Ross Clark

Ross Clark

Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero, The Road to Southend Pier, and Far From EUtopia: Why Europe is failing and Britain could do better

Will a vaccine really be ready by September?

Aside from a handful of anti-vaxxers, virtually everyone would leap at the prospect of a vaccine earning us an early exit from the Covid-19 crisis. The only snag is that we do not have a vaccine that is proven to work, let alone safe to use, and that it is improbable that we will have

Covid’s knock-on effect on child deaths

The daily death toll has been a constant backdrop to the Covid-19 crisis. Would we ever have entered lockdown, would so many people have been driven to panic, were it not for the publication, every afternoon, of the number of deaths in the past 24 hours? It has helped set in the minds of the

Ross Clark

Why are some people being repeatedly tested for coronavirus?

Testing, the government keeps telling us, is the way out of the coronavirus lockdown. Soon, the Prime Minister assured us in his address to the nation last Sunday, we will be testing ‘literally hundreds of thousands of people every day’. Given that Matt Hancock seems finally to have achieved his ambition of testing 100,000 people

Could having a cold protect against Covid?

Could having a common cold protect you against Covid-19? The intriguing prospect has been raised by a team from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California. They were researching the response of human T cells – which play a vital role in the immune system – in patients who have recovered from Covid-19. The

This study from Iceland suggests reopening schools is safe

Some countries are refusing to open their schools for fear of a prompting a second wave of coronavirus infections. But their policies would appear to be flatly contradicted by evidence from Iceland. There, a company called deCODE Genetics, in association with the country’s directorate of health and the national university hospital, has analysed the results

Are we seeing 2000 excess deaths a week from non-coronavirus causes?

Cambridge professor of the public understanding of risk David Spiegelhalter recently made the point that, given the uncertainties over exactly what constitutes a death from coronavirus, the number we should we watching is the ONS’s figure for deaths from all causes. That, he argued, will give us the surest indication as to the progress of

How do we know which lockdown measures should be lifted first?

Today, the cabinet has to decide where to go next with the lockdown – although the decision will not be announced until Sunday. Boris Johnson has talked of a ‘menu of options’ for relaxing some of the measures, but we have been warned not to expect too much. The government has also distanced itself from

Israel’s antibody breakthrough

The Israeli government is reporting this morning that the country’s Institute for Biological Research has made a breakthrough in the development of a potential treatment against SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19. Scientists there have isolated a ‘monoclonal neutralising antibody’ which could potentially neutralise the virus after infection. The antibody was obtained from the blood

Herd immunity may only need 10-20 per cent of people to be infected

Since mid-March there has been an assumption that herd immunity against Covid-19 would not be achieved until around 60 per cent of the population has been infected. It is a figure which gave rise to the now-famous paper by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, which claimed that a herd immunity policy (which the government

Ross Clark

Have we been fighting a very different disease to China?

One of the great mysteries of coronavirus is how the epidemic has become much more severe in Europe and North America than in the Far East. A disease which appeared to be on the wane in China, South Korea and elsewhere in mid-February suddenly erupted with a vengeance in Europe in March, with death tolls

Coronavirus reinfection fears appear to be unfounded

A week ago, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a warning which, if it were true, would constitute the most depressing-yet development in the story of Covid-19. It said that there was ‘no evidence’ that people who have already been infected with the disease, and who have developed antibodies as a result, have gained any

Could Remdesivir eliminate the need for a coronavirus vaccine?

Over the past few weeks the government’s scientific advisers have indicated that the only real way out of the coronavirus crisis is a vaccine – until then a high degree of social distancing will have to remain. Given that no-one expects a vaccine to be ready for deployment for another year at the very earliