other corners of the academy. In October 2021, to give one example, philosophy professor Kathleen Stock left her post at the University of Sussex following an intimidation campaign by students and academics opposed to her gender-critical views. Far from supporting their colleague, the local UCU branch called for a university-wide investigation into “transphobia”.

Nor was this mania to die down with Covid. The UCU has continued to dismiss concerns about academic freedom as a “sideshow” invented by the Right, while also opposing the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, with the union suggesting “there is no real evidence” of a free speech crisis on campus. Tell that to the hundreds of academics who signed an open letter imploring the Government to implement the remaining provisions of the Act, something even Keir Starmer now seems willing to accept.

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Not, of course, that this is a purely British problem. Across the world, higher education’s failure to prioritize academic inquiry during Covid has been a huge blow to its legitimacy. Yet in the UK, where the public has long raised concerns about the status and value of degrees in our massified, financialized system, people are now questioning the worth of university altogether. This not only speaks to how lightly we hold our cultural heritage: it is a terrible shame for the kids. Students and parents continue to be broadly positive about higher education, despite its problems. But when the sector is tearing itself apart, why should the public come to the rescue?

A year ago, Professor Shitij Kapur, vice chancellor of King’s College London, argued that UK universities are trapped in a “triangle of sadness” between “aspiring students who feel burdened with debt and uncertain prospects, a stretched government that has allowed tuition fees to fall far behind inflation, and beleaguered university staff who feel caught in the middle”. To escape this mess, we need an unflinching discussion of a single basic question: what are universities for? To come to an answer, meanwhile, we need people committed to the intellectual and educational purpose of higher education and prepared to acknowledge previous mistakes. Otherwise, we’ll be left with the policy fudge we have right now, a consultant-led drive to achieve institutional “sustainability” by cutting back the things that give universities their heart: subjects, academics, and students who are there to broaden their minds.

Vaccines are one of the marvels of modern science, allowing our species to overcome some of our oldest microscopic adversaries. The erosion of public support for childhood immunization is thus lamentable, not to mention dangerous. Yet public-health and government authorities looking for someone to blame for growing vaccine skepticism might wish to look in the mirror: Their Covid and gender excesses have done a great deal to sow distrust among parents.

In a much-discussed report on Monday, The New York Times insisted on making this a partisan issue, noting that the number of kids receiving vaccine exemptions rose in states that Donald Trump won in November’s election. But exemptions are up in some Kamala Harris states, too. As The Times conceded, “the story with noncompliance is more complex” than the partisan headline figures might suggest. “It rose in both blue and red states, although more in red states.”

In short: The partisan angle tells only part of the story, as does the proliferation of crank ideas on the online right (a phenomenon that predates the pandemic, though it went on hyperdrive in the wake of it). Authorities in red states might be making it easier to obtain the exemptions. Or it could be that the great migration of the Covid era has reshuffled people into regions that more closely match their opinion on the issue of vaccinations. Or some combination of these factors may be at work. The bottom line, though, is that these and other factors wouldn’t be as significantly in play but for the breakdown in trust between many families and health agencies. That trust will take a long time to rebuild — that is, if it even can be rebuilt.

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Start with the source of the decline data: The CDC is at the top of the list of agencies that destroyed trust. Rochelle Walensky took over as the agency’s director on the day President Biden was inaugurated. Biden had promised to reopen schools in the first 100 days of his presidency. As you might recall, this wasn’t seen as a particularly ambitious goal, since that timeline would put the reopening date in May, right around when schools would be closing for the summer anyway. Yet by February, even that meager plan was scrapped.

Text messages showed that Walensky cowered to Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, and changed school-opening guidelines based on the union boss’s demands. No science was involved in the decision: a special interest group was allowed to influence policy at the nation’s top health agency.

As if that alone weren’t egregious enough, Walensky’s also shotgunned her own credibility. There seemed to be a lot of simple guessing in her comments. In November 2021, Walensky said that masks are 80% effective in reducing Covid spread, a figure that appears to have been made up on the spot. If true, that would have meant masks were far more effective than vaccines in stopping infection, a claim the CDC would never have made.

It wasn’t just Walensky who bungled or politicized the Covid-19 response. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of America’s war on Covid, frequently and unaccountably reversed himself or simply lied to the American people. He admitted to misleading the public on the efficacy of masks because of mask shortages at the outset of the pandemic. But in a closed-door interview session in January 2024 before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci admitted that he had pushed regulations such as the six-feet rule and masking without having any clear evidence that these prescriptions would be effective.

Both Walensky and Fauci pushed the Covid vaccine on children, even after it was clear that the jabs didn’t stop the spread. In October 2022, a CDC advisory committee voted unanimously to add the Covid vaccine and the corresponding boosters to the recommended immunization schedule for children as young as 6 months old. By then, it was clear that the shot didn’t prevent transmission, so the argument was it “reduces risk of serious outcome”. Of course, kids faced a minuscule risk of serious outcomes in the first place.

This was nearly a year after European countries had started limiting the Covid vaccine for kids as data about myocarditis revealed the risk presented to teenage boys. The CDC was aware, too, that boys were far more at risk than girls, which led to a curious choice in its presentation of data. As David Zweig reported for Wired: “In the advisory-committee meeting, a slide was presented that showed that within seven days following the second dose, males aged 12 to 17 had a rate of 62.75 myocarditis cases per million, whereas females had a rate of 8.68. Averaging the two rates yields 35.72 cases. Yet the rate for young males is more than seven times that of young females”. The CDC frequently lumped the two together.

It wasn’t just Covid where public trust in health agencies and “expert” organizations was shattered. There was also the gender question. The CDC recommended the vaccine to “pregnant people” and removed all references to “women” from its vaccine website. Last year, the CDC presented guidance on “chest-feeding” — that is to say, pretend breastfeeding by biological males using “medication to induce lactation.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics is just as guilty of becoming a political operation with a health-care name. During the pandemic, the AAP reversed its previous guidance on the importance of babies being able to read faces to fit in with the leftist push for masking. The organization also took advice from teachers’ unions and pushed for schools to remain closed. Today, the AAP is busying itself issuing political statements on the conflict in the Middle East.

Parents didn’t wake up one day and decide to stop vaccinating their children without reason. They no longer trust groups that have proved themselves untrustworthy. Parents are fed up with falsehoods that made them wonder what else they’ve been lied to about. Moms and dads have had a front row seat to the politicization of health policy over the last few years and have decided to opt out of taking any further guidance from these people until that trust can be restored.

When I speak to parents who no longer vaccinate their children, a common thread is that they just don’t believe what they are told anymore. These were normal people, following the rules, until abnormal policies were pushed on their families. Low trust in institutions is detrimental to societies. Maybe those institutions should work on fixing themselves so people will once again listen to what they have to say.

And it seems I’m not alone. We learned this week from a survey of British players that full-blown rows during board games are an occupational hazard, with bending the rules a particular flashpoint. This probably reveals more about family dynamics than the devious British Character, though. Cheating is so often in the eye of the beholder; and especially after a few drinks, repeated outbreaks of petty bickering, and several failed attempts to name the capital of the Ivory Coast. Or so I hear anyway.

Despite posing such dangers, games are having a cultural moment. Tabletop games, we also learned this week, are all the rage at chichi dinner parties arranged by the sort of person whose job title is “founder of a fashionable condiment brand”. There’s a board-game café in East London (obviously) and an artsy magazine devoted to the pursuit called Senet, tackling such pressing issues as “the tabletop theme of high-seas piracy” and — hinting at discord here too — “dealing with Alpha Players in your gaming group”.

Literally thousands of new titles are released every year, it seems, with something for progressives ( “in Biome, players aim to build diverse ecosystems and raise baby animals”) as well as conservatives (“Wokelandia is an educational, fun-with-friends battle between the Oppressors and the Oppressed. The first person with 100 oppression points wins!”). Fifty million people now play Dungeons and Dragons, apparently. Those without a Dungeon Master in their life to consult might well wonder: what is going on?

A feelgood answer — sort of — is that living in a dispersed digital world has left us “hungry” for “real-world connection and community”, something that’s provided by tangible boards, counters, and cards. A more jaundiced answer is that board games help you avoid talking in any depth to others, where you are all forced to be in the same room together and are nervous about being canceled for your opinions. At least this way, your arguments can be about really important matters — like whether a helmet really counts as a weapon, or how long a burning cart would take to immolate the walls of a castle, given the viscosity of tar.

Another explanation — not necessarily competing with the last — says that online gaming has been growing in popularity for decades, Covid lockdowns intensified the trend and brought in new cohorts of users; and now the vibe has finally spilled over into real world spaces as well. On this interpretation, we are not so much getting away from the online world as enacting it more vividly with the help of physical props.

Sometimes it seems like the lines between game and life are blurring — not helped by the gamification of everything, occurring in parallel. This is the application of game design to ordinary life, in order to better incentivize some desired outcome. Educational programs send school pupils on virtual quests and give them progress badges; dating apps encourage users to proliferate “matches” as a fun end in itself; workplace training schemes make cute emoji faces at you for meeting particular challenges.

Only this week I received an email from Adidas, telling me that I had “gone down a level” in their club. Reassuringly though, it also said I could regain my previous status by “earning 2,900 points” — otherwise known as buying more stuff from Adidas.

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Occasionally a company gets carried away and blatantly starts to treat employees like soulless avatars driven by blind competition: as when Disney Hotels disastrously introduced an electronic leader board to rank workers’ speeds loading laundry into machines. But even if gamification is more benevolent than this — all dopamine hits and no cortisol, so to speak — it still has significant downsides.

In his funny, clever book The Grasshopper, written in 1978, philosopher Bernard Suits used the fable of the playful grasshopper and diligent ant to make the provocative claim that in Utopia we would all be grasshoppers, for game-playing would be the only activity carried out there. Along the way — and picking up the famous gauntlet thrown by Wittgenstein, who said it couldn’t be done — he offered a persuasive definition of a game as an activity with three necessary and sufficient aspects.

First, he said, a game must have a “prelusory goal” which can be specified independently of playing, and is usually something trivial: getting a ball into a hole, say, or picking up a king-shaped counter. Then there are the rules, which must by definition introduce unnecessary complications to achieving the prelusory goal, so that the most efficient means of doing it are disallowed: you can’t just manually drop the ball into the hole, or grab the King on your second go. And finally there is the “lusory attitude” required of a player: to accept the rules voluntarily because otherwise there is no game. In a memorable summation, Suits wrote that “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Rule-benders can’t win, technically speaking, because in cheating, they have literally stopped playing the game.

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Ultimately, I think it’s false that in Utopia everyone would be a grasshopper. Other intrinsically valuable lifestyles are also available. But more to the point, the worry about the rapid rise of both games and gamification is that they turn ants into grasshoppers, right here on earth. This is not a worry about productivity; on the contrary, gamification is supposed to increase it. It’s more about the solipsistic habit of eyeing up real-world tasks and collaborators as things to be weaved into fictional quests and challenges; to view them primarily as sources of short-term personal reward.

It is sometimes observed that games put a player in a metaphorical “magic circle”: an imaginary space where striking at an opponent, say, is not just equivalent to pushing a piece of plastic from one square to another, or piling up bits of colored cardboard. Fictional and symbolic dimensions of such actions are the primary focus instead, and consciousness of the real world mostly drops out. Equally, gamification takes as a goal something highly important to a corporation or government, rather than something silly or trivial, but then distracts the “player” from that fact by introducing circuitous intermediate steps involving jeopardy, thrill, or virtual head pats. A desire to replicate the subjective feelings produced, rather than paying attention to the goal itself or to how you are objectively achieving it, is the whole idea.

In an ideal gamified context, you would sleepwalk towards the end planned out for you almost by accident, driven onward by jolts to the dopamine system. The internet is full of business gurus trying to explain why Gen Z are relatively demanding in the workplace, uncritically telling us that this generation above others “expects reward” and is full of “affirmation addicts”. Yet this is also the generation that grew up with the cultural dominance of gaming, and I don’t think it is too farfetched to make a connection. For their sake, we probably shouldn’t indulge the trend.

Which is not to say I won’t be throwing a die or two this December, fortified by a few margaritas to increase the jeopardy for all concerned. Distracting yourself from a rainy afternoon or an unpleasant chore — or indeed, a difficult dinner party — by turning proceedings into a literal points-scoring exercise is always tempting. Games, though, only have their proper place in life because life is not one.

Originally initiated by the previous Conservative government and championed by the centre-left Labor Party, the legislation promised to be a watershed moment in Australian media regulation. It proposed stringent controls on information sharing, with a curious twist: some, including legacy media and academics, would be exempt from the most restrictive provisions, while the hoi polloi would face intense scrutiny and potential censorship.

What makes this defeat truly remarkable is the broad coalition that emerged to block the bill. In the senate, an uncanny alliance formed — conservative opposition, the Greens, and Left-wing independent senators all united in rejecting the proposed legislation. This cross-political alignment suggests a growing recognition of the dangers inherent in state-controlled information management.

Progressive media outlets such as The Guardian, which would have been sheltered from the bill’s most severe provisions, were full-throated in their support for the legislation, dismissing opposition as a “scare campaign”. But the fractures within progressive circles proved to be the most intriguing development.

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The bill’s trajectory exposes a deeper narrative about how contemporary progressive culture has inadvertently become a vehicle for speech control. While I believe the core global actors pushing speech control are centrist, contemporary Left-wing culture has provided an excellent Trojan horse, via its collectivist concerns about public health, identity politics, online bullying and environmental issues. These fears have been systematically leveraged to advance increasingly restrictive information management strategies. Despite our reputation as living among snakes, spiders and emus, Australians have long been a coddled and fragile bunch, tucked into cul-de-sac suburbs, afraid of both the sun and our own shadows. Our Covid response was so remarked upon for this reason. A brutalist contrast between self-image and stark reality.

Harnessing contemporary progressive culture to advance speech controls was effective not only in disarming the field of digital free-expression NGOs, but in many cases those same organisations provided platoons of digital mercenaries to scour the internet and weed out disinformation. Having spent nearly two decades working in digital free expression advocacy, I witnessed first-hand how government and philanthropic funding diverted organic digital free speech movements. towards policing what they define as “disinformation”.

Working on the Twitter Files with Matt Taibbi, I helped map the intricate networks behind this phenomenon. First Draft, a US/UK outfit, emerged as a key player. It coined the term “malinformation” and played a critical role in attempting to suppress the now-verified Hunter Biden laptop story, two months before the New York Post broke the story. It was all carried out under the guise of “anti-disinformation” work.

First Draft also assisted in developing the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation which the proposed legislation was based on and sought to strengthen by providing a “regulatory backstop” and was the only NGO involved in the Trusted News Initiative, a Covid-era legacy media consortium that was integral to pandemic narrative management. Its work illustrates that these are not organic responses to the challenges of a cacophonous internet — but a politicised strategy to shape the public debate.

Through the Australian Twitter files I revealed that, under the existing voluntary code, our security agencies were already flagging remarkably innocuous content to social media platforms. Jokes, political criticism, and accounts with minimal followings were targeted. They even attempted to censor respected academics such as former Harvard professor Martin Kulldorff for questioning lockdown efficacy and promoting the Great Barrington Declaration. Full-scale legislation would only make things worse.

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And the bill’s provisions were breathtakingly broad. Companies could face fines of up to 5% of global revenue, and the bar was lowered to the point where content only needed to be “reasonably verifiable as false or misleading” to count as misinformation. “False” according to whom? Well, this would be the domain of faultless fact-checkers, their cheeks flushed with truthiness and here to rescue you from your misinformed self.

Among the justifications for the bill were the Southport Riots in Britain (triggered apparently by misinformation) and a recent stabbing in Sydney, where the perpetrator was misidentified most significantly by mainstream news, which, in a fabulous irony, is exempt from the bill. The cherry on the cake was the expansive definition of “harm” — encompassing potential damage to the environment, economy, and public health.

But, whisper it, the bill’s resounding defeat could signal that something profound is afoot. Could free speech values be experiencing an Australian revival? Though the Covid pandemic period saw unprecedented restrictions on public discourse, a growing number of people — including those traditionally supportive of such measures — are now loudly speaking out. Nick Coatsworth, a Deputy Chief Medical Officer during Covid and previously supportive of vaccine mandates, has emerged as a powerful critic. Coatsworth has seemingly been to Damascus and back, stating: “Misinformation causes harm. The weaponisation of misinformation as a term to shut down debate causes even greater harm. This bill does the latter.”

Similarly, legal experts, including the Human Rights Commissioner and constitutional law professors, provided crucial intellectual ammunition against the bill. The freedom movement that emerged from Covid managed to move the conventional Right into a more populist free-speech position and those moderate “expert” voices on the centre and centre-left gave permission to progressives to voice their concerns with less fear of being dogpiled.

That said, the failure also owes much to the incompetency of the current Labor government, who littered the bill with hypocrisies and excess largesse making it easier to shoot down. It should also be noted that the Greens’ rejection was a mixed bag – in part wanting legacy media to be included in government policing efforts, and in part a broader critique of Big Tech power.

But while celebrating this victory, realism is essential. Australia remains a fertile ground for technocratic control mechanisms with its penchant for technocracy and over-trust in government. Other restrictive legislation continues to advance, including proposed bans on social media for under-16s that would have serious impacts on adult users and expanding eSafety regulations.

Winning the free speech war requires building a broad, cross-political consensus. The defeat of this misinformation bill suggests such a thing might be emerging. The Left’s partial rejection of speech control narratives is especially significant, potentially creating a “permissions cascade” for other fearful progressive voices.

But the rejection of Australia’s counter-disinformation bill is more than a legislative outcome. It represents a potential inflection point in how democratic societies negotiate the challenging terrain of information control. The emerging alliance defending free expression suggests that the impulse to protect open dialogue might be more resilient than the forces seeking to constrain it.

After slavishly obeying perhaps the most absurd covid diktats of anywhere in the world, today Australia offers a sprig of hope. In a new political atmosphere, reasoned debate, cross-political collaboration, and a commitment to free expression can still prevail against increasingly sophisticated attempts to shut it down.

In truth, though, their weaknesses were clear four years ago. For while Trump was certainly defeated in 2020, this had little to do with his policy programme, or even his personal ratings. Rather, it is likely that he only lost because of a pandemic no one foresaw, and one that’s unlikely to boost his enemies again soon. This fact has lessons both for Trump himself, and for his opponents.

The strongest evidence that Trump could have won four years ago is the result of the election itself. Between 2016 and 2020, the once-and-future president improved his share of the popular vote from 46.1% to 46.8%. That, to be sure, was well short of the 51.2% that Biden won. But what counts in presidential elections isn’t the popular vote but the electoral college. And here the 2020 race was much closer. Four years ago only 44,000 votes across Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin prevented a tie in the electoral college.

