Health

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Time to flatten the curve of shoddy COVID scholarship

Last October, I wrote that COVID-19 had created a stampede of shoddy research. Little has changed in the interim. Putting all hands to the pump might feel appropriate in a crisis, but during a global public health emergency, rushing headlong into the scholarly frontline is anything but okay. Frankly, it is […]

All Aboard the Long COVID gravy train

Swiss Re Group, “one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance and insurance,” recently hosted a virtual Expert Forum on “secondary” impacts of COVID. As would be expected, the insurance industry is especially interested in the financial implications of this new disease. The programme covered many of the biophysical sequelae […]

Who’s more deluded, the conspiracy nuts or the journalists who dismiss them?

Ireland often likes to see itself as a cosmopolitan kind of place, where the world’s tourists, investors, and bohemian artistes are promised the traditional hundred thousand welcomes. As the most recent example of our keenness to globalise, witness our incorporation of the latest intellectual trend: delusional-right-wing-conspiracy-theory-based anarchy! Last weekend’s violence […]