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 […]
Health
On risk perception and vaccine clots
I am a bit late posting this, but there you go. Watchyagonnadoaboutit. The other week I was quoted in the Irish Times on the matter of risk perception and vaccines: Proper risk assessments should combine two factors: impact and probability. In other words: “how bad something is” and “how likely […]
Some psychiatrists still not getting it
Steven Lubet, a law professor at Northwestern University, has written a powerful piece over at Social Science Space, responding to the awful Op-Ed on Long COVID that appeared the other week in the Wall Street Journal. He doesn’t hold back: It would be mistaken to suppose that disdain for patients […]
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 […]
Podcasting about Lockdowns, Vaccines, and “Following the Science”
Here I am on the latest PSI Podcast, with Professor Luke O’Neill and host Breda Brown. Do have a listen… * * *
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 […]