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Quite aside from the historical drama of such an outcome — the electoral college has never been tied in US history — America’s arcane federal constitution means the election would have gone to the House of Representatives. Each state delegation would have cast one vote for president. In 2020, the Democrats had a majority in the House, but Republicans had a 26-23 majority of state delegations, and almost certainly would have voted for a second Trump term.

But without Covid, the 2020 race might not have been that close. On the eve of the pandemic, Trump was in a remarkably strong position. For one thing, the Mueller Commission report had discredited claims that the president owed his 2016 victory to Russian interference. For another, the first of the two partisan impeachments by the Democrats had failed. A decade after the Great Recession, the economy was recovering, and Trump’s popularity ratings rose to 49%.  Then Covid struck. During the pandemic, Trump’s favourability ratings slumped. In hindsight, his handling of the disaster was far from a failure, resulting in the rapid government-backed mass production of vaccines via Operation Warp Speed. But the same alliance of Democratic politicians and establishment journalists that had falsely accused him of being a Putin stooge now hysterically called him a mass murderer, personally responsible for every Covid death in the United States.

No less striking, the pro-Democratic media twisted Trump’s comments to falsely claim that he favoured injecting bleach into Americans, disingenuously suggesting that he supported prescribing “livestock dewormer” to patients. That sounds bad until you realise he meant ivermectin: a drug prescribed across Latin America, as well as by some doctors in the US itself. Sued by some American physicians, who claimed its public pronouncements had hurt their practices, the Food and Drug Administration agreed to pay out in a settlement in March 2024. Among other things, they implicitly apologised for the 2021 tweet that warned people: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all, stop it.”

Whatever less partisan historians finally conclude about Trump’s handling of Covid, in the absence of the pandemic it would obviously not have mattered. History, for its part, points us in the same direction. Before Trump’s failure to secure the Oval Office in 2020, Obama, Bush, and Clinton had all been re-elected and served second terms. Dubya, who like Trump in 2016 had lost the popular vote but narrowly won the electoral college in 2000, went on to win the popular vote in 2004, before the costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars turned the public against his administration. You could say something similar about Obama, who won re-election while pushing his country into two more quagmires in Syria and Libya.

Trump, in contrast, believed the Iraq War to be a mistake, and hadn’t involved his country in any unpopular new wars. At the same time, claims by Democrats that Trump was a dangerous warmonger collapsed when, imitating Nixon, he personally met North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un. No less striking, Trump had started the process of disengaging US forces from Afghanistan, a policy that Biden continued but ultimately bungled.

Overall, then, Trump was well-positioned to run for re-election as a president who had presided over both foreign peace and domestic prosperity. Nor do we have to rely on the President-elect alone here: his opponents were distinctly lacking too. Most of the Democrats who sought their party’s presidential nomination in 2020, from Elizabeth Warren to Pete Buttigieg, were well to the Left of the median voter and would likely have struggled outside of big cities and college towns. Unpopular among the party’s base, billionaires like Michael Bloomberg would probably not have done well either.

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What about Biden himself? If the pandemic hadn’t happened, there’s plenty of evidence that he might have lost in a match-up with Trump. For one thing, he didn’t do well in the early Democratic primaries, only winning his party’s nomination when more progressive candidates dropped out. It’s not clear, meanwhile, how advanced Biden’s cognitive problems were four years ago. What is certain is that the pandemic boosted his 2020 campaign in two ways. First, it gave Biden’s handlers an excuse to minimise his public appearances, plausibly allowing them to conceal the extent of his mental decline — problems that finally became clear during his catastrophic debate with Trump in June 2024.

No less important, the pandemic allowed the Democrats to benefit from various mail-in voting systems, adopted in response to Covid lockdowns. To be clear, there is no evidence of systematic cheating here. But the combination of mail-in voting with lockdowns favoured university-educated and politically engaged Democrats at the expense of Trump’s core constituencies. Even with these advantages, at any rate, Biden still only managed to defeat Trump by a few tens of thousands of votes in swing states.

In all, this suggests that the Democrats didn’t lose last week merely because of Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, or Tim Walz. Rather, they lost because they underestimated the degree to which the pandemic temporarily eclipsed the underlying popularity of Trump in particular and the Republicans in general. As the Democrats reflect on their future, it’s ironic that they were finally felled by a force beyond their control — the inflation that stalked America during Biden’s presidency.

In those moments, your mother not only knows best, but becomes a sort of goddess. Against the fevers, blocked noses and nettle-stung shins of childhood, she wields a mystical healing power — the ability to kiss it better, to ordain that you’ll be “right as rain” in the morning (and you always are). This relationship rests on a limitless bank of trust, the ultimate vulnerability and the ultimate faith.

But what if your mother is not worthy of it? What if, having recently emerged from a global pandemic, she is now at odds with your family doctor, and mistrusts the mysterious adults who administer jabs at hospitals? What if she now represents a gatekeeper to things that might help, or even save you, from syrupy sweet Calpol to a vaccine preventing a bout of measles that might kill you?

This is life for the children of “crunchy mums”, so called because of the hippy, molar-cracking-granola world they emerged from. They congregate on anonymous forums, on Facebook, Reddit and Mumsnet, swapping advice on raising a child under the radar of mainstream medicine. One mother asks for tips on how to lie to doctors about her children not having had their vaccines. Another’s 17-year-old daughter begs her for the Covid jab; she is told to coax her out of her mainstream-media brainwashing and push “homeopathic prophylaxis” instead. “All the protection, none of the risk,” the comment says. Another woman asks how to treat her four-year-old with meningitis, whom she refuses to take to hospital. “Is this necessary?” she says of heading straight to A&E. “I am over Covid politics.”

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How astrology fooled womankind

By Poppy Sowerby

On a different forum, a mother worries about the prevalence of measles in her son’s school; he is not vaccinated. “Stay confident in your decisions. Don’t let fear manipulate you,” comes the soothing reply. In one nannying forum, a woman tells of a mum who refuses to let her daughter carry an Epipen despite being fatally allergic to bananas. Instead, a “homeopathic salt” is kept in the house for emergencies. Another posts a picture of her three-year-old’s teeth — or what remains of them; they are all but completely decayed thanks to the misguidance of a “holistic dentist”. The mother now wants to do “what’s best” for her toddler, to relieve her pain, but it seems a little too late.

The Crunchy Mum phenomenon might appear, to most observers, as utter selfishness masquerading as care. This is certainly how I see one such “TikTok influencer” whose sister-in-law writes a warning post on Reddit exposing her for making videos about her “amazing and perfect” home births, assisted by an Amish midwife with “no official medical training”. Her fifth child, we are told, was delivered in a traumatic episode involving life-threatening pre-eclampsia and an admission to hospital — but the influencer “absolutely will not disclose” these facts to her followers, denying having had life-saving mainstream medical treatment to continue pushing her all-natural brand.

Spending a little time on these message boards, one gets the impression that these women — and it is almost exclusively women — are motivated not by selfishness, but by a surfeit of paranoid love. A couple of seams run through the discourse. The first is a hangover from woo-woo communal and natural-living circles of the Sixties and Seventies; it is all about lentils, flax seeds and coconut oil. This is where a lot of Crunchy Mums seem to start; after all, what can be so wrong with raising your child in the bosom of Mother Nature? There is an organic feminist flavour to it all, slightly witchy, vaguely empowering and ultimately quite harmless.

But the second seam is where the problems begin. It seems unlikely that the alt-Right homesteader mentality can coexist so comfortably with the dippy softness of the sandal-wearing Mother Earth sisterhood, but that confluence, the coaxing from concerned mother to anti-Big State freedom fighter, is at the heart of Crunchy Mum ideology. A few weeks or months among aluminium-deodorant-dodging acolytes online sends you hurtling down a pipeline of classic tropes — a distrust of Big Pharma, an aversion to vaccines, a suspicion of mainstream education.

There is a distinct hierarchy to these forums, where even quotidian questions are met with a barrage of replies which jostle to be the most extreme, the most radically sage. Mothers out-do each other with “well actually” correctives informing forum-lurkers that, in fact, you might be killing your child with radioactivity from baby monitors, seed oils or whatever else. Women bond over how they are shunned by other mothers at the school gates; they delight in the digital garrison they have formed, the spite of it all. If children see their mothers as a sort of magician, a healing goddess, then the cultists see themselves as the chosen ones.

This anxious-but-smug fatalism is nowhere clearer than in the big-ticket forums of Crunchy Mum culture: the autism boards. Here, mothers advise one another on “detoxing” their children through natural methods, which promise to see “autism characteristics improving or going away completely”. This process involves overhauling the diet, introducing supplements, and for some reason getting chiropractors involved. You must junk pesticides, preservatives and artificial colours. And give your child Epsom salt baths. One mother reassures another that her five-year-old has “lost” his autism diagnosis by cutting out “gluten and casein”. When the original poster expresses concern that this strict diet would remove some of the greatest pleasures from her little boy’s life, she is scolded: “The changes you make now can impact the rest of his life.”

The link between “alternative medicine” and obsessions with autism is not new. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a former physician, published a study in respected medical journal The Lancet linking the MMR jab to autism. Though the research was based on a study of only 12 children, it quickly became accepted that gastrointestinal inflammation from the vaccine caused developmental disorders. It sparked the first major wave of what would become a global and recurring anti-vax movement. The paper was ultimately discredited — The Lancet retracted it in 2010 — and Wakefield was disgraced. The fable is by now so familiar, but nonetheless many parents are still determined to believe it.

Why? The appeal of this theory is that it gives parents a sense of control, which saves them from the bleak uncertainty of genetic fate while conferring blame on those who didn’t try “hard enough”. There is great comfort in the belief that the destiny of the person you love most in the world is not random, but in fact entirely dependent on the sacrifices you are willing to make for them. You are determined to face censure from your community, to smilingly nurse them through bouts of mumps and rubella, to become the heroine of your own family story, to save them. If anything, the controversy of your beliefs only burnishes your heroism.

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There are significant spiritual overtones to this martyred maternity. Crunchy Mums represent a slippage between real and mystical lives; they are the modern continuation of a medieval thought system which held that left-handed children represented something sinistra, devilish, and that harsh correctives could drive the dark out. In one forum, this connection is taken to an extreme in the context of — what else? — the Covid vaccine: “Don’t take it under any circumstances,” a mother says. “The mark of the beast is an unforgivable sin and you will get grievous sores all over your body… Plus the shot changes your DNA — writing lucifer (shot contains luciferace) [sic] all over it. Hell is not worth it. Plus the definition of pharmacia is spells, witchcraft, potions. [The] Bible WARNS against witchcraft and seeking such things.” This is worth unpacking. Luciferase is a family of proteins that, from the Latin, bear light (produce photons) — so are used as bioluminescent markers. These harmless, useful proteins are used in a variety of common medical applications, but not the Covid vaccine. That this woman has combined fundamental medical misunderstanding with earnest spiritual sentiment crowns her Crunchy Mum to end all Crunchy Mums.

Groomed by others to leap from well-meaning woo-woo to paranoid extremism, Crunchy Mums are a growing army. But it is one thing asking how to make soap out of your own breast milk, and quite another to give your baby botulism. These children are living the same embattled lives as those who, centuries earlier, would have grimaced through back-room exorcisms, huffing the acrid smell of burning sage from the local warty witch, getting leg cramp from sitting in a salt circle until your deformity is cured. And for the mothers, the same ancient affliction: guilt, overwhelming love — you will and must do anything to save your child. But what if rather than saving them, you’re condemning them?

“Listen to the scientists, support masks,” Biden said at a campaign rally, four years ago, berating Trump for not wearing a mask after he had caught Covid. “Support a mask mandate nationwide,” Biden thundered to cheers and adulation. His campaign message captured a “follow the science” sentiment among Left-leaning American voters who derided anyone questioning mask effectiveness with the label “anti-mask”. This, despite a smattering of articles in Scientific American, Wired, New York Magazine and The Atlantic reporting that scientific studies found masks didn’t seem to stop viruses.

The debate over mask effectiveness took an odd turn last year when ardent mask advocate, Zeynep Tufekci, wrote a New York Times essay claiming “the science is clear that masks work”. Tufekci’s piece denigrated and belittled a scientific review by the prestigious medical nonprofit, Cochrane, for concluding that the evidence is “uncertain”.

Shortly after Tufekci published her essay, Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, dashed out a statement, to assure mask advocates that Cochrane would update the review’s language. Cochrane reviews are widely considered as the “gold standard” for high‐quality information to inform medicine, and their process is laborious, with multiple rounds of internal checks and expert peer review. Having Cochrane’s head make a personal pronouncement about a published review is unprecedented — akin to having the executive editor of The New York Times write an essay expressing personal opinions about one of the paper’s own deep-dive investigations.

The incident also marked an odd point in the timeline of mask use. Before the pandemic, few, if any, prominent organisations promoted masks to stop influenza or other respiratory viruses. As the WHO concluded in their 2019 pandemic preparedness plan: “There have been a number of high-quality randomised controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission.” So, it was not surprising that both Tufekci’s claims “masks work” and Karla Soares-Weiser’s allegations that something was wrong with the Cochrane mask review were later found themselves to have no real evidence.

Earlier this year, Soares-Weiser issued another statement, this time explaining the mask review was fine and no changes would be made. Despite the 180, damage to Cochrane’s mask review had already been done. Google sends you straight to Tufekci’s New York Times essay alleging problems in the Cochrane review.

But why did Soares-Weiser change her mind?

I have discovered, through hundreds of emails provided to me by freedom of information requests and a Cochrane whistleblower, that Tufekci bumped Soares-Weiser into making the statement against Cochrane’s own mask review — a move that landed like a grenade inside the organisation.

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While Soares-Weiser runs Cochrane, scientists with expertise in each specific subject matter write and edit the reviews. When she rushed out her statement complaining about the mask review, the review authors charged that Cochrane had thrown science under the bus by working with “controversial writer” Zeynep Tufekci; meanwhile, the editor of the mask review reminded Cochrane’s leadership that changes were only being considered because of “intense media coverage and criticism”, not because there were any problems in the review’s science. “I had a very challenging meeting with the [governing board] yesterday,” Soares-Weiser wrote a few days afterwards. “I am holding on, stressed, but OK.”

But the story doesn’t end there. Because the attack by Soares-Weiser and Cochrane’s leadership on their own mask review is illustrative of how media and political pressure undermined and suppressed inconvenient scientific conclusions during the pandemic — and are still attempting to do so. The incident also raises questions about media ethics and whether Cochrane’s leadership is still fit for purpose.

When Cochrane published their 2023 mask review, it was the seventh iteration of a process that began 18 years previously. Back in 2006, Cochrane researchers raked through the scientific literature to see if they could determine what interventions could halt the spread of viruses. They found no good evidence that masks work. The scientists then updated their review in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2020.

With all six updates, each time scouring any new peer-reviewed studies, Cochrane researchers concluded the same: there is no good scientific evidence that masks work to control viruses. And each time, the scientific community yawned. Because until the Covid pandemic, nobody had conceived of a political movement to advocate for masks. Not even Zeynep Tufekci.

“Don’t worry if you cannot find masks,” Tufekci wrote in a February 2020 article for Scientific American. “For non–health care people, washing your hands often, using alcohol-based hand-sanitiser liberally and learning not to touch your face are the most important clinically-proven interventions there are.” Promoting the article on X, Tufekci reiterated this point: “Clinical studies show hand-washing is the crucial step not masks.”

But the following month, a New York Times media reporter praised Tufekci for reversing her former opinion in a 1 March tweetstorm. This was followed by a 17 March essay for The New York Times that convinced the CDC to alter federal guidance and advise Americans to mask.

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What makes this all alarming is that Tufekci is an academic sociologist, with no training in medicine or public health. And yet, she managed to alter public health policy with a bunch of tweets and an essay followed, two months later, by a co-authored scientific preprint that promoted mask mandates. “We recommend that public officials and governments strongly encourage the use of widespread face masks in public, including the use of appropriate regulation,” it said.

The study’s lead author is Jeremy Howard, a mask advocate and Australian software entrepreneur, who, like Tufekci, has no training in public health or medicine. The review was later published in a medical journal and remains the only article I could find that Tufekci has published in the scientific literature on masks.

Despite such a thin publishing record in the scientific literature, the Raleigh News & Observer (an influential paper among academics) anointed Tufekci a Covid media hero who had challenged the medical and public health establishment and got the facts right — but with essays, not science. “Instead of conducting lab experiments related to Covid-19, she used her platform on Twitter and in the opinion sections of Scientific American, The Atlantic and The New York Times to inform the public with practical advice about what to do and why.”

In retrospect, it’s hard to read this article — celebrating an academic for doing science by essay — and not wonder if it’s a satirical piece for The Onion: “Monkey Solves Grand Unified Theory of Physics in a Single Tweet.” Nonetheless, Tufekci played along with the gag, amazed at her magical ability to solve complex scientific problems without doing any actual science — just writing essays.

“I never thought in a million years I’d be writing something that basically said the World Health Organization and CDC and medical establishment in the United States and Europe are wrong,” she told the paper. But one tiny obstacle stood between Tufekci and full acceptance of mask mandates: Cochrane.

When Cochrane released their mask update in January 2023, which again said the efficacy of masks was uncertain, critics of pandemic policies naturally used these scientific conclusions to cast doubt on the mask advocates. “Mask mandates were a bust,” wrote New York Times columnist Brett Stephens, citing an interview by Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane mask review. “Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as ‘misinformers’ for opposing mandates were right.”

Tufekci’s rise to public prominence is tied closely to her mask advocacy. Reading this column in The New York Times, the most prominent paper in the country, and where she also worked, must have been irksome for her. Three days after the Stephens column, Tufekci emailed Cochrane for an interview. But rather than contacting Jefferson or any of the scientists who authored the review, Tufekci went straight to Michael Brown, one of Cochrane’s editors. She also asked if he would introduce her to Cochrane editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, to which Brown agreed.

Some days later, Karla Soares-Weiser emailed a Cochrane official that she had been “back and forth with NYT about the mask review”, asking for help responding to questions. “I’m navigating a difficult situation,” Soares-Weiser emailed. Tufekci meanwhile, had contacted Jefferson for comment, but he ignored her.

The very following day, the Times published Tufekci’s “masks work” essay. Given the way American journalism works, the piece had most likely been written and edited before she had contacted Jefferson the night before for comment. Although 12 different scientists had been involved in writing and researching the Cochrane mask review, Zeynep singled out Jefferson. She named him several times in her essay for making alleged false statements about the pandemic. Hours later, Cochrane rushed out Soares-Weiser’s statement, and then apologised to the review authors. “We hoped to inform you all before publication but have been blindsided by the NYT and have scrabbled to upload our statement,” Cochrane emailed the review authors.

This did not go down well with the authors. “I will not speak for the others but am deeply distressed by this course of events which have occurred without our knowledge,” replied Jon Conly, a professor and former head of the department of medicine at the University of Calgary. He insisted that Cochrane had thrown the review authors under the bus. “Very naive to think you and the [editor in chief Soares-Weiser] spoke to the media at NYTs (without informing us) and would trust them and that they would not immediately publish what you said, especially with this woman who is well known as a controversial writer.”

“There was no intention to ‘throw you or anyone under the bus’,” Brown responded, “since I would be throwing myself under the bus as the sign-off editor.” He added that he had told Tufekci that he stood by the review and had asked her to contact the review authors for their statements.

Conly confirmed to me later that Tufekci — who did not respond to repeated requests for comment — never contacted him, even though he is named as the review’s corresponding author, who Tufekci should have contacted for comment. “Not sure who Tufekci would have corresponded with to find any of the authors who would have agreed with her,” Conly said.

As I have seen from internal correspondence, Cochrane’s editors then began discussing how to manage blowback from Soares Weiser’s statement. Brown reminded them the update used the same language from 2020 and that revisions were now being suggested because Cochrane was flinching from media critics, not because the science was wrong. “Although I agree that the proposed changes to the [summary] add clarity, it was only under intense media coverage and criticism that these revisions were suggested,” Brown wrote.

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Seeking another angle to quell criticism of Soares-Weiser’s statement, Lisa Bero, a professor medicine at the University of Colorado who serves as Cochrane ethics advisor, suggested that Cochrane publish comments being submitted by outsiders that were also critical of the mask review. “That should be published as soon as possible (following screening for libel or profanity),” Bero emailed. “It is important for readers to know that criticism has not just come through the media, but through the formal channels that we have.”

But according to Conly, the review had already undergone extensive, detailed peer review. “If the editor-in-chief and ethics officer were colluding to find criticism afterwards,” he told me, “that would appear to be unethical.”

Meanwhile, Soares-Weiser’s statement and Tufekci’s article were having a significant effect outside the organisation, spurring several news articles as well as ridicule of the mask authors on social media. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of several books on pandemics, Laurie Garret, accused the mask authors of fraud. “[T]hese bozos have undermined public faith in [masks] & biz/govt willingness to promote use,” she posted on X. (It is notable that, prior to the pandemic, Garrett posted on X in 2018 that masks don’t work for influenza and other respiratory viruses. “We have also known for 100+ years that masks do no good.”)

The argument was even reverberating through politics. Testifying in her final appearance before Congress, CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky, cited Soares-Weiser’s statement, falsely stating that Cochrane had “retracted” the mask review. Congressional staff were forced to correct her testimony: “The lack of trust in public health officials is becoming an enormous problem,” a congressional staffer later wrote.

Word of Soares-Weiser’s actions even reached the highest levels of the British government. That summer, while she was in London for a Cochrane event, an MP invited her to Parliament’s Portcullis House to explain her statement. However, according to a staffer in Parliament, Soares-Weiser dodged the invite and never appeared.

Although he was noted prominently in the “masks work” essay, Cochrane’s Michael Brown told me the Times had engaged in a lot of of “spinning” of his comments and he hadn’t been aware that Tufekci had campaigned for mask mandates, nor that she had published a review whose conclusions contradicted those of Cochrane. In her initial email to Brown, Tufekci had highlighted her ostensibly scientific background, introducing herself as both a New York Times columnist and an academic with a background in statistics and causal inference, and an interest in scientific reviews. “I use and participate in reviews myself (I’m writing one in my own field soon) and thus am familiar with many of the challenges and issues.”

This is something of an embellishment of Tufekci’s bona fides. According to Google Scholar, she has published no academic articles this year and the only one she published in all of 2023 was an opinion piece in Nature. As for the review article Tufekci had pointed to, it has never appeared.

“I’m a trusting person,” Brown told me, explaining that he had never looked up Tufekci’s history before speaking with her. “She’s definitely more of a journalist than a scientist. I didn’t agree with her, the way she then spun it: masks work.”

“The bottom line is that [our] review was well-done,” Brown said. As for the proposed changes to review’s language, Brown explained that the summary language had been written by Cochrane staff reporting to Karla Soares-Weiser, not Tom Jefferson and the other review authors.

“She sort of got caught in the crossfire,” Brown said of Soares-Weiser, adding that colleagues pressured her because they didn’t like the conclusions that there is no evidence masks work. “Which is really hard for her, for someone in her position as editor in chief.”

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Brown made his views on the science clear last September when he emailed the organiser of a talk he was giving that masks “do not make a major impact at the community level when promoted as a public health intervention”. He also told me that a recent scientific review in the Annals of Internal Medicine complemented the findings of Cochrane. “In the end, the conclusions were the same.”

But while Cochrane has ceased attacking its own mask review, The New York Times continues to promote the “masks work” narrative — despite evidence to the contrary. Last May, the paper ran an essay by Tulane University’s John M. Barry. In his piece, Barry wrote: “Masks present a much simpler question. They work. We’ve known they work since 1917, when they helped protect soldiers from a measles epidemic.”

And yet, we know this is not true. Even Barry does. As he wrote his bestselling tome, The Great Influenza: “The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could.”

But as has become clear, and as Brown confirmed in our conversation, masks are no longer about science: “Instead of just talking about the science, it became a political thing. And people fell on one side or the other,” he said. “And they said some things, and then they have to back up what they’ve said previously. And they’re just digging a hole deeper and deeper.”

What The New York Times did was to embrace a scientific opinion — masks work! — and then defend that notion like a divine ruling — ignoring contrary evidence and attacking researchers such as Tom Jefferson who have spent decades toiling away on a once-obscure topic. “This is what the future holds,” Jefferson told me. “It’s an upside-down world. It’s the death of science.”

Since then, “Pfizergate” has ballooned into one of the biggest scandals in EU history. Following von der Leyen and the Commission’s refusal to hand over the text messages — not only to journalists, but even to the EU Ombudsman and the EU Court of Auditors — the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), an independent EU body responsible for investigating and prosecuting financial crimes, announced in late 2022 that it had opened an investigation into the pandemic procurement process (though not into Pfizergate specifically). It confirmed that it had received “an exceptionally high number of reports and complaints” asking that “it investigate the purchase of Covid-19 vaccines in the European Union”.

Then, in April 2023, Frédéric Baldan, a Belgian lobbyist specialising in EU-China trade relations, filed a lawsuit against von der Leyen before a Liège court, accusing her of usurping official powers, destroying public documents, pursuing illicit interests and committing corruption, and damaging his country’s public finances. Shortly after, Baldan’s lobbyist accreditation was withdrawn by the European Parliament. The story, however, doesn’t end there.

Despite von der Leyen’s clumsy attempts to sweep the case under the carpet, or arguably because of them, Pfizergate continues to rumble on. Since Baldan filed his criminal complaint, several individuals, organisations and even two countries — Hungary and Poland (under the previous PiS-led government) — have joined the lawsuit. With Brussels steeling itself for the EU elections in June, all the signs pointed to a big legal bust-up and an even bigger PR disaster.

But then, earlier this month, von der Leyen’s hearing in front of the Belgian court — to decide whether the EPPO or the Belgian investigators should prosecute the case — was mysteriously postponed to December. This is not a trivial matter. Even though a year and a half has passed since the EPPO first opened its investigation, no one has yet been charged. Indeed, it’s unclear whether the EPPO has actually been looking into the case at all. A few days before the recent hearing in Liège was supposed to take place, Baldan’s lawyer, Diane Protat, visited the EPPO’s offices in Brussels and Luxembourg to request a copy of its case file — standard procedure from a legal standpoint. However, not only was she told that there was no such file, but on both occasions security was called on her.

Such behaviour is typical of the EPPO. For several months after beginning its probe into the EU’s vaccine procurement, it showed little interest in Pfizergate; as far as we know, it didn’t even demand that von der Leyen hand over the infamous text messages. However, shortly after Baldan filed his complaint in Belgium, the EPPO quickly moved to obtain a copy of the document from the Belgian prosecutor’s office — and almost immediately claimed exclusive jurisdiction over the case.

It argues that, if there was any misconduct relating to EU-wide vaccine-procurement deals, this represents a damage to the EU budget, and that under EU law it is up to the EPPO to investigate, prosecute and bring to judgment the perpetrators of criminal offences that affect the EU budget. The complainants see the situation differently: they note that the vaccines were purchased with money that came from member states’ national budgets, not the EU budget — as even von der Leyen herself admitted in a recent presidential debate. That is why they argue that the case should be tried in national courts, such as the Belgian one, rather than by the EPPO.

As for the immunity from legal proceedings that von der Leyen enjoys as president of the Commission, the complainants suggest this applies only with respect to acts carried out within the scope of her defined function as Commission president. Suffice it to say that whether carrying out billion-euro deals behind closed doors, and then leaving member states and taxpayers to foot the bill, falls within the purview of her role is questionable. That said, the plaintiffs face an uphill struggle: if the case moves forward, the request from prosecutors to waiver von der Leyen’s immunity would be handled by the College of Commissioners — which is usually chaired by von der Leyen herself. However, they have an ally in the Belgian investigating judge, Frédéric Frenay, who has successfully investigated several corruption cases in the past: according to Euractiv, he doesn’t agree with the EPPO taking over the case and is insisting that it remain in Belgian hands.

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But why is the EPPO, after showing hardly no interest in it for several months, now so adamant about taking over the case? Given the organisation’s behaviour since Pfizergate broke, one could be forgiven for wondering if they were ever interested in truly investigating von der Leyen — or whether they were covering up for her. As the German MEP Martin Sonneborn told the Berliner Zeitung: “Why does the EPPO, which reports to Justice commissioner Didier Reynders, who reports to Commission president von der Leyen, need a year and a half to search von der Leyen’s office in the Commission building and confiscate her work cell phone to view the Pfizer SMSs?”

Questions have already been raised about the body’s judicial independence: last year, for example, it attracted criticism after Giorgia Meloni’s government helped install a new prosecutor despite an independent panel of judiciary experts ranking him last among Italy’s three candidates. Previously, other countries had faced criticism for the same reason. As Sonneborn put it, with the EPPO, “another organisation seems to have been created that does not have the interests of the citizens in mind, but rather the shielding of EU officials from their democratic accountability”.

Seen in this light, the EPPO’s efforts to assume jurisdiction over the Belgian complaint could be read as an attempt to stifle an independent investigation into Pfizergate — or at least delay it until after the EU elections and the nomination process for the new president of the Commission. Certainly, if that was the aim, they’ve succeeded. We can rest assured that Baldan’s recent demand for von der Leyen to be sacked and barred from running for office as long as she is the subject of criminal proceedings will likely fall on deaf ears.

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Von der Leyen, however, is far from off-the-hook. After all, the Belgian court may still decide to allocate jurisdiction to the state’s investigative authorities. And who knows, the EPPO might actually decide to start doing some serious investigating itself. Besides, this isn’t the only legal cloud hanging over von der Leyen’s head: another case was filed by the New York Times against the European Commission at the European Court of Justice after they failed to provide them with the text messages, but the court has yet to rule on the matter.

Paradoxically, far from pointing to a well-functioning rule of law, all of these investigations only serve to highlight the complete lack of accountability of EU politicians, and of the EU system more generally: despite all the courts and bodies that have looked into this so far, not one has managed to get von der Leyen to hand over some text messages. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Ultimately, Pfizergate isn’t an isolated incident, but a reflection of the EU’s true nature: a haven where unelected politicians and corporate leaders can cosy up to each other away from prying eyes, unhindered by obsolete concepts such as transparency and the rule of law. The only difference is that, this time, they might finally be caught out.

For Edinburgh University officials are stifling my efforts to help find the truth about the origins of Covid-19 in order to protect one of their top academics, who finds himself a central figure in a furore of worldwide significance. It might seem a long way from Wuhan, where the pandemic erupted at some point in 2019, to Scotland’s genteel capital. But at the core of debate over the birth of a strange coronavirus stands an evolutionary biologist called Andrew Rambaut. This influential professor, among the world’s most cited scientists, is accused of playing a key role in efforts by a cabal of prominent experts to suppress the idea Covid might be linked to risky research carried out inside a Chinese laboratory.

Science, of course, depends on data, evidence and unfettered debate. And tracking down Covid’s origins could help protect the planet from future pandemics; it might even have implications for the global tussle between autocracy and democracy. But it seems clear now there was an alarming cover-up led by the heads of major American and British research funding bodies — and the emails exchanged between Rambaut and other leading players might shed light on what else went on behind the scenes.

Edinburgh University boasts a “culture of openness” on its website. But it rejected my requests under the Freedom of Information Act to access these emails on the basis that such a move might affect their professor’s health and safety. After 27 months — and following my appeal to Scotland’s Information Commissioner — the university admitted finally it held the information that I sought. However, it declined still to release it into the public domain, and rebuffed similar requests on the same grounds from US Right to Know, a public health campaign group that has winkled out significant information on these issues using similar tactics.

So in the absence of their evidence, let us examine some of the existing data. After all, as Conan Doyle once wrote to explain how dodgy theories can get bolstered to mask the truth, “there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”. There are at least 10,000 cities on our planet. And yet, Covid emerged in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan. This sprawling city is hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of wild bats with similar coronaviruses, found in the tropical caves of southern China, so the location surprised even Shi “Bat Woman” Zhengli, their leading expert on such diseases. She is based at Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s most important bio-security laboratory and the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia. It had known safety concerns. And it was conducting risky research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice in low-level biosafety conditions.

Other labs in the city were also carrying out cutting-edge scientific work. So it did not take the forensic genius of a great detective to suspect the emergence of Sars-CoV-2 — the strain of virus that causes Covid-19 — could possibly be tied to research in the city. Especially when this new disease had a feature not seen on more than 200 similar types of coronavirus called a furin cleavage site, which allows its spike protein to bind effectively to cells in many human tissues.

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Maintaining on an open mind regarding all possible scenarios the available data might indicate should not have been controversial. This is, after all, the basis of science. Yet from start of the pandemic, a few prominent scientists, led by the bossses of the most important research funding bodies in Britain and the US, publicly dismissed fears Covid might be linked to a Wuhan lab. This led the suggestion to be scorned as “conspiracy theory”, condemned by patsy journalists, and even dismissed by some people as racist.

Among these experts was Rambaut, who ran the online site that first published the Sars-CoV-2 genome after it was leaked by a brave Chinese scientist in early 2020 in tandem with their mutual friend Eddie Holmes, a Sydney-based British virologist. Before the pandemic, both men were critics of the sort of “misguided” virus-hunting carried out by Wuhan scientists such as Shi in those bat caves of southern China. Some of this work was carried out with Western partners, especially the controversial British scientist Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance group that was backed by US taxpayers.

Yet in mid-March 2020 — just 11 weeks after Taiwan tipped off the World Health Organisation about a weird new disease in Wuhan, and six weeks after the body had declared Covid to be an international emergency — Rambaut and Holmes were among five authors of a commentary in Nature Medicine hastily stating that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This unequivocal statement — entitled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” — was arguably the most influential scientific document published in the pandemic. It was even cited in the White House by Anthony Fauci. And it was singled out to me for its significance by Sir Jeremy Farrar, the former head of the Wellcome Trust who was appointed as the WHO’s Chief Scientist last year.

It has since been revealed through leaks, investigations, books and a barrage of freedom of information requests that these two scientific leaders, along with the head of the biggest US science funding body, were involved in covertly drafting this statement (although strangely not credited). And it emerged that some of these scientists privately feared the possibility of a laboratory link even as they drafted the paper condemning such ideas. Farrar himself had complained to Francis Collins, then the head of the US National Institutes of Health, which helped fund some research in Wuhan, about the “Wild West” biosecurity at labs in the central Chinese city. Private messages released though a Congressional inquiry — detailing “super secret” discussions between Rambaut and three fellow authors of the “proximal origins” statement — further exposed concerns that Covid might be tied to scientific research, along with concerning signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such a stance.

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One admitted the lab escape theory was “so friggin’ likely” based on work carried out in Wuhan and molecular data — leading Rambaut to say that their discussion of the idea “shows how plausible it is”. In February 2020 he wrote: “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff… I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good. The truth is never going to come out (if escape is the truth).”

Rambaut also said that “once you lose the market as the origin, all bets are off” — a reference to the theory that the virus originated with an infected animal in a food market, ruled out three months later by the Chinese authorities. The Edinburgh academic also wrote about “the shit show” if “anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release”, arguing they should say “given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process”.

Such discrepancies between the private views of prominent experts and their public positions, published in prestigious journals with commercial ties to China, fuel fears that powerful scientists — whether trying to appease China or mask Western funding ties to risky research — duped the world by trying to stifle debate. Needless to say, this has been firmly denied by those involved. Rambaut, however, also used social media to debunk the “Mojiang miners theory”. This suggests Sars-Cov-2 might be tied to three miners who died from a respiratory disease, similar to Covid 19, that they caught while clearing bat droppings in a cave network in south China. The trio were infected in an abandoned copper mine where scientists from Wuhan sampled RaTG13, the closest known relative of Sars-Cov-2.

Having been looking into these issues since early 2020, I requested Rambaut’s email discussions with Farrar, Fauci, Holmes and Danish evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen in relation to that controversial Nature Medicine document. I had made an earlier effort to obtain emails between these experts through Whitehall and Sir Patrick Vallance, then the government’s chief scientific adviser, but this resulted in release of a batch of documents so heavily redacted that they were almost worthless. So I sought Rambaut’s emails with Vallance, too, on this issue.

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This was far from a journalistic fishing exercise — as proven by evidence that has emerged elsewhere from other FOI requests. These include US Right to Know’s exposure of how Daszak had secretly organised another notorious statement published in The Lancet early in the pandemic that condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin” and ridiculously praised Beijing for “rapid, open and transparent” sharing of data. It was signed by 27 experts, including Farrar and two Wellcome Trust colleagues.

Daszak also authored a $14.2 million funding request to the Pentagon’s research arm for a study supposedly “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses” that suggested the insertion of “human-specific cleavage sites”. US Right to Know found last month that he envisaged much of this controversial gain-of-function work being carried out in Wuhan — although Ralph Baric, his partner on this project, admitted they might grow viruses in such low-level biosecurity that US researchers “will likely freak out”. The initial 2018 proposal was rejected since it could “put local communities at risk” — but clearly there were plans afoot for precisely the sort of high-risk work in Wuhan that could have led to the pandemic.

