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Tag: Coronavirus

Audio 

A post-Covid world in the moral maze

Melanie, , ,

On BBC Radio’s Moral Maze this week, the 30th birthday of the show and the last in the current series, we discussed morality in a post-Covid world (if there is ever to be such a world..!) To mark the occasion, the show used a novel format. Instead of having one proposition for debate, each of us four panellists proposed a moral principle or something else we had learned from the pandemic crisis that we thought was important for the future of our society. Tim Stanley said we needed to be…

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Coronavirus Britain Coronavirus 

Anti-vaccination culture threatens Covid fightback

Melanie,

Preliminary results published yesterday from early trials of a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by Oxford University suggest that it safely triggers an immune response. Other research teams around the world are racing to develop a vaccine against the virus This may be the only way to return to normal life. Yet there are suggestions that an alarming number of people would refuse to be inoculated. Vaccination has enabled one of the greatest global advances in public health. I have always been strongly in favour of safe and properly tested vaccination…

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conversation Britain Culture wars USA 

Politically homeless as the western mind shuts down

Melanie, ,

To make oneself politically homeless may be regarded as a misfortune. To do it a second time looks like recklessness on steroids. In the Eighties and Nineties, I broke with my former comrades on the left. On a variety of issues arising from their repudiation of the western nation and its values, I challenged the orthodoxy and found myself condemned as having gone over to the dark side, otherwise known as “the right”. I concluded that the left consisted of people who denied evidence and reason in the furtherance of…

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Coronavirus Global conflict Israel 

Both hero and zero: Israel’s strategic incoherence

Melanie, , ,

While Israelis are increasingly alarmed by the government’s loss of control over the coronavirus crisis, different events suggest that the country may have pulled off a spectacular advance in the battle against another intractable foe. Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a succession of mysterious explosions in Iran. At the end of last month, there was a major explosion in the Khojir missile factory near Tehran and at a power plant in Shiraz, which plunged the city into darkness. There has also been an explosion at a…

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Coronavirus Britain Coronavirus 

“How has it come to this” indeed. But now Boris must keep his nerve

Melanie, , ,

This week, when Boris Johnson made his first appearance at prime minister’s questions since he nearly died from Covid-19, the new Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, got the better of him. It wasn’t just that the absence of the usual braying mobs of backbenchers played to Starmer’s strengths as a calm, relentless and well-briefed advocate. It was that the questions he asked with such deadly and polite quietness were unanswerable. With the UK’s virus death toll then standing at more than 29,000, Starmer asked: “How has it come to this?”…

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Boris Britain Coronavirus Europe Israel 

The ghastly mirror-image of lethal group-think

Melanie, , ,

In Britain, there are now insistent calls for the government to lay out its strategy for exiting the Covid-19 lockdown. Treat the public as adults, goes the cry; tell us the truth. Well, the truth which ministers are not telling is pretty unpalatable. For as in other countries, the government faces two brutal and appalling alternatives: destroying the economy or ending people’s lives. Yes, the lockdown is doing terrible damage to the economy and if it goes on for much longer some of that damage at least may well be…

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Pope Culture wars 

Is the Pope a pagan?

Melanie, , ,

The observations by Pope Francis on the coronavirus pandemic published in The Tablet are startling. They reveal with unusual sharpness just what kind of person currently heads the Catholic church. Asked whether the economic devastation wrought by the virus was a chance for an ecological conversion by reassessing priorities and lifestyles, the Pope replied: “There is an expression in Spanish: ‘God always forgives, we forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives.’ We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18…

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Passover Jewish people 

The story Jews repeat on Passover is the secret of their survival

Melanie, , ,

As Jews around the world celebrate the festival of Passover this week, the ironies are painful. The festival celebrates the pivotal biblical event that followed Pharaoh’s refusal to free his Hebrew slaves. The last and most terrible of the 10 plagues inflicted as punishment upon the Egyptians, the death of the firstborn in every family, passed over the houses of the Hebrews who then left Egypt for freedom and their destiny as a Jewish nation. Today, of course, the plague of the coronavirus has not passed over the Jewish people—a…

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Cina coronavirus Coronavirus Global conflict 

West can no longer turn a blind eye to China

Melanie, , ,

The coronavirus pandemic is the direct outcome of appalling behaviour by the Chinese communist regime. Yesterday, the Commons foreign affairs committee reported that the fight against the virus has been hampered by China’s lies. The committee’s chairman, Tom Tugendhat, said China had “manipulated vital information about the virus in order to protect the regime’s image”. Despite all this, it has been posing as a humanitarian superpower by sending medical supplies to desperate countries. Britain is accordingly importing from China ventilators and virus test kits. But will they work? Numerous countries…

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Israel 

For Israel, recognising another enemy is second nature

Melanie, , ,

Among the world’s populous democracies fighting the coronavirus, Israel has so far been by far the most successful. With a population of about 8.6 million, it had recorded at time of writing 33 deaths from COVID-19. The Deep Knowledge Group, a consortium of technology and analytics organizations, has ranked it in the fight against the virus as the safest country in the world. While Israel’s death toll is continuing to edge up, the country has contained the epidemic better than Britain, America or the stricken nations of Western Europe. Britain,…

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