We still do not know the definitive answer to the riddle of Covid’s origins. But we do know China’s Communist dictatorship covered up the emergence of a deadly new virus with disastrous consequences, silencing medical whistleblowers and burying crucial data that could have saved lives. We know that two major US intelligence agencies feared the virus leaked from a lab. We heard housing minister Michael Gove tell the Covid inquiry “there is a significant body of judgement” that believes coronavirus “was man-made”. Meanwhile no sustainable evidence has emerged to prove the claims of zoonotic transmission, despite desperate efforts to link animals such as pangolins and raccoon dogs to the spread of a bat disease into humans.

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Curiously, Edinburgh University admitted last year to being over-reliant on Chinese funding with more than 7,500 students coming from Asian superpower, compared with 11,000 from England. Two months ago, Civitas think tank accused it of taking £12 million in five years from bodies with ties to China’s military — revealed through freedom of interest requests. Such sources of finance are not unusual at our universities, sadly, but it would be disturbing if such links were the real reason why this prestigious institution does not want to release important documents that might embarrass Beijing.

It rebuffed my request in an eight-page letter from its legal chief that even had the gall to argue that Rambaut had already published his views on Covid origins in that contentious Nature Medicine article “accessed over five and half million times”. The letter — ironically delayed for months by Covid’s impact on working practices — ruled that disclosure of their professor’s emails might “endanger the physical or mental health or safety of an individual” following “threatening behaviour against several academics in this narrow field”. Like many journalists, I am aware of the unsettling nature of abuse and threats. Such treatment is unacceptable for any scientist, however famous or controversial. But it should be pointed out that it is the shameful behaviour of some of science’s leading lights that turned this into such a toxic debate, which became all the more poisonous after becoming entangled in tribal politics amid disingenuous talk of conspiracy theories.

Science, like academia and journalism, should not be undermined by hiding of key information. Data, facts and evidence should be shared, not shackled or suppressed in a democracy — especially if they might cast light on the worst public health disaster for a century.

Tegnell, both revered and reviled as the architect of Sweden’s more laissez-faire Covid response, begins by restating the fundamentals in answer to a series of written questions. What was Sweden’s approach to lockdowns? “No formal lockdown used.” What about so-called “circuit-breaker” mini lockdowns? “None used.” And what was the overall result in terms of excess deaths, or the number of people who died as a result of the Covid period? “Excess mortality differs slightly depending on the method but Sweden is at the same level as the Nordic countries and sometimes lower. The UK has a considerably higher excess mortality.” Ouch.

Frankly, Dr Tegnell needn’t have said anything else. The combination of these two datapoints alone — that the only country in Europe to avoid lockdowns entirely emerged with the lowest excess death count of the whole continent — should be enough for any fair-minded evaluation of the evidence to conclude that lockdowns were a mistake. The minimum evidential threshold for a policy experiment so radical and so destructive to society must surely be that it definitely saved lives; this threshold was not met, and in fact the Swedish example suggests that the policy may well have cost lives in the longer term.

The reason the inquiry invited Dr Tegnell to answer questions was to convict Boris Johnson of recklessness in not imposing a second lockdown sooner in September 2020. Tegnell attended a now-famous Zoom meeting with Johnson and Sunak alongside Professors Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and John Edmunds in that month, to hear from alternative voices. The theory is that they delayed the autumn lockdown in part as a result of this meeting.

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In his evidence to the inquiry, Tegnell meticulously avoids the traps being set for him, insisting that on the Zoom call he shared information about the Swedish experience but avoided giving specific advice about whether the UK should lock down or not. Indeed, in a memo written to the UK government at the time and shared with the inquiry this week, he concludes that the UK should take action of some kind, but in doing so should be guided by evidence.

“The short answer to the question [of whether the UK government should intervene] is in my opinion yes,” he wrote in September 2020. “The myth that Sweden did nothing during the pandemic is false. We have initiated a wide range of activities not least in the area of communication.” There was advice to work from home where possible, for example, and to self-isolate while you are symptomatic.

But throughout, Tegnell relentlessly places emphasis on the need for evidence: if he was not convinced that a particular measure provably worked (for example mandating face masks) he refused to introduce it. As a result, except a few notices on trains for some months in 2021, Sweden avoided face-masks entirely.

Perhaps the most interesting section of Dr Tegnell’s evidence is his analysis of the impact of the Swedish constitution. Unlike in most parliamentary democracies including the UK, Swedish politicians are forbidden from interfering in the work of the government agencies, including the health agency:

“The Government sets out the objectives of the agencies’ activities and how much money they have available to them… but it has no powers to interfere with how an agency applies the law or decides in a specific case… In many other countries, a minister has the power to intervene directly in an agency’s day-to-day operations. This possibility does not exist in Sweden, as ‘ministerial rule’ is prohibited.”

In other words, the real reason Sweden resisted the global rush to lockdowns in 2020 was that its technocrats (such as Tegnell) were all-powerful. Where politicians are instantly vulnerable to media narratives, public opinion and political pressure, the Swedish agencies were constitutionally protected from these influences. They had a plan, and they stuck to it. In other contexts, I can attest, the Swedish insistence on sticking to the rules can be quite maddening; but in 2020 it saved the day. It’s a paradox that will not sit well with many anti-lockdown campaigners who see the evil technocracy as the problem, and want to sweep away the “blob”.

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Further, Sweden’s constitution has a specific approach to crisis management, designed precisely to avoid power-grabs by governments during a crisis. It enshrines three principles: responsibility (in which the normal regional authorities retain their jurisdiction during a crisis), similarity (business-as-usual as an explicit virtue and goal, so that policies during a crisis should be as similar to normal as possible), and proximity (meaning that the lowest devolved authority should retain responsibility unless that is absolutely impossible, to avoid central government taking over.) It is a rubric specifically designed to avoid power-grabs by the centre during so-called emergencies. Tegnell continues:

“Sweden’s constitutional order does not allow for the declaration of a state of emergency. Fundamental civil rights and freedoms can only be suspended in the case of war. Public health emergencies are therefore regulated by ordinary law… It is legally impossible to enforce a general quarantine or “lockdown” measures.”

So, even if the Swedish politicians had buckled to international pressure and called for lockdowns, they would have been constitutionally unable to impose them.

If the Covid Inquiry were actually interested in preparing for future crises, this lesson from Anders Tegnell is a profound one. It points in the opposite direction to the “muscular” Asian-style central government so revered by Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove. It suggests that if you want to protect people during a so-called crisis, keep the politicians out of it, slow the spread of panic and enshrine in law the virtue of “keep calm and carry on”. It used to be considered a British virtue; a Covid inquiry that was more connected to reality might have rediscovered it.

To be fair to Biden, he is the truest successor of FDR yet. Like Roosevelt, he came into office at a time of overwhelming economic crisis and despair. And like Roosevelt, he realised that nothing short of a programme of economic reconstruction as ambitious as the New Deal would suffice to address America’s long-term and corrosive economic suffering. It was not enough, in his eyes, simply to banish the virus and restore the economy to its pre-Covid state. He needed to restore faith in American democracy and the American dream.

At the heart of Bidenomics is the idea that 21st-century America is in the grip of its own economic crisis, this one emerging far more slowly and unevenly than the Great Depression, but with results that were just as disfiguring. In the past 30 years, a globalised world of free markets and unregulated capitalism has generated a vast economic gulf between deindustrialised rural and small-town America, and the vast metropolises. The resulting economic suffering and social disintegration, Biden observed, had made possible the rise of strongmen such as Trump who captivated angry and alienated portions of the population with their faux-populism and attacks on distant elites.

The only way to address the root of this populist anger and alienation, Biden thought, was by implementing a vast Rooseveltian public spending plan to bring manufacturing jobs back to America’s deindustrialised regions. His economic package — which included a mammoth trillion-dollar physical infrastructure bill, a $400 billion Chips and Science Act to re-shore the manufacturing of computer chips, and a $400 billion green energy bill, the largest investment the US had ever made in green energy — rivalled some of the biggest accomplishments of the early New Deal.

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In other ways, too, Biden has shown himself a careful student of Roosevelt. He has welcomed elements of a reawakened Left into his administration, cognisant that the greatest progressive advances by the Democratic Party across the last century have resulted from the willingness of the party’s centre to work with its Left-wing. In contrast to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who had both snubbed the Left, Biden embraced Bernie Sanders’s support for his election.

But here the similarities of Bidenomics and Roosevelt’s New Deal come to an end. Whereas Roosevelt pushed nearly the entirety of his legislative programme through Congress — much of this in the legendary First 100 Days of his administration — major parts of Biden’s programme have failed. That Biden hit a wall is not surprising, given that he had a small majority in the House and the slimmest possible majority in the Senate. Roosevelt by contrast enjoyed huge majorities in both the House (313 to 122) and Senate (58 to 37).

Their administrations have diverged in a second, more surprising, way. While Roosevelt’s popularity soared as his economic recovery programme faltered, Biden’s plummeted as his economic plan succeeded. In Roosevelt’s first year and a half in office, the economy ticked up briefly, then plunged into depression once again. His legislative programmes had generated intense hope; their early failure spread discontent and then social uprisings. Workers went on strike in large numbers. Populist demagogues — including Louisiana senator Huey Long and radio priest Father Coughlin — attracted millions to their crusades by criticising the New Deal for not doing enough for the “little guy”. However, very little of this populist fury was directed at Roosevelt himself. In the off-year elections of 1934, the Democrats’ Congressional majorities actually increased, deepening FDR’s control of Congress.

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Biden’s fate has been the opposite. As the economy soars, his popularity has sunk. Thanks to Biden, there’s now a palpable dynamism in the US economy, one felt neither in Britain nor Europe, nor in Thirties America under Roosevelt: unemployment has been below 4% since April 2022; economic growth in the third quarter of 2023 exceeded 5%, a level that mature industrial economies of the West no longer expect to achieve; and the number of manufacturing jobs in the US is the highest since 2008. And yet, Biden’s popularity has crashed: his approval rating now stands at a miserable 37%, down 20% since April 2021.

Biden’s age and perceived infirmity have undoubtedly contributed to this plunge. Yet when Roosevelt ran for a fourth term as president in 1944, though his ill health had led him near death’s door, few Americans seemed to care. A soaring inflation rate — the highest in 50 years — that erupted under Biden’s watch has no doubt damaged his reputation in ways that have nothing to do with his age. But one would think that he would get some credit for cutting the inflation rate from its 9% peak in 2022 by nearly two thirds. None has yet been forthcoming.

What was it about Roosevelt, or the Thirties, that allowed him to suffer defeats on the economic front without losing popularity? And how was he able to tap into what we might call the American imaginary — the section of the political soul where Americans fashion their hopes and dreams — in ways that Biden can’t? Roosevelt was certainly a more ebullient figure and a more eloquent speaker than Biden, but he was also living in a different era. He arrived in the White House at a moment when the 20th-century’s “age of reform”, to use Richard Hofstadter’s phrase, was far more advanced than its 21st-century counterpart.

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Three aspects of the Roosevelt era stand out as different from today. First, the magnitude of the Great Depression. Unlike the 2008 financial crisis, which hit some regions worse than others, the Great Depression came for every American state, and every group of people. It also went on for far longer than the Covid pandemic, which helped FDR, a politician skilled at giving comfort and generating hope in time of despair, build an enduring appeal. Indeed, Biden, whose own empathetic instincts are acute, enjoyed his greatest popularity when the threat of Covid was most severe and widespread — in other words, when life in America most closely resembled the Great Depression.

Then there’s the fact that Roosevelt was able to draw the metaphorical borders of the national community more tightly than can be done today. In the Thirties, the gates were shut tight to immigrants: Mexicans were allowed in, but they were just as easily deported when no longer wanted; feminism and an early gay movement had faded; patriarchy and heteronormativity reigned just about everywhere. Moreover, FDR made a deal with the devil — the southern barons of the Democratic Party who controlled Congress. The latter agreed to support New Deal programmes so long as FDR didn’t disturb the racial hierarchies and white supremacy that structured southern life. These moves shrank what David Hollinger has called the “circle of the we” — those considered to be full members of (and able to make full claims on) the national political community.

What’s more, unlike Biden, Roosevelt was heir to a 30-year-long effort to reform American capitalism, helped by the presidencies of his cousin Teddy and his Democratic predecessor in the White House, Woodrow Wilson. The movement that Biden leads, by contrast, is far younger and more naïve, with limited experience of power. It was Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, not FDR, who broke with the economic orthodoxy of their predecessors, as Biden is now the first to break with the neoliberal policies of Clinton and Obama. And it’s worth remembering that prior to FDR’s presidency, the progressive movement had lost more battles than it had won. Perhaps Biden and his Democratic Party will go through a similar cycle of defeats before achieving enduring victories. Donald Trump is certainly intent on laying waste to Biden’s economic programme if he wins in 2024.

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It took decades for the Democrats to build enough support to reform capitalism under Franklin Roosevelt. But the New Deal would never have succeeded had warring cultural tribes in America not put aside some of their differences in order to unite over a common political cause. Consider the scene that greeted Roosevelt when he appeared at the Democratic Party Convention in New York City in June 1924. This moment marked Roosevelt’s return to active political life after a devastating encounter with polio that cost him the use of his legs. On the evening of 26 June, Roosevelt made his way to the convention podium, supported by unwieldy steel leg braces, to put the name of Al Smith in nomination. Al Smith then battled his opponent William Gibbs McAdoo for 103 ballots across two weeks in an unbearably hot Madison Square Garden, before both men gave up, and shifted their support to a milquetoast candidate, John Davis, who then got crushed in the general election.

The divisions that Roosevelt encountered in 1924 were as bitter as any today: between Catholics and Protestants, between urban and rural districts, between “wets” and “drys”, between the North and the South, between the immigrant and the native born, between liberals and the KKK. These divisions then seemed insurmountable, especially in the Democratic party. There were grounds for thinking that the Democrats would never again win a Congressional majority or elect a president. Yet less than 10 years later, Democrats pushed aside their “insurmountable” differences. Americans who hated each other were now willing to come out of their bunkers and find common ground. Roosevelt helped to facilitate that process: he had the political skills, to be sure; he was assisted by the magnitude of the Great Depression, which thrust so many Americans of different ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds into similar conditions of economic precarity. But Roosevelt, witness to the calamity of 1924, also understood that he had to find a way to temper the culture wars.

The cultural challenge that confronts Biden is more difficult. Roosevelt’s Republican predecessors had shut the country’s immigrant gates in the Twenties, saving FDR and his party from having to wade into that contentious issue themselves. Because racial equality is now a core commitment of the Democratic Party, the Roosevelt formula of addressing class inequality while marginalising issues of racial inequality cannot, and should not, be redeployed. But the higher level of difficulty that confronts Biden does not render his challenge — or that of his party — impossible. Culture wars wax and wane. And America is currently witnessing a possible waning in one very unexpected place: the coming together of women across the political, racial, and ethnic spectrum to defeat radical Republican measures in state legislatures to outlaw all access to abortion. These alliances of liberal and conservative women fuelled an unexpected surge in Democratic victories in the 2022 elections, and are likely to do so again in 2024.

This surprising alliance of Democratic and Republican women may not be enough to propel Biden to a second term. But should he lose in 2024, it would be wrong to regard his defeat as the end of his political undertaking. It may make sense to view the Biden presidency as the beginning, rather than as the culmination, of a 21st-century project of economic reconstruction. The heyday of reconstruction on this scale may lie in the 2030s, when an heir to Biden may play a role similar to the one that Roosevelt took on in the Thirties: learning from his predecessors, and accurately sizing up what needs to be done to bring to America, once again, a large and transformative Democratic majority.

“Djokovic Crowned Anti-vaccine Hero after US Open Win,” howled the title of an internal report. It continued: “The optics of Djokovic, whose vaccine opposition barred him from competing in the 2022 US Open, returning to and winning the Moderna-sponsored competition bolsters anti-vaccine claims that vaccines — and mandates — are unnecessary.”

The report rated news surrounding Djokovic as “high-risk”, noting that “vaccine opponents are celebrating” the tennis champion and that some on social media “mockingly point out that Moderna is a US Open sponsor”. Other alerts, produced by a partnership blending marketing executives with former FBI and Secret Service analysts, also cited concerns around drug industry profits as a source of misinformation.

Far from viral deception, much of the content flagged by Moderna as “misinformation” and a supposed danger to public health was nothing of the sort, it was legitimate discussion of vaccine-related issues. But the Moderna misinformation reports, reported here for the first time, reveal what the pharmaceutical company is willing to do to shape public discourse around its marquee product. And, even affect policy-making.

Moderna did incredibly well out of the pandemic. It was shot from a fledgling biotech firm to a household name, having created one of the most effective vaccines during the outbreak. The mRNA Covid-19 vaccine catapulted the company to a $100 billion valuation and minted five new billionaires, including the chief executive, Stéphane Bancel, its chairman, Noubar Afeyan, co-founder Robert Langer, president Stephen Hoge, and Timothy Springer, a Harvard Medical School professor and early investor.

But as demand for its vaccinations has diminished, inevitably, so too have its earnings. This year, its only marketable product lies unused and the company has recorded steep losses. Moderna has also been forced to pay royalty payments to NIAID, the US government agency that helped produce the basic research that underpins the mRNA vaccine technology. As a result, in January, Bancel announced a price hike of up to $130 a dose, far higher than the $15-26 for American federal contracts, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We’re expecting a 90% reduction in demand,” Bancel said, when he was asked to defend the decision. “As you can see, we’re losing economies of scale.”

With its profits evaporating, Moderna embarked on a flashy new marketing campaign that features a child chasing a red string that transforms into a ribbon, which the narrator explains is an mRNA strand that could unlock cures for all types of diseases. And its latest television advert depicts the company’s coronavirus vaccine as emblematic of a healthy lifestyle. Over some cool music, the narrator says, “make vaccination against Covid-19 a part of your health routine: Spikevax that body”.

The most important thing for Moderna is that people keep having their jabs. Smart ads are part of that. But more important is to push back aggressively against any prevailing anti-vax narrative and engage where possible in any discussions around vaccine policy. That’s where the Moderna disinformation department comes in.

Behind the scenes, the marketing arm of the company has been working with former law enforcement officials and public health officials to monitor and influence vaccine policy. Key to this is a drug industry-funded NGO called Public Good Projects. According to documents we have seen, PGP works closely with social media platforms, government agencies and news websites to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” by rapidly identifying and “shutting down misinformation”. A network of 45,000 healthcare professionals are given talking points “and advice on how to respond when vaccine misinformation goes mainstream”, according to an email from Moderna.

Moderna’s disinformation arm is perpetuating the public discourse wars that have been raging since early in the pandemic, aimed at shutting down anything that might undermine Covid-19-related policies, including lockdowns and efforts to encourage mass vaccinations. These documents provide a new window into the process that has roiled speech debates over the last three years.

With PGP, Moderna is monitoring a huge range of mainstream outlets, as well as unconventional ones, such as the Steam online gaming community and Medium. Meanwhile, Moderna also retains Talkwalker which uses its “Blue Silk” artificial intelligence to monitor vaccine-related conversations across 150 million websites in nearly 200 countries. Discussions around “competitor” issues, including discussions of Pfizer are flagged as well as vaccine hesitancy.

Their monitoring team includes Moderna’s global intelligence division, which is run by Nikki Rutman, who spent nearly 20 years as an analyst with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Rutman was working from the FBI’s Boston office during the COVID-19 effort known as “Operation Warp Speed”, which involved the FBI conducting weekly cybersecurity meetings with the Boston headquartered Moderna. She is among many former law enforcement agents now with the vaccine maker. The involvement of former law enforcement reflects a wider trend in the misinformation-space, as the Department of Homeland Security and FBI have increasingly leaned on social media platforms to shape content decisions as a national security issue.

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The reports issued by the department, which are circulated around staff, include colour-coded warnings about the severity of various anti-vaccine narratives. The high and medium alerts include explanations of the news source and why it matters, followed by a listing of “low-risk narratives we are monitoring” that “don’t currently warrant any action”. If and when a response is needed, “our team will notify the appropriate stakeholders with recommendations”.

According to one report we have seen, Musk is deemed to be “high risk”. Specifically, a Musk video that ridiculed media and government officials who claimed the Covid-19 vaccine was “100% effective” against the virus. The report did not identify any false statements, but warned that his video highlighted the fact that “deception by health authorities and health care providers during the pandemic” would “lay the groundwork to sow distrust in credible sources on vaccine safety and effectiveness”.

Another high profile critic of Big Pharma featured in a Moderna report is Russell Brand. In September, he was flagged because some on social media suspect that he has been targeted for his “anti-vaccine beliefs”.

The report featured a video of Brand decrying pharmaceutical profits and making the claim that Moderna and Pfizer made “$1,000 of profit every second” from the pandemic. The claim is bundled into a “high-risk” alert that warns Brand’s views are “circulated in anti-vaccine spaces where he is viewed as a truth-teller and threat to authority”. Moderna further notes that Brand received support from “high-profile” figures such as Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson.

None of the reports that we have seen makes any attempt to dispute the claims made. Rather the claims are automatically deemed “misinformation” if they encourage vaccine hesitancy. We approached Moderna for comment, but they didn’t respond.

“What often flies under the banner of combating disinformation is, in this case, nothing but corporate public relations, trying to spin public narratives in directions favorable to the corporation’s interests,” said Aaron Kheriaty, a bioethicist, and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Does anyone really want to live under a regime where their social media feed is essentially curated by government or by multinational corporate interests that stand to profit, influencing opinion on these issues?”

This is where the line between PR and lobbying gets blurred for Moderna. It’s all very well for a company to be information gathering, and attempting to send out a positive message. But it’s quite another for it to be using that information for more problematic purposes. Of particular interest in this respect is PGP — the company at the heart of Moderna’s misinformation department.

Financed through a $1,275,000 donation from the Biotechnology and Innovation Organization, lobbyists representing Pfizer and Moderna, PGP maintains close ties to government and media. Moderna first worked closely with PGP on a programme called “Stronger” in 2021-22 in which it identified misinformation and shaped content decisions on social media. PGP was particularly well-equipped to help with this since it had backdoor access to Twitter data, known as the “firehose”, and helped Twitter formulate its pandemic-related speech policies.

We have discovered, through internal emails from Twitter, that PGP’s misinformation reporting team was frequently in contact with Todd O’Boyle, a lobbyist at Twitter, and sent him periodic Excel sheets with accounts to amplify or censor. Their intention, as we have gleaned from the emails exchanged, was not only to combat misinformation, but also to affect the content and tenor of public debate. While PGP identified some obvious falsehoods, such as claims that the vaccines contained microchips or were devised intentionally to kill patients, many tweets flagged as misinformation were simply critical of vaccine passports and other policies designed to coerce vaccination.

The relationship may have extended into the law enforcement space. Last year, Vijaya Gadde, then serving as Twitter’s general counsel, advised the Department of Homeland Security’s task force on combating misinformation on trusted fact-checking organisations. In an email to her colleagues, reported here for the first time, Gadde recommended that the government meet with PGP to decipher Covid-19 speech issues.

Moderna’s corporate intelligence and marketing team has worked closely with PGP again this year in its bid to shape the vaccine discourse as take-up drops off a cliff. The partnership expanded again in October with an official training programme, developed by Moderna and PGP, alongside the American Board of Internal Medicine, to help healthcare workers identify medical misinformation. The online course, called the “Infodemic Training Program”, represents an official partnership between biopharma and the NGO world. But none of PGP’s recent work with Moderna is disclosed on its website or in the Infodemic Training Program. PGP did not respond to requests for comment.

As the pandemic abates, Moderna is, if anything, ratcheting up its surveillance operation, with a keen interest in anything relating to policies designed to coerce vaccination. In particular, the company is closely tracking elected officials and recently passed laws in Arkansas and Texas which restricted vaccine mandates.

“Politicians attempting to ban COVID-19 mandates — or at least claiming to — signals growing resistance to COVID-19 mitigations,” reads one of the Moderna alerts. Given the company avoided publicly commenting on the mandate debate, this is revelatory.

This attitude is borne out in a report from October 5, which flags an Elon Musk message on X that elaborates on the billionaire’s opposition to mandates. Musk expressed outrage at the “demand that people *must* take the vaccine and multiple boosters,” adding that, until the courts overturned the Biden employer mandate, “SpaceX and many other companies would have been forced to fire anyone who refused to get vaccinated.”

The report notes: “Musk has one of the largest platforms in the world—literally and figuratively. He increasingly uses that platform to elevate fringe vaccine opponents and conspiracy theorists.”

But despite the growing backlash against social media censorship, the network of fact-checking nonprofits has grown at an industrial pace, providing opaque opportunities for private and public interests to take subtle control over the public discourse. Such sophistication in blending public-health messaging and corporate advertising should concern anyone with an interest in how government controls free speech.

“This is an interesting peek behind the disinformation industry, what it actually does,” said Kheriaty, the bioethicist. ”It’s about controlling a narrative, controlling the flow of information, controlling how people think about public policy, like the vaccine mandate, and how people think about a particular product that a corporation is profiting from,” he added. “It’s deeply disturbing.”

The preferred idiom was very sweary. According to Cummings’s communications from 2020, government ministers and civil servants dealing with the Covid crisis were “useless fuckpigs”, “morons”, and “cunts”. Everyone mentioned seemed to have a nickname, as if planning a heist: “Sonic” the Hedgehog Special Advisor; “Frosty” the Snowman Minister of State at the Cabinet Office; “Trolley” the Problem Prime Minister, and so on.

Sexist bravado also apparently abounded, with Cummings threatening, in one exchange with Trolley and Director of Communications Lee Cain, to “personally handcuff” Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen MacNamara and “escort her from the building”. In cadences reminiscent of a made man arranging concrete shoes for a troublesome foot soldier, Cummings continued: “We gotta get Helen out of [the Cabinet Office] She’s fucking up Frosty. She’s fucking up me and Case. She’s trying to get spads fired and cause trouble on multiple fronts. Can we get her in Monday for chat re her moving to [the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government] … we need her out ASAP. Building millions of lovely houses.”

Yet in the flesh at the Inquiry, Cummings was more penitent schoolboy than would-be gangster, apologising repeatedly for his previous “terrible” and “appalling” language. And the contrast was also stark with his written submission, in which, as others have also noted, he came across more like Adrian Mole than Harvey Keitel. (A characteristically mournful extract: “Although I was/am often described as ‘all powerful’ in No 10 in 2020 this is false and very misleading regarding Covid… For example, in January 2020 I could not even stop Chris Grayling being appointed by the PM to chair the Commons intelligence committee”.)

Equally, when the next day MacNamara herself appeared at the Inquiry, giving us first sight of Cummings’s much-maligned female nemesis, the deep histrionics running through his communications about her became even more discernible. For if his own fictional lodestar seems to be Nineties Tarantino films, MacNamara’s seems to be Bridget Jones Diary — even down to the fact of having once brought a karaoke machine to a lockdown party at Downing Street.

Though appearing calm and self-assured on the stand, MacNamara’s reported messages to fellow officials seemed almost parodically self-deprecating and tentative — perhaps partly due to the calibre of the individuals she was dealing with at the time. One email to the Cabinet Secretary from 2020 about the inadequate fit of most PPE with female bodies started with the words “Just when you thought you were out of the woods on annoying emails from me” and closed with “I didn’t know who to annoy with this so chose you”.  She signed off with a fist emoji but immediately felt the need to explain, quasi-humorously: “that’s a fist bump not a punch”.

And as the mostly male officials around her focused their attention on managing manly pursuits like “football, hunting, shooting and fishing” — ignoring trifling issues like women being locked down with no escape from violent partners, or having to give birth alone — with touching optimism MacNamara bought “multiple copies” of a book about male bias in policy for her colleagues to read. Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that, when Cummings furiously said of MacNamara, “we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that cunt”, he was really trying to get out of reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez.

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Some dissatisfaction has been expressed among the commentariat about the extent to which the Inquiry’s KCs — often sounding like gently disappointed headmasters — have focused on the bad language of dramatis personae like Cummings. Writing in The Spectator, witness Professor Carl Heneghan complained of the Inquiry that he “had submitted a 74-page statement on what I thought it should discuss. Instead the main topic was rude words in old WhatsApp messages.” For many, understandably tired of endless trivial complaints about hurt feelings stemming from inappropriate word choices, it perhaps feels like a capitulation to focus less on what a person said or did and more upon how, exactly, he said it.

Still, I don’t think that focusing on the way Cummings and others expressed themselves at work is wholly tangential to the main business of the Inquiry. For a person’s words are one of the main sources of evidence we have in judging their character, understood as a relatively fine-grained collection of personality traits. And there is a definite public interest in knowing which characters, precisely, are supposed to be running the country.

It is why a public inquiry’s unusual access to an individual’s emails and private messages is often so potent — for we get to find out, relatively directly, what sort of people are behind the public actions that affected so many lives. When combined with witness statements, cross-examination transcripts and other material, onlookers can get genuine insight, not just into what a person said or did, but also into who they are: their intellectual obsessions, quirks, and blind spots; their talents and inadequacies; their vices and virtues; whether they are funny or charming, or pompous or boring, or patronising or evasive, or whatever. No wonder other public figures apparently get so worried about WhatsApp disclosure.

In Cummings’s case, there are also hundreds of blog posts over the years to add to the overall picture. To read one of them is to travel on a syntactically unexpected, invective-laced and often hysterical emotional journey — full of quotes from famous men, head-spinning new ideas (“It would be great if Oxford created alternatives to PPE such as Ancient and Modern History, Maths for Presidents, and Coding”); undecipherable technical jargon; and deep gloom about the future, assuming the world continues not to listen to him (“such is life in a country that increasingly resembles the trajectory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”).

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Cummings’s musings existed in the public domain well before any of his high-profile public appointments. It still astonishes me that anyone reading them could excitedly call off the search for their next political adviser. It’s hard not to wonder whether his appeal was so great for his employers because, though they personally couldn’t understand what he was on about, they were still impressed by the superficial signs of cleverness and staggering self-belief and desperately hoped it all made sense to someone else.

We are, after all, in a strange place these days, in which we pretend we can understand everything relevant about another person’s motives and meaning from just a small, context-free snippet of their discourse. And yet we tend to pay little attention to the obvious warning signs embedded in much larger chunks of publicly available information (such as, for instance, the fact that Cummings reportedly used to sign himself into No. 10 as “Osama Bin Laden”). Perhaps it is partly just a matter of not having enough time or a long enough attention-span to do the reading. But perhaps another reason for myopia in higher Tory echelons about Cummings’s evident weak points was that they felt his swearing, scowling presence there was a comforting counter to a general atmosphere of stifling political correctness and conformity.

If so, I understand this impulse. The more that mindless progressive types try to micromanage language and instil irrational guilt in their traditional po-faced manner, the more tempting it is to stick two fingers up at the lot of them and to start striking deliberately offensive poses just for the hell of it. And if you can’t do that, perhaps the next best thing is to hire someone who will do it for you; someone whose socially transgressive interventions will act as satisfyingly irritating provocations to any mealy-mouthed, rule-quoting pencil-pushers in the vicinity.

In a microcosm, this is the dynamic that appears to be inhabiting large parts of the Right-leaning political spectrum at the moment. The unstated ethos seems to be that if my attitude-policing, finger-wagging political enemy is against something — in this case, using outrageously rude and bullying language at work — then I must be for it; and vice versa. And of course it doesn’t hurt that large swathes of the electorate are similarly fed up with being told off by self-righteous missionary-types.

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But to base your current political sensibilities on what your opponents hate is to court destruction, whether on the Right or the Left. It gives the enemy effective control of the political agenda and can end with some deeply counterproductive, incoherent decision-making. Just as no Home Secretary supposedly interested in free expression should be talking about banning Palestinian flags just because some deeply revolting people currently want to wave them, no government minister should ever employ a loose cannon with an apparent case of oppositional defiance disorder, just because it tends to set the teeth of members of the Blob on edge. As the Trolley knows all too well by now, such initially tempting ideas tend to come back to haunt you.

We have yet to understand the full cost to Britain of having had such an anarchic crew at the heart of government during one of its worst crises in recent history; nor of the way that degraded norms in workplace communication enabled other forms of dysfunction to proliferate there. At the very least, it is already suggested from MacNamara’s testimony that the atmosphere resulted in some chaotic and damaging choices. As she said at the time, in an email to superiors about the lack of options for victims of domestic violence during the first lockdown: “It is very difficult to draw any conclusion other than women have died as a result of this.”

Perhaps the Inquiry will eventually shed some light on this. But either way, Cummings doesn’t seem to have learnt much from the experience. The day after his Inquiry appearance, he was back on social media in his more familiar Lord of Misrule guise, responding to criticism by asking: “so is the problem a/ me calling Hancock ‘a lying cunt killing people’ or b/ Hancock actually being a lying cunt killing people?!” And it doesn’t seem to occur to him that the answer might be “both”.

While two centuries would be a solemn milestone for any publication, for The Lancet it’s much more than that. After the turbulence of the Covid pandemic, the journal is not only more celebrated than ever but also more embattled. It faces the fallout of a major Covid retraction and accusations of malfeasance by prominent figures.

Here, however, The Lancet is in its element. The journal’s long-reigning editor-in-chief, Richard Horton, a kind of Anna Wintour figure of science publishing, seems more sanguine than ever as he advances political and even ideological positions in the name of science with his characteristic media savvy and a constant refusal to tone it down — no matter how unruly it gets. While some may claim that this is a departure from the journal’s staid, grey roots, they’d be wrong. For The Lancet was forged by controversy.

Conceived by a fiery Victorian physician and rights campaigner named Thomas Wakley, The Lancet came into the world in a fit of protest. Born in 1795 in Devonshire to a family of yeoman farmers with 11 children, Wakley had in his early twenties married the daughter of a wealthy businessman and hospital governor who set him up with a London medical practice. Ensconced in a 15-room house at 5 Argyll Street, Wakley had every reason to believe his success imminent until one evening in 1820 when an unexpected knock on his door was followed by a brutal assault. The assailants believed (probably baselessly) that Wakley had played a role in the execution of members of the Cato Street Conspiracy, a radical plot to murder the entire cabinet and the prime minister. Wakley survived, but his house and practice were burned to the ground.

Part of the founding myth of The Lancet was that it was born from Wakley’s outrage and desperation. His insurance company refused to cover damages from the fire, leading to Wakley’s first confrontation with institutional injustice. He sued — and won. His practice had been ruined but a new career as a journalist rose from its ashes. The episode thrust Wakley’s name into the limelight and, according to a review of his 500-page 1897 biography, earned him “a reputation as a man who would fight strenuously against an injustice”.

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With The Lancet, Wakley set out to do something different. While the existing journals were the elite products of an elitist medical system, The Lancet was “founded by a marginal medical man with no reputation and a left-of-centre agenda [within] a conservative profession”, according to a 1998 history published in (none other than) The Lancet. But The Lancet was far more than an ideological and class reaction to medical orthodoxy. It was a stylistic mould-breaking experiment driven by a commitment to “entertain, instruct, and reform”. Its early editions featured chess problems, theatre reviews, and even gossip. “Our Columns will not be restricted to Medical Intelligence, but on the contrary, we shall be indefatigable in our exertions to render ‘THE LANCET’ a complete Chronicle of current Literature,” Wakley wrote in the preface to the journal’s inaugural issue.

The literary elements were quickly dropped but a more potent approach was taken up, one that construed medicine itself as an inherently — and even primarily — political endeavour. “It is widely recognised that, from its foundation in 1823, The Lancet functioned as the principal mouthpiece for the disadvantaged medical classes,” historian of medicine Michael Brown wrote in a 2014 academic article. “It is likewise recognised that, as its editor, Thomas Wakley occupied a uniquely powerful position from which to shape the radical medical political agenda.”

For Wakley, medicine was the arena of a Manichean struggle between good and evil. This played out in the pages of The Lancet as a grand melodrama, with Wakley’s pen supplying a slashing lexicon entirely out of character for a journal at that time. It was a rhetoric of “monsters, spies, and villains, of fetid dungeons and the chains of bondage”, the forces of darkness and evil embodied by the British medical establishment — in particular, surgery — that preyed on the snowy innocence of its eternal victims, the poor and disadvantaged.

In an 1828 editorial, Wakley raged with characteristic hyperbole that: “The Hydra of medical corruption is at its last gasp, and one well-directed blow may rid us of a monster, whose noxious influence has retarded the progress of science, disgraced the character of British surgery, and rendered the profession an object of public scorn.” He was talking about the Royal College of Surgeons. Wakley wrote in the same editorial that while the “tyranny” of the medical establishment was strong “we have possession of the field, and THE LANCET IS UNBROKEN”. In this sense, the publication’s name referred not only to an instrument that could pierce infected skin, but also to the pointed spear used by medieval cavalry. Wakley was the self-styled white knight of public health. The Lancet was his weapon.

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Though it was draped in the language of melodrama, Wakley had in hand a remarkably effective formula for success. His target was a corrupt system, but abstractions rarely make for good targets. Wakley, ever the effective polemicist, understood this. He directed his most ferocious attacks on individuals. In the most notorious case, The Lancet covered a lithotomy (the removal of a kidney stone) from a patient by a surgeon who was the untalented nephew of a luminary figure in British medicine. The surgery was a debacle. The procedure (inserting forceps into the male patient’s urethra to remove the stone — with no anaesthesia) should have taken 10 minutes. It took an hour. The patient, who begged the surgeon to stop, died shortly after.

It wasn’t the facts that got the journal into trouble, but the florid, withering tone it employed. Casting the procedure as a literal tragedy, the article theatrically divided the events into “Act I” and “Act II”. Bransby Cooper, the surgeon who performed the botched lithotomy, sued Wakley for libel and won (though the damages granted by the court were considerably less than what he’d claimed). While The Lancet’s coverage of Cooper’s surgery was deemed libellous, the journal had found a template for how to not simply address medical incompetence and corruption, but to catapult itself to further fame as a crusader for justice. As Brown put it: “By deliberately publishing libellous material and thus positively soliciting prosecutions, Wakley was able to locate his specifically medical campaign within the established traditions of democratic political reform.”

One of the many remarkable things about The Lancet is that it has managed to poignantly maintain its character for two centuries. In the past three years, the journal has again and again found itself at the centre of the most heated Covid controversies and scandals. The most prominent began in the first week of June 2020, less than three months after the WHO declared a pandemic, when the journal was forced to retract a paper on hydroxychloroquine — the anti-malarial drug promoted by Trump as a Covid cure — because it was based on fabricated data.

On its own, a retraction by a journal as prestigious as The Lancet would be noteworthy. But this wasn’t just any paper. For the preceding two months, the media had leaned on The Lancet’s paper, authored by a Harvard Medical School cardiologist, to claim that the Trump-touted drug was not just ineffective in treating Covid, but also dangerous. It became a weapon to attack the President, furthering the notion widespread in the media that no matter what Trump said, the opposite was likely true.

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Nevertheless, it was in the context of not just The Lancet’s hydroxychloroquine retraction but no fewer than seven other Covid-related retractions that the journal clinched the top impact factor — science publishing’s measure of influence — in its category last year, doubling its 2021 score. “I think what you saw with The Lancet is they were clearly chasing big splashy papers that would get a lot of attention,” said Ivan Oransky, the co-founder of Retraction Watch and editor of the journal Spectrum. In this, he says, the journal is no outlier. “The Lancet is like a more public version of what happens at every journal. Everybody’s chasing impact factor, everybody’s chasing particular papers.”

In the wake of the retraction, The Lancet’s editor Richard Horton mounted a very different defence. After acknowledging the paper to be a “monumental fraud”, he averred that the peer-review system that forms the backbone of science publishing isn’t equipped to detect this kind of fraud at all. “If you have an author who deliberately tries to mislead, it’s surprisingly easy for them to do so,” he told The New York Times.

This, however, raises the question of what the science journal is there to do. For Horton, the answer isn’t merely to ensure the integrity of scientific papers. Rather, it’s an explicitly political mission that can be traced directly back to his predecessor, Thomas Wakley: using science to accomplish the objectives of radical politics.

Like Wakley, Horton has created a field-defying public profile by standing on a mountain of accumulated controversy. This includes his scathing open letter to Gaza on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which brought accusations of antisemitism (followed by an apology); The Lancet labelling women as “bodies with vaginas” (followed by an apology); and Horton channelling the ghost of Wakley by attacking the Royal Society as a “shrill and superficial cheerleader” (followed by a semi-apology). There were also accusations that the journal vastly overestimated the number of deaths caused by the war in Iraq, drawing the ire of Christopher Hitchens, who called the study in question “moral idiocy“. And, more recently, Horton has supported Extinction Rebellion, chiding Britain’s scientific community for doing too little for “the struggle for climate justice”.

Far from being a black mark against the publication, each new episode presents Horton with an opportunity to drive home the institutional ethos that has defined the journal for two centuries — namely, that science is, and ought to be, a vanguard for politics. “Some of the great advances, like the 19th-century sanitary movement and the birth of the NHS, were not technical accomplishments but political struggles,” Horton told the Financial Times. “The idea you can strip out politics from medicine or health is historically ignorant. The medical establishment should be much more politicised, not less, in attacking issues like health inequalities and poor access to care.”

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So successful has this strategy been that it was effective in navigating Horton through the mother of all science publishing scandals — the fraudulent paper published by Andrew Wakefield in The Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. It took The Lancet an astonishing 12 years to fully retract it. By that point, the damage had been done, and vaccine-related conspiracy theories had taken root.

Horton’s response to the scandal was to publish a “5,000-word avalanche of denials”, according to Brian Deer, the Sunday Times journalist who broke the story. Even more disturbingly, Horton looked to Wakefield and a number of co-authors of the MMR paper to lead the initial investigation into the fraud. “In short,” Deer wrote in the BMJ, “the accused were investigating themselves — an investigation that Horton would say ‘cleared Wakefield’.”

And in the most quintessentially Lancet fashion, the scandal did nothing to damage Horton. Far from it. In the midst of the scandal, he was awarded the Deans Medal by Johns Hopkins University in 2009. A decade later, he received the Roux Prize. Between those two honours, he received another: in 2015, he was the recipient of the “Chinese Government Friendship” award granted by the CCP. To mark the occasion, Horton offered Lancet readers soaring rhetoric on how China’s “emphasis on friendship, and the free flow of critical ideas that such friendship encourages, might offer lessons to other nations about how scientific co-operation can accelerate social and political change”.

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In the years that followed, Horton would be vocal in his defence of China. In 2016, he attended a symposium organised by the Chinese government body that ran the country’s “Thousand Talents” programme, which, according to The New York Times, “lured” Western scientists into collaboration with China using “lavish funds” that sometimes amounted to quadruple a scientist’s official salary.

There is no evidence to suggest that Horton personally took any money from China. Nevertheless, he became one of the most high-profile voices to praise China for its handling of the pandemic — not only in the Western media but in China too. In a May 2020 interview with China Central Television, he said: “I think we have a great deal to thank China for how it has handled the outbreak in Wuhan.”

Horton also claimed during the interview that questions about whether the virus might have originated from a lab in Wuhan amounted to “disinformation” based on “conspiracy theories”. This narrative would go on to form the basis of the first major publication on the question of Covid’s origin. Published in mid-February 2020, “The Lancet Letter” — as it came to be known — made baseless claims that the lab-leak hypothesis was a racially motivated conspiracy theory. It was later revealed that the man who organised the letter, Peter Daszak, funded the lab in Wuhan in question — and that four of the scientists who signed the letter were affiliated with Daszak’s NGO. More astonishingly, according to The Daily Mail, Horton admitted to being aware of the conflict of interest. Nevertheless, The Lancet waited almost a year and a half to formally disclose the conflicts.

None of this would stop, or even put a dent in, The Lancet’s ceaseless march to prestige and power. This likely has to do with the fact that the journal has built its reputation on a foundation of public scandal and melodrama. It was founded not on the principle of scientific rigour — but as a basis for radical political activism. And it remains an activist publication to this day. If he were alive now, Thomas Wakley would likely be proud of Horton, his intellectual heir, who has remained strikingly true to the founder’s vision. While the formula has brought acclaim for Horton and for the journal, the question for the rest of us is this: who really pays the price for The Lancet’s success?

Bird is right about the need for faith in scientists as we hurtle into a technological revolution based on artificial intelligence — and indeed, to point out how their efforts depend on rigorous testing of theories with facts. Unfortunately, the behaviour of a few key scientific figures in the pandemic, seemingly desperate to appease China and protect their ties to high-risk research, has done the precise opposite.

This is, one prominent US biologist told me, “the biggest scientific scandal of our lifetime”, involving a deliberate attempt to suppress debate on a health catastrophe that killed almost 15 million people in two years. It revolves around a landmark commentary in Nature Medicine stating firmly that the five authors “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This was published in March 2020 — barely six weeks after the stumbling World Health Organization had declared an international emergency.

Now, hundreds of private messages between four of these five scientists, exchanged as they wrote and published this article, have emerged — and they are astonishing. The “super secret” discussions show this arrogant quartet boasting about success, misleading the media, sneering at journalists and making fun of other experts, even a world-renowned epidemiologist co-opted as the fifth author. They condemn China “for trying to rewrite what happened” and disclose Beijing sequenced the genome for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes Covid — just before the rest of the world discovered from a Taiwanese tip-off that the disease had erupted in Wuhan.

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Most significantly, these discussions on Slack expose the quartet’s deep fears that Sars-CoV-2 could have been tied to laboratory research — along with overt signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such suggestions. Clearly these scientists were concerned the disease was engineered. They dismiss the well-worn theory about the virus arising in a Wuhan animal market on several occasions, one calling it a “red herring”. Yet they abruptly switched direction in public despite the lack of discernible new evidence. They carried on debating their suspicions in private after the article’s publication — even as they attacked claims about a possible lab leak in public and their statement was used to condemn such “conspiracy theories”.

“Let’s face it, unless there is a whistleblower from the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] who is going to defect and live in the West under a new identity we are NEVER going to know what happened in the lab,” wrote Eddie Holmes, a British virologist based in Australia with strong contacts in China, at one point a month after publication. “That’s my thinking too,” responded lead author Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist — although he admitted that he was “worried” US diplomatic cables showing concerns over biosecurity in Wuhan, which had been disclosed by The Washington Post, “might have something”.

It is hard to overstate the influence of this single article, accessed almost six million times and cited by 5,942 other specialist papers. The journal’s editor João Monteiro tweeted out a link saying: “Let’s put conspiracy theories about the origin of #SARSCoV2 to rest and help to stop spread of misinformation.” China’s ministry of foreign affairs welcomed its “evidence” — as did the Communist Party chief at WIV. It was highlighted in the White House by Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and adviser to several presidents. Sir Jeremy Farrar, now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, told me it was “the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus” more than one year later as he insisted “no scientific evidence I have seen to date points to outbreak linked to a laboratory”.

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It subsequently emerged through leaks and freedom of information requests that this pair, along with Francis Collins, head of the biggest US science funding body, were involved behind the scenes in the article. Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust, was tasked with hosting a teleconference on February 1 involving the five authors and six other experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser until three months ago. After the call, Farrar confessed he was “50:50” on whether Covid came from a lab — and later was found to have told Collins that Wuhan engaged in “Wild West” research practices. His office admitted to me eventually, after a barrage of emails, that he helped “convene” the Nature Medicine authors.

As Vallance once wrote in another science journal, “inferences should be drawn from attempts to hide interactions”. Unfortunately, the lab leak theory was snarled in tribal politics after it was flagged by Donald Trump, creating a toxic climate for those of us probing the origins in the pandemic’s early days. Now, this article is at the centre of a House subcommittee investigation after Republicans summoned the two US-based authors — Andersen and Bob Garry, a microbiologist in New Orleans — to answer questions earlier this month on their deliberations. Afterwards, the cache of documents and messages were detected in the committee papers and on its website by members of Drastic, a group of independent researchers that has uncovered many key nuggets in this quest for the truth about a deadly disease.

Andersen set up what he called the “super secret” Slack group under the intriguing original name of “project-wuhan-engineering” with Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, on the day of the teleconference. Farrar, portrayed as a driving force behind the paper, urged everyone to keep their deliberations confidential in that first discussion. A few days later, he signed a letter with two Wellcome Trust colleagues in The Lancet journal hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by British scientist Peter Daszak, who runs a body that funnelled substantial US funding for research into bat coronaviruses to WIV.

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The Dane declared to his colleagues that the question they needed to answer was whether Covid emerged due to “evolution or engineering” since both were “really rather plausible” — as remains the case today. Andersen added that Garry would not want the virus to have arisen from “GOF escape” — a reference to controversial Gain of Function research, which boosts the infectivity of viruses and was banned for four years in the US. “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” he said.

The fact they were discussing the concept of a lab leak “shows how plausible it is”, added Rambaut the next day. But the Scottish-based expert urged them to change tack. “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need to be irrefutable evidence. My position is that natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”

Rambaut said revealingly that due to “the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes”. Andersen responded that he agreed this was “a very reasonable conclusion” despite hating “when politics is injected into science”. And this seemed to become their eventual template.

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Much of their subsequent discussion, interspersed with banter, is technical. They discuss RaTG13, the closest known relative to Sars-Cov-2 that was collected by scientists at WIV from a mine hundreds of miles from Wuhan and is linked to the deaths from a mysterious Covid-like respiratory virus of three miners clearing bat guano from a cave. They puzzle over the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses. “Bob [Garry] said the insertion was the 1st thing he would add,” wrote Holmes. “Yeah,” responded Andersen. “The furin site would be the first thing to add for sure.”

Garry even explains at one point how easy it would be — even for a graduate student — to make such a virus by inserting a furin cleavage site into a bat virus such as RaTG13 in cell culture. “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF research we know is happening,” he adds.

Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-founder of the advocacy group Biosafety Now, said he was struck by how strongly the Slack messages made the case for a laboratory origin for Covid. He pointed to a decade-old paper shared among the quartet detailing experiments on bovine coronaviruses, which found that when inserted in different human cells they developed a strikingly similar furin cleavage site. Kinney claims knowledge of this paper flew in the face of their claim in Nature Medicine that such cleavage sites had only been observed after prolonged experiments on avian flu. “Bovine coronavirus is much more closely related and this took place after minimal passage in cell culture,” he said.

The discussions show how Farrar strengthened one key phrase — and that the force of their entire argument was beefed up after an initial draft was rejected by Nature, a more prestigious journal. Last month, Garry admitted to a BBC podcast “maybe we went a little too far” by taking such a strident position. Kinney, who wants the paper to be retracted, believes they succumbed to the intensity of pressure from a variety of directions, including from funders with the cash and power to determine the future of their careers — and that this cover-up could have disastrous consequences for their profession. “Science must be honest,” he said. “The logic in the paper is so weak, the conflicts of interest are not revealed and it now seems clear that the authors did not fully believe their own claims.”

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Emails show the team consulted with Ron Fouchier, a Dutch scientist who pushed the boundaries of Gain of Function work with experiments on avian flu. “Molecular biologists like myself can generate perfect copies of viruses without leaving a trace,” he told them baldly. There is also mention of “intel” in the background — and at one point, members of the quartet accuse “Ron” of leaking details of their activities to a journalist.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of these revelations is how their private debate over the origins carried on after publication of their seismic statement. The March article stated that their “analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”. Yet Andersen wrote on 16 April that he was “still not fully convinced that no culture was involved”. When Holmes pushed back, warning such fears could lead to an end of Gain of Function research, the Danish biologist replied that the top bat researcher at WIV was carrying out “a lot of work that involved isolating and culturing SARS-like viruses in BSL 2” — a reference to the sort of low-level biosecurity comparable to that found in a dental surgery. He linked to four papers on this “concerning work”. And he said again the next day that “we can’t fully disprove [cell] culture… we also can’t fully rule out engineering”.

Later that month, this same scientist told a journalist that the odds of Covid’s accidental release in Wuhan were “a million to one”. And he told those politicians that after considering all the evidence, their group concluded that “culturing” — which can make a virus more infectious and better-adapted for human transmission — had not occurred since the virus most likely spilled over naturally from wildlife. “By the time we published our final version of Proximal Origin I no longer believed that a culturing scenario was plausible,” he stated in written evidence. The evidence now seems to challenge this pivotal claim to Congress.

Andersen claimed they reached this conclusion through scientific inquiry rather than under pressure from Fauci or other funders. Yet he told the others at the outset “it’s well above my pay grade to call the shots on a final conclusion”. The messages show that just before the paper was submitted for publication it was shared with Farrar and Collins, at the time heads of the two most significant funding bodies in Western science. They were “very happy”, reported back Holmes. Coincidentally, Andersen works at Scripps Research in California, a non-profit lab given $8.9 million for work on infectious disease outbreaks from the grant body headed by Collins five months after the statement’s publication — although he insisted to the Congressional subcommittee that this funding decision was agreed before the pandemic.

We still do not know for sure the origins of that destructive pandemic. But we do know it was an extraordinary coincidence that Covid emerged in the Chinese city containing the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia, a place with known safety concerns conducting high-risk research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. We know China covered up the outbreak, hid key data, lied to other countries and refused to allow proper investigation. And we know that accidents and human error can occur during research. So as Andersen said to his pals, the possibility of some kind of lab incident was “friggin’ likely”.

It looks beyond doubt that Beijing’s cover-up was aided by an outrageous attempt to suppress global debate, led by the Western scientists we should have been able to trust to search for the truth and guide an unshackled debate based on hard facts. They were assisted by patsy politicians, supine journalists and complicit scientific publications. This murky affair appears to be the most terrible betrayal of science — and indeed of democracy — that was far darker and more disturbing than those sinister events that felled Oppenheimer seven decades ago.

The Gambia announced its first Covid lockdown, in March 2020, at a fragile moment. Following years of President Yahya Jammeh’s dictatorship, the democratic government installed under President Adama Barrow in 2017 had ushered in hope. There was, for instance, a noticeable drop in Gambian youth’s attempts to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Yet the country’s pandemic response has erased those gains, and also dealt a severe blow to Gambians’ confidence in its young democracy.

The timing of The Gambia’s lockdown could not have been worse. In March 2020, as many African countries shut down in accordance with WHO advice, The Gambia’s main market at Serekunda closed for six weeks. Late March is when Gambians buy seeds to prepare for planting, in readiness for the rains. The unilateral closure of markets meant that seeds were widely unavailable. A transport shutdown meant that even where they did have seeds, people could not take them to their villages for planting. Even when public transport restarted, several weeks later, social distancing requirements meant that buses were only allowed to operate at half capacity. As this was uneconomic, many buses did not run at all.

Anyone who did manage to sow crops then had difficulties in harvesting, since social distancing protocols meant that no more than two people could work a plot at one time. When food was finally taken to market, the forced impoverishment of the population meant that few could afford to buy it and much went to waste: the UN estimated on-farm losses of 50% in Africa in 2020.

The aggregated effect of The Gambia’s Covid response was a massive reduction in farming revenue and in available food. In effect, these were policies guaranteed to cause hunger and malnutrition — and to stoke food price inflation through the destruction of stores and harvests. Food inflation quickly grew in 2021 and remains in double digits, much higher than pre-pandemic levels.

At the same time, and as in the rest of the world, the Gambian government threw money at Covid-19. Donor advice on hygiene saw all public institutions forced to buy large plastic vats and gallons of hand wash and disinfectant. This, and the costs of implementing Western biomedical surveillance regimes, was paid for by taking on new debts: the Gambian government implemented a 500 million dalasi (US$10 million) emergency response fund — a vast sum for a country with a per-capita GDP of US$772. This was financed by a World Bank loan of the same value, and by an IMF loan of US$21.3 million.

Meanwhile, Gambian tax revenues fell by half in 2020, owing to the economic cataclysm, meaning that debt repayments stacked up even higher. This is money that The Gambia does not have. It was frequently said that “we could have fed the country for 10 years for the amount of money that we spent on Covid-19”. The Gambia is beset by poverty and malnutrition. Structurally indebted to Western creditors, with a median age below 18, and where a teacher’s monthly salary is under £50, the spending of these sums to implement Western protocols for a disease quickly known to affect mostly the elderly and obese is scandalous.

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Gambians themselves protested vociferously. Some tried to break into Serekunda market to continue working, and others — when a mask was demanded — asked who would pay for it. But the question remains: why did Gambian politicians implement these policies? In fact, creditor pressure from the EU and other Western embassies, from the World Bank and the WHO, made it almost impossible to do anything else.

Still today, billboards line the country with EU funding logos, indicating the “correct” way to wear masks. This offers a flashback to the bombardment which Gambian officials received from Western agencies on handling Covid-19. Weekly flurries of information arrived with instructions on “appropriate” behaviour. Weekly “situation reports” were demanded from the Gambian Ministry of Health by these partners: these reports had to indicate the effectiveness of the Covid protocols, and case numbers. This information was a prerequisite for further access to the finance so essential in the economic meltdown.

The Covid vaccine rollout made this dynamic even clearer. When by late 2021, vaccination numbers remained low, the UK High Commission warned Gambian counterparts that tourists would not return until all those in the tourist industry were vaccinated. Indeed, the UK only removed The Gambia from the red-list of countries once the vaccine rollout had “decreased risk to British nationals”. In the end, public officials were virtually forced into vaccination. Most of these vaccines were not gifted to the country, but paid for through World Bank loans which increased structural indebtedness.

The consequences have been vast. The impact on Gambian young women has been especially severe. The closure of schools in the pandemic made schoolgirls vulnerable to being sent away for marriage by parents desperate to earn some dowry money to assuage the pain of the pandemic restrictions. One expert in the field described how early marriage had become common in The Gambia during the pandemic.

Secondly, there has been a huge increase in Gambian youths seeking to migrate to Europe illegally. The restrictions shattered the Gambian economy. Hotels, which employ more than 50,000 Gambians, were closed. The youths lost their jobs and many of them were forced into the dangerous ‘backway’ journey to Europe. Indeed, the fledgling democratic government’s noticeable achievements in youth job creation were all but wiped out by the pandemic, and the 2022-23 season tourism was still only at 30% of pre-pandemic levels.

Another harm came in the primary health sector. The pandemic and the endless Western agency briefings as to the requirements on vaccination, social distancing and masking meant that frail health facilities were completely rewired to focus on Covid-19 patients. This meant that as malaria, fevers and digestive diseases took their usual toll on the population, no one did much. The medical personnel, drugs, ambulances and facilities were all dedicated to fighting the pandemic in accordance with the demands of Western embassies and NGOs. This made maternity, child health and outpatient services suffer disruptions which were, in many cases, fatal. There was also a severe disruption in the Meningitis A, Tetanus, and Hepatitis children immunisation schedules, which still have not completely recovered.

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Given the devastating impacts of the pandemic response on the general population, Covid vaccine hesitancy is strong. A recent survey suggested that close to 70% of Gambian adults surveyed trusted “prayers” more than the vaccines. Many accuse healthcare officials of diagnosing simple cases of malaria as Covid-19. Popular distrust extended to the Government’s efforts to alleviate the food scarcity caused by the restrictions. A series of corruption scandals have broken pointing to the embezzlement of Covid-19 relief funds, while key suppliers contracted by the World Food Programme over two years failed to deliver the required 8,550 tons of rice intended as relief for needy families.

All of this could take decades to fix. Austerity has been forced on the country by external creditors and their incessant demands for information and compliance to protocols that, to most Gambians, were useless — and where Covid-19 was far from the greatest health threat they faced. As elsewhere around the world, vast levels of corruption were involved with the effective printing of money that went with the Covid response. Meanwhile, international solidarity collapsed, as Western activists appeared far more concerned by the political landscape in their own countries than by the effect of these policies on African lives — about which many remain reticent to this day.

What policymakers do not appear to have grasped are the consequences that all this will have. For all multi-billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates’s plans, and the current US government’s ideas about future pandemic preparedness and mass vaccine manufacturing in Africa, it is clear that no citizen of that continent will be prepared to trust future lockdowns, social distancing measures or mandatory vaccinations. While policymakers opine and “official narratives” are constructed, the experience in The Gambia, and across Africa as a whole, will ensure its response to the next pandemic will be nothing of the kind.

* Co-contributor Hassoum Ceesay is writing in a personal capacity

And so the biological-industry complex was also born, swept into being as the US started to reckon with the inevitability of biological warfare and bioterrorism — an inevitability that arrived just one week after 9/11, when envelopes of inhalation anthrax were mailed around the country. But, as with the military-industrial complex, the emergence of America’s biodefense infrastructure was about much more than defending against potential threats. It was about anticipating them, understanding them, spying on them, and creating them. In many ways, the sense of urgency echoed the Manhattan Project, which showed just how quickly a “scientific-technological elite” could coalesce around a military project of strategic value. Consequently, American biodefence today spans the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture, the FBI, the State Department, and the Intelligence Community (not to mention state-level agencies).

Curiously, however, it also appears to have spread into American foreign aid. In April, Samantha Power, the former human rights activist and Obama hand now serving as administrator of United States Agency for International Development (USAID), testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Rand Paul asked: “Did USAID fund coronavirus research in Wuhan?” In response, Power was evasive, referring repeatedly to USAID funding of the Wuhan lab having taken place “before my time”. But Power’s testimony raises a much bigger question: Why was USAID funding risky research in a Chinese lab that the US Department of Energy and the FBI now assess to be the source of Covid at all?

Since the heady days of the pandemic, when top scientists resorted to burner phones and clandestine meetings, journalists have uncovered thousands of pages of redacted emails, deleted virus sequences, and concealed events related to the outbreak of Covid. Among the key revelations of this years-long investigation was the enormous sums of US government funding spent on risky virus research around the world, but with a particular emphasis on China. The vast majority of this money was funnelled through a New York-based NGO called EcoHealth Alliance, led by  British zoologist Peter Daszak. And by far the largest portion of US money channelled through EcoHealth — no less than $65 million — came from USAID. Not even the pandemic could put a stop to investment. As recently as late 2021, well after EcoHealth Alliance had been rebuked by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for improper practices regarding its funding of the Wuhan lab, USAID gave EcoHealth Alliance a further $4.67 million.

This was merely the latest in a long series of funding rounds. EcoHealth received its first installment from USAID in 2009. The money would come from a then-novel USAID programme called Predict, whose mission was to hunt out viruses that jump from animals to humans and could potentially cause a pandemic. Predict was the brainchild of Dennis Carroll, an infectious diseases expert who had run USAID’s Pandemic Influenza and Other Emerging Threats (PIOET) Unit.

Carroll had permanently joined USAID in 2005 — a critical year for the agency, but also for the country. Two years prior, an outbreak of avian flu, or H5N1, had decimated poultry stocks and infected around 1,000 people around the world. The outbreak heightened a sense of terror of biological agents that had gripped the Bush Administration since the anthrax attack. In response, the Bush administration increased non-military biodefence funding from a paltry $60 million 2001 to a staggering $2 billion in 2003 — in addition to $6 billion dedicated solely to the development and stockpiling of vaccines. Just as importantly, with the 2004 presidential directive called Biodefense for the 21st Century, based on the assumption that “a bioweapons attack could devastate America”, Bush would lay the foundations for America’s first biodefence infrastructure.

At USAID, a similarly seismic change was underway. Under the leadership of Andrew Natsios, a longtime Republican political operative who started his career in politics running the 1990 primary campaign of George H.W. Bush, USAID would take a dramatic shift towards America’s defence establishment, becoming “a quasi-security agency”, as British professor of conflict studies Alice Hills wrote in a 2006 paper. This began in 2005 when USAID created its Office of Military Affairs (now the Office of Civilian Military Cooperation). “Uniforms [of US military personnel] in the corridors of the Ronald Reagan Building that houses USAID are now so commonplace they are not even noticed,” Henrietta Fore, the USAID administrator from 2007 to 2009, wrote in Parameters journal in 2008. “This is not the way things used to be.”

In 2009, USAID was forced to ramp up its efforts when another seismic event in the world of biological-threat preparedness took place: a novel influenza virus called H1N1, swine flu, which infected around one billion people and killed tens of thousands. In May 2009, Carroll testified before Congress that USAID had announced the launch of a new Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) Program, which would create “a global early warning system for the threat posed by diseases of animal origin that infect humans”. The programme, which in various forms ran until 2019 was slated to consist of four projects: Predict, Respond, Identify and Prevent — with the first, Predict, granted around $200 million in funding over two five-year funding cycles. (A follow-up USAID virus program called STOP Spillover was announced in May 2020 with a $100 million budget before getting quietly shelved.)

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With Predict, USAID sought to “identify the emergence of new infectious diseases in high-risk wildlife, such as bats, rodents, and non-human primates, that could pose a major threat to human health”. Under Carroll’s leadership, however, Predict went much further than identifying the “emergence” of dangerous new viruses. Instead, it started actively hunting them out. It sampled more than 164,000 animals and people and sourced more than 1,100 unique viruses, including strains of Ebola, Marburg, MERS- and SARS-like coronaviruses, 949 of which were not previously known. In doing so, Predict introduced a completely new kind of pandemic risk: giving these deadly, unknown viruses a direct pathway to become introduced to large human populations living nearby.

Given the risk, the benefits would presumably need to be at least as great. But a highly influential 2017 paper by Emma L. Geoghegan and Edward Holmes demonstrated that the predictive value of the programme wasn’t merely of dubious value but of no value at all. “[E]fforts to predict disease emergence commonly conflate fundamentally different evolutionary and epidemiological time scales, and are likely to fail because of the enormous number of unsampled viruses that could conceivably emerge in humans,” the paper stated.

Nevertheless, the programme’s leaders were certain that Predict worked. A 2012 article published by the journal PLOS concluded that, as a result of Predict and EPT: “China has made a series of changes to public health policy and infrastructure specifically targeting SARS-like illnesses… It is likely that any future spillover from SARS… would be less likely to result in international spread.” One of the main authors of the paper was Dennis Carroll. Another was Peter Daszak.

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It would be less than seven years from the publication of that paper before a pandemic would be caused precisely by a SARS-like pathogen originating in China. This raises the very serious question of how the world’s leading experts on pandemics, who commanded nine-figure budgets to monitor populations for exactly this kind of emerging virus, failed to even detect its emergence.

The reality is that Predict was doing more than detecting dangerous pathogens: it was helping labs make them. In May 2021, the office of US House Representative Guy Reschenthaler released a report showing that USAID had funnelled $1.1 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) through the EcoHealth Alliance. Among the work funded by USAID was a 2015 study jointly conducted by Shi Zhengli, the infamous “bat lady” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the University of North Carolina researcher Ralph Baric, which used reverse genetics to insert a spike protein from a wild coronavirus capable of binding to a human receptor into the SARS-1 virus. The new lab-made virus was shown to bind to the human receptors and replicate “efficiently”, according to a House Foreign Affairs committee report.

The 2015 study — which the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists characterised as a “prototype” for making SARS-CoV-2 in a lab — was considered so dangerous that its authors did not upload the resulting sequence to GenBank, the NIH’s genetic research repository, for fear it might “fall into the wrong hands”, as Baric, its lead author, would later attest. But the study also omitted one other critical piece of information: USAID had provided funding for the study. Nature Medicine, the journal that published the paper, was forced to add a “Corrigendum” clarifying that the aid agency had in fact funded it.

Funding this kind of research in China added a whole other dimension of risk. According to the State Department, the Wuhan Institute began collaborating with the People’s Liberation Army no later than 2017. NBC News reported that in spring 2018, the Wuhan Institute’s Shi collaborated with military scientists specifically on coronavirus research. And in April 2020, it was revealed that the Wuhan Institute worked with Chinese military researchers to conduct research on Covid in humanised mice cells for the purposes of investigating the new disease. (US government investigators later found that the mice cells used specifically for Covid testing would have been created in the summer of 2019 — months before the pandemic began.)

There is little doubt that the US had, and still has, a global premium on the equipment, expertise, and ambition to do this type of research. So why would the NIH, let alone the USAID, fund such research in, of all places, a lab in China?

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Among the four pillars of “Biodefense in the 21st Century”, Bush’s strategy that gave rise to programmes like Predict, was one called “Threat Awareness”. It indicated that the US was “improving the Intelligence Community’s ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence [on bioweapons]”. Of all places, China would almost certainly be at the top of any list of bioweapons intelligence targets. Though the nation is a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the State Department found in 1993 that its bioweapons activities continued long after its accession in 1984. A 2002 report by The Nonproliferation Review found that one of a number of PRC-connected factories producing bioweapons was located in Wuhan. It was there that Shi Zhengli was conducting her own cutting-edge virus research, though under the banner of scientific research.

While failing to anticipate, or even identify, the Covid pandemic, Predict could have given American intelligence access to the findings of virus researchers such as Shi Zhengli, not just in China but around the world. In which case, given the sums associated with America’s defence and intelligence budgets, the project’s hefty $200 million lifetime budget would have paid for itself.

It wouldn’t have been the first time that international aid programmes have been used to gather intelligence. In 2014, it was reported that USAID had been caught trying to create a version of Twitter in Cuba that would help the CIA influence the political situation, with an eye to overthrowing the government. “USAID, perhaps, is the new CIA here,” Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive’s Cuba said at the time. The programme backfired, eventually allowing the Castro government to spy on the 40,000 Cubans who signed up.

Have USAID’s intelligence efforts failed again? In September 2019, the Wuhan Institute, with no explanation, took its database of viruses offline — a database populated by efforts funded, in part, by Predict. It was only months later, in March 2020, that Predict was brought to a close. But far from being the end of the programme, Predict’s demise was only the beginning of a much bigger and bolder incarnation of it.

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The Global Virome Project (GVP), a $3-billion private venture to “identify and characterize, within a decade, 99% of all zoonotic viruses with epidemic/pandemic potential”, was envisioned as Predict on steroids. Not coincidentally, it was created and led by the same people at the centre of Predict, including Dennis Carroll, Peter Daszak and Predict’s principal investigator Jonna Mazet. Like Predict, the GVP would be rooted in tight cooperation not just with the Chinese government (one of the co-authors of the Science paper announcing its launch was George Gao, then head of the Chinese CDC), but specifically the lab in Wuhan. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology… is the forerunner to the Global Virome Project,” a 2018 State Department cable from the US consulate in Wuhan reported. “China has expressed interest in building the GVP database… Other countries…are skeptical on whether China could remain transparent as a ‘gatekeeper’ for this information.”

In addition to the Chinese government, a core partner in the GVP was health-tech company Metabiota. Led by a PR-savvy “virus hunter” named Nathan Wolfe, Metabiota played a key role in USAID’s Predict, despite having been accused of running a “bungled” response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. The company received around $24 million in funding from the Department of Defense, funding that is alleged to have been facilitated by Hunter Biden, whose investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, led a $25 million investment round in Metabiota, investing $10 million for a 13% stake in the company. Emails revealed by US Right to Know show that, while building the GVP, Carroll (using his USAID email address) earmarked hundreds of thousands of dollars in USAID funding to Metabiota, possibly in violation of federal law.

Since then, even in the wake of a pandemic that it might have caused, the power of the biological-industrial complex has continued to grow. Funding to EcoHealth Alliance has been fully restored. Everyone from Anthony Fauci to Samantha Power to Anthony Blinken is able to calmly sit in front of a powerful senator and explain that documents regarding the research done at Wuhan, subsidised by USAID, NIH and the State Department, will not, after all, be forthcoming. When I asked USAID about Predict, a spokesperson said: it “focused on understanding viral risk” and lowered “the pandemic risk in several ways”. They also stated: “USAID has never funded gain of function or dual use research of concern activities.” But it still remains unclear what exactly it did fund. With 20 million people dead and the world no closer to answers regarding what actually caused the pandemic — not the scientific method, but the policies, people, and institutional corruption — we can only continue to pose questions that have, for three years, gone glaringly unasked.

Earlier this week, he visited the UnHerd Club for a wide-ranging interview about God, his love for WB Yeats, the heroism of JK Rowling, and how he changed his mind about vaccine hesitancy. Below is an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Richard Dawkins, welcome to UnHerd. You’re launching a podcast, “The Poetry of Reality”. Why?

Richard Dawkins: I’ve always felt that science is poetic, and deserves to be treated as a part of our culture. The magnificent fact that the universe has given rise to us, supremely complicated beings capable of even understanding where we came from, ought to be a topic of great literature. Science is the poetry of reality.

FS: Am I wrong to detect a softening in your later years? The choice of podcast name seems designed to give the impression that you’re a more romantic, less rigidly rational spirit than people realise?

RD: I think I’ve always been a romantic spirit and I think that’s what science inspires, or ought to inspire, as opposed to the cold, hard, dispassionate image that science can be mistaken as projecting.

FS: We’re talking at a time in which once-unassailable scientific ideas have become… complicated. Gender is an obvious one. Do you worry that the scientific institutions you cherish have become overly attuned to faddish politics, and that science risks compromising its reputation?

RD: Certainly, I have noticed that some of the leading scientific journals have capitulated to political pressure to become unscientific, and to betray what is an obvious scientific dichotomy between male and female. This seems to have been betrayed for political reasons by people in editorial positions in leading scientific journals who ought to know better.

FS: Another example might be Nature magazine, which has stated that part of its mission is to work to correct racial injustices — it seems to be a political agenda rather than a scientific one.

RD: There’s an analogue of original sin, that white people are expected to feel guilt for what their ancestors — or maybe just people of the same skin colour — did to other people of a different colour. It’s as though we are supposed to inherit the guilt of people of the past, just because we have the same colour skin as they did. And that is, I think, racism. It is actual racism to confer guilt upon people because of the colour of their skin.

FS: So would you prefer a completely colour-blind world, as far as institutions are concerned? This is controversial in the United States right now, with the Supreme Court reconsidering whether affirmative action has a place in education. For years, admissions criteria for university science departments have considered an applicant’s race. Where do you stand on that?

RD: If I were in favour of any sort of affirmative action, it might be in favour of those who have been disadvantaged in their own past, through poverty. And if they happen to be black, fair enough — but simply because they’re black? No, that’s the wrong sort of affirmative action. That is racism.

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FS: And if that resulted in fewer black people going to elite colleges, you’d be fine with that, on the grounds that places would be going to the most deserving candidates?

RD: Well, they would probably be the people most able to benefit from those places, yes. But there is also something to be said for bending over backwards to help people from a disadvantaged background who have a genuine ability that hasn’t had a chance to flourish — and if they were to get to Harvard, then they might be able to. And so I am in favour not of affirmative action but what I would call ‘intelligent looking’ for talent, which is what we try to do at Oxford. In my time, we did, anyway. We tried to recognise that somebody might be not so well groomed for an entrance exam or for an interview, but who showed signs of genuine talent.

FS: You’ve also been critical of New Zealand schools including indigenous origin stories in science classes. How do you think people of a scientific mindset should treat the irrational, or intuitions for which there is no clear proof? Is it not possible that poetic and symbolic ways of describing such things get us close to a different kind of truth? 

RD: My favourite poet is W.B. Yeats, a notorious mystic. Obviously, I have no sympathy whatsoever with his belief in fairies and things like that, but I resonate with his poetry. I think it’s wonderful. It’s hard for me to explain what I mean, but I suppose that’s the point. I’m not trying to be a scientist when I do that. I’m resonating as a human being. In the early poems — “The Wind Among the Reeds”, for example – I empathise with this lovelorn young man, struggling with his feelings of lost love. And I get that, but not as a scientist.

FS: But those feelings of being a lovelorn young man are true, are they not? They exist in the universe?

RD: They are true for this subject, what’s going on in his own mind, yes.

FS: Hearing you talk about a Yeats poem, you don’t sound that different to religious people. Just as when you talk about the beauty of the natural world and the miracles of science — although you might not use the word “miracle” — it feels as though you’re moved by that. Perhaps the difference between you is more a question of language?

RD: I think there’s something wrong with that idea. According to supernaturalism — which is what I take to mean religiousness — there is something beyond physics, beyond the material world, which I do not believe. I do not believe in anything beyond the material world, no matter how poetic you feel, no matter how much you’re in love, or no matter how deeply you feel emotionally about looking at nature, looking at fields of wheat, looking at the stars. These are all human reactions, which I feel as strongly as anyone. But there is nothing supernatural about that.

As a human being, when contemplating the Milky Way, I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach. There’s nothing supernatural about that, it’s something in my nervous system. That’s not to demean it — it feels real to me. But it’s not truth in the scientific sense, which really is actually physically true about the material world.

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FS: In the realm of theoretical physics, for example, there are whole dimensions of the universe that we simply don’t know how to describe yet. Is there not a chance that some of those feelings might be perceiving physical realities that we don’t yet have a way to analyse?

RD: As it happens, this evening I’m going to a meeting in London with Lawrence Krauss, the American theoretical physicist, who has just written a book called The Known Unknowns, which is about all that we don’t yet know. And physicists are proud to admit that there’s a lot that they don’t know, but they’re working on it. It is entirely possible — probable, even — that there are beings in the universe who already do understand things that are beyond our understanding, and that our brains simply aren’t big enough to understand these profundities about the universe. But to somehow equate those with mystical feelings that you get when you’re in love, or when you contemplate a rose, or religious feelings, that’s a naive confusion.

FS: Your work on evolution and natural selection holds that most things about human nature and the human body, in our evolved cells, are there for a purpose.

RD: Yes — and I might be in a minority of biologists for believing that. For that reason, I’ve been called an ultra-Darwinian. Quite a lot of other biologists feel there’s a lot in life that is not actually Darwinian, in the sense that it’s not actually designed by natural selection, but is there by chance.

FS: In which case, should we not view the religious impulse, or mystical impulses, and those feelings that we were just talking about, with more respect? Should we not view them as more likely to be more intelligent than purely a kind of mistake, possibly being wiser and more purposeful than you have been prepared to admit?

RD: Not wiser and more purposeful, but possibly there for a reason. I readily agree that, because it’s a human universal, pretty much, and therefore logically that means that it is highly probably that it is of Darwinian advantage. That, I get. It doesn’t mean religion is true, though. I mean, you could say, the tendency to be religious, the tendency to believe in something supernatural, the tendency to think there’s something higher than you, the tendency to think that people also can connect… all this could have been built in by natural selection.

I often suggest that this could be because children have been naturally selected to be respectful of what their parents tell them, what their culture tells them, because they need that in order to survive. Religion flourishes because children who are vulnerable, in a dangerous world, need to be instantly obeying their parents advice, not to endanger themselves. You don’t question what your parents say, you just believe what they say, which means the child mind is pre-programmed by Darwinian natural selection to be credulous of what elders tell them. And that is fertile ground for falsehood, as well as truth.

FS: But if it’s there by natural selection, it must be a net positive?

RD: A net positive in a survival sense, yes – but it doesn’t make it true. It’s not true that if you sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, you will cause the crops to succeed. But it’s a net positive in the sense that it’s a by-product of the impulse to obey authority, because the impulse to obey authority, in general, is a net positive.

FS: In that context, the latest mostly secular generation could be seen as a species-wide experiment. It hasn’t happened before in history — and you had a fair bit to do with bringing it about. Judging on the evidence, how do you think the secular experiment is going?

RD: The statistics I’ve seen suggest it is slowly getting better. The statistics I’ve seen suggest that the number of people who profess some kind of religion is going down. It’s now below 50%, which is the first time that a British census has shown that to be the case, which I think is good. Similarly in America, which is lagging behind, in this respect, but it’s still going in the right direction. Those are the only figures I’ve seen and, all I can do is offer you my intuition, which is worthless.

FS: There’s a book by Tom Holland called Dominion, which has been very influential in suggesting that a lot of what we consider to be secular Western ways of thinking on morality is still drenched in Christian thinking. So perhaps, although people aren’t describing themselves as religious in the census, they’ve just moved those religious intuitions into other realms?

RD: Yes, I think that’s very likely true. You can make a good religious case for the trans debate. I make an analogy with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the wine in the Aristotelian accidentals remains wine but, in its true substance, becomes blood. Similarly, the trans person: he has a penis, but that’s a mere accidental, and in true substance he’s a woman. I mean, that’s a perfect analogy to transubstantiation. It even begins with the same prefix.

FS: So which is better, then? We’ve gone through this whole process, we’ve had a whole generation who’ve now been brought up reading your books, and Christopher Hitchens, who are now ardent and proud atheists, and then they end up believing things like you just described. And that has all sorts of societal repercussions. Should we now look back on the New Atheist movement with regret?

RD: No, I don’t get that at all. It’s just an interesting analogy to point out that there is a strong religious element to a current political fad. So what?

FS: The question is: empirically speaking, between conventional religion and what appears to be its successor ideology, which will be proven by history to be better for the flourishing of the species? Early signs are that this new kind of religion, which thinks it’s secular, has some major problems.

RD: Well, if you care about the flourishing of the species, yes, but I care about truth.

FS: So you don’t care about the flourishing of the species?

RD: Well I do care about it as a human being, but more deeply I care about truth.

FS: And if your sense of truth would lead to the annihilation of the species, would you be content with that?

RD: No I would not be content with that. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t happen. I think that truth actually is a genuine value. I believe that a true scientific outlook on the world would actually be best for the flourishing of humankind.

FS: We have to talk about the most recent scientific controversy of our age: Covid. It feels like we are now emerging from the Covid years, when our trust in science was enormously damaged. Millions of people now intuitively distrust what they are told by scientific authorities. Do you think Covid was a moment of scientific glory, or something more problematic?

RD: I think glory, with regards to the unprecedented speed that vaccines were developed. And that is a tribute to molecular biology. It was possible, almost instantly, to sequence the genome of the virus, and to transmit the genome directly to labs all over the world, who set to work developing vaccines with, as I said, unprecedented speed. That is magnificent. Whether humans mistrust or trust science, that’s their business.

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FS: But the vaccines were enormously over-promised in terms of their efficacy. They were originally sold to us as being 95% effective in preventing infection. That was then endlessly revised downwards and, in the end, we were told vaccination didn’t stop transmission, it only improved outcomes for vulnerable patients.

RD: The speed with which things were happening means that it’s very difficult for people entrusted with authority to give advice. And normally, there’s much more time in order to examine all the evidence and give balanced, wise advice. When you’re required to give advice almost instantly, there inevitably are going to be mistakes.

FS: During the pandemic, you condemned people who were sceptical about the pandemic response. You tweeted that: “Some faith heads have a ritual of handling snakes, believing faith will protect them. When they’re bitten, they deserve it, they alone suffer. Vaccine refusal is different. Others are endangered. It’s as though their faith told them to release rattlesnakes in supermarkets.” This was April 6, 2021. Your vilification of people who were hesitant about taking the vaccine, in retrospect, seems too much, doesn’t it? Do you take that back?

RD: Well, I had become aware of the conventional wisdom about vaccination, which is that it’s a matter of altruism, because it’s not simply a matter of saying: “This is my private business, whether I’m vaccinated or not.” And in the case of the measles vaccine, for example, it really is a matter of altruism, because if you don’t get vaccinated, then then you are part of the problem if there’s a measles epidemic. And I thought that that would be the case with Covid. Now, it’s not entirely clear that that was right. And so, to that extent, I would take that back, yes.

FS: Do you also think that Covid showed how vulnerable scientists and institutions such as universities have become in this social media age — to peer pressure, to a fear of being cancelled and of being on the wrong side of mainstream thought?

RD: Yes. There are some heroic scientists who go off on their own and don’t need grants and just get on with their research — people like James Lovelock, who I’ve criticised on other grounds, but…

FS: Recently, universities have not been good at defending their own when they come under assault, on social media and elsewhere, for taking an unpopular position. The trends we saw with American universities during Covid, but there are lots of other examples. Professor Kathleen Stock springs to mind. Surely we can be constructively critical of universities for this?

RD: I think we can, and I think Kathleen Stock is a very good example of somebody who’s been appallingly treated. I think she’s a real hero. I think J.K. Rowling is a real hero. She’s not at a university, but she’s another one. Yes, I’ve been rather shocked at the way universities have not stood up to a rabble, a lynch mob, really, going after people like Kathleen Stock. But you can also sympathise with a university vice-chancellor with a baying mob of students after their blood. It’s difficult, but I think in that case they should hold the line.

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FS: Another concept you’ve defended recently is AI, and whether we might be leaving human nature behind altogether, either through some kind of AI future, or via extraterrestrial life. With your materialist hat on, explain how you think AI could supplant organic life?

RD: Well, the brain is a material object — and what it does is, although we don’t understand it fully yet, it must have a scientific explanation. And it must be the case that whatever the brain can do, in principle, could be done by an AI simulation. So, an artificial intelligence must be capable of doing what the human brain can do — and there’s no obvious reason why it shouldn’t be greatly superior to it.

It is conceivable that an artificial intelligence could greatly surpass what the human brain can do. And in many ways, that’s a very frightening prospect. People, many people, are very frightened of it. I haven’t decided whether I’m frightened of it or not. I think I could imagine it going both ways. But, as a materialist, I can’t deny that it’s possible.

FS: People might also be surprised by how much credence you give to the possibility of extraterrestrial life. How likely do you think it is that life exists on other planets?

RD: Very likely — especially when you think of the sheer number of opportunities in the universe for it to exist. It has arisen here and evolved to the point where it can understand its own existence. That was a ridiculously improbable event, but it happened. So why deny that it has happened anywhere else in the universe?

FS: So, on the balance of probabilities, we’re talking more than 50% likely, in your estimation, that there is life beyond our own planet?

RD: Yes. And I would make a distinction between life existing elsewhere, which is far more probable, than actual intelligent life, because one’s got to come from the other. We might well discover intelligent life through radio communication, but we will never be visited by it. Flying saucers, no — very unlikely. But visitation by radio communication, electromagnetic waves , that’s not totally unlikely. And I think that SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is a worthwhile enterprise that should be pursued and funded.

FS: You don’t think interstellar travel will become possible through some breakthrough in physics?

RD: Well, that’s very, very far off in the future, because of the huge distances involved. So far, we are waiting for interplanetary travel within the solar system. Light years is a very long distance for solid, physical objects to travel.

FS: So if Elon Musk succeeds at getting human beings to Mars in your lifetime, would you volunteer for his next flight?

RD: No, I wouldn’t volunteer… actually perhaps yes. If I knew I was dying, it might be the last thing I’d do.

* “The Poetry of Reality” With Richard Dawkins is available to download now.

As you may have guessed, Young is no doctor. But for 25 years, up until his most recent arrest in the summer of 2022, the retired pro-tennis player from Utah peddled his life-threatening cures to sick and desperate Americans. He is not alone. Far beyond the familiar landscape of yoga, chiropractics and aromatherapy lies a Wild West of supposed cure-alls, many of them driven by small-scale entrepreneurs who hope to parlay a unique product or brand into a sprawling business empire. Such characters have always floated around the margins of America’s healthcare scene, but right now, fringe practitioners are having a moment. The alternative-medicine lobby that backs them has never been more powerful.

The story of its rise to power begins in the mid-Nineties, around the same time that Young first started dabbling in alternative health: pairing tennis-related diet and exercise advice with a line of branded dietary supplements. The supplement industry was going through a sea change, thanks to the nascent alternative healthcare lobby, which scored a massive and improbable victory in the halls of Congress in 1994. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act broadened the definition of a food supplement to include almost any vitamin, mineral, plant or hormone. It also, critically, shifted the burden of proof away from manufacturers to the federal Food and Drug Administration, which had to identify dangerous products on a case-by-case basis, a resource-intensive prospect that allows tens of thousands of quacks to sell shady products with relative impunity.

This lax regulatory environment made selling supplements far more profitable. Between 1994 and 2002, the US supplement industry mushroomed from $4 billion in annual sales to $18.7 billion, and the number of dietary supplements advertised grew too, from 4,000 to 29,000. Bolstered by the efforts of its Republican Senator, Orrin Hatch, the supplement industry was centred in Utah, which became a sort of Silicon Valley of suspect health claims.

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This was the ideal environment for Young, who rose to fame after publishing a bestselling book on the importance of an alkaline diet, The pH Miracle Diet, in 2000. The book was innocuous enough — it recommended exercise and a plant-heavy diet, and offered a blend of American can-doism and hucksterism that is tolerated, or even looked upon fondly, by the American public. This is where Young might have stayed, had his fantastical beliefs not led him down a much darker path.

The problem was that Young thought he had made a paradigm-shifting discovery: that germs were a myth, and that all diseases were caused by the body becoming overly acidic. When he began treating cancer patients at his upscale resort, a former grapefruit and avocado ranch in Valley Centre, he took his groundless theory even further. His de-acidifying treatments denied patients the chance to seek proper healthcare: Naima Houder-Mohammed, a 27-year-old captain in the British military with advanced breast cancer, drained her family’s finances to raise more than $77,000 (£62,700) to fund a visit to the Miracle Ranch.

Young might never have gone so far had the healthcare profession maintained its integrity. In the early days, there was a fairly clear division between people like Young and licensed medical doctors, a division that was enforced by state laws and various gatekeeper institutions — public health agencies, medical universities, and legacy media outlets, none of which would consider Young’s medical theory to be worthy of consideration.

But the alt-health lobby, swelling with profits and energy, began seeking ways to bypass these gatekeepers and make unfettered health claims directly to consumers. By 2005, supplement manufacturers were partnering with libertarian lobbyists to aggressively court small businesses in the alt-health community. Lobbyists held hundreds of Health Freedom Expos, where fringe practitioners gathered to hear them out. Their sales pitch focused on an appealing libertarian message: medical freedom. Instead of convincing the established gatekeepers of medical science that, say, herbs could treat cancer, practitioners should instead convince the public and their elected representatives that Americans had a fundamental right to buy the medicine of their choosing, whether it worked or not.

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It was an ingenious strategy. By 2010, Americans were spending $34 billion out of pocket for alternative healthcare, and industry analysts estimate that spending increased by more than 50% between 2010 and 2020. An estimated 72 million American adults now use some form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

The political makeup of CAM users shifted too. In 2003, it was extremely progressive Leftists who favoured alternative medicine, a hangover from America’s hippy movement. Twenty years on, it is mainly Conservatives, particularly when it comes to taking dietary supplements. A 2019 industry survey found that the American South has higher rates of supplement use than anywhere else in the country, while a 2008 survey found Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to be heavy users of supplements.

How did a culture known for peace, love, happiness, marijuana and socialism transform into a hotbed of gun rights, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and nationalism? The answer lies in the “medical freedom” movement, which very quickly found synergy with Republican politicians in the early 2010s, after 18 House Republicans, led by Georgia’s Tom Price, first floated the Medical Freedom Act. Not only were Republicans loathe to decry freedom in any form, but presidential candidates including Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Herman Cain also found that they could monetise their campaign email lists to sell quacky medical products to their supporters. At the same time, Right-wing media personalities including Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro began promoting supplements and other alt-med products.

It wasn’t long before millions of conservative Americans found themselves bombarded with glowing sales pitches about herbal Viagra, brain-enhancing pills, pendants to ward off electromagnetic frequencies, and handheld lasers that could cure cancer. The pandemic only hastened this trend, as medical freedom lobbyists touted their miracle health cures and rail against mandatory mask-wearing and vaccines.

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Of course, not all alt-med users are poor Conservatives. The field tends to be associated with well-to-do urban women, who spend significant amounts of money on Gwyneth Paltrow-style toxic cleanses and reiki therapy. And it’s true that, among white women, the more money they make, the more likely they are to use mild alternative therapies (mostly mind-body medicine such as yoga) — but that’s alongside routine visits to their private doctors.

Instead, the real victims of the alt-med lobby are poor Americans who struggle to pay for proper healthcare, and who are far more likely to seek out alternative cures for serious diseases. A National Health Interview Survey found that having unmet needs in medical care or having delayed care due to cost were associated with a higher chance of CAM use.

And as long as America’s justice system remains ill-suited to combatting the problem of medical misinformation, that looks unlikely to change. Despite serving several months in jail in 2017 and being ordered by a judge to pay out $105 million in damages to a single patient in a civil lawsuit in 2018, Young has refused to give up his operation. In May 2022, he was hit with further criminal charges related to his treatment of a patient, including that he had committed “wilful cruelty” to an elderly woman suffering from liver and thyroid disease.

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It is unclear whether this will lead to a penalty that finally puts Young out of business — but, either way, the alt-health movement is unlikely to disappear soon. In the years since the pandemic motivated many Republicans to oppose Covid vaccines and mask mandates, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has brought other aspects of the medical freedom movement out of the libertarian fringe and into the conservative mainstream. He has emboldened Republican state lawmakers across the country to introduce hundreds of public health bills this year in the name of liberty: critically, they go beyond targeting Covid-specific mask and vaccine mandates by weakening evidence-based care.

Under the DeSantis agenda, Florida’s proposed medical freedom laws would give doctors and insurers the freedom to refuse treatment to vulnerable Americans and force doctors to inform patients of alternative Covid treatments, regardless of FDA approval. As other red states follow Florida’s lead, America’s alt-health lobby will continue to prey on the poorest in society. They have created a world we cannot escape: where Left is Right, medicine is poison, and the doctor’s white coat is a harbinger of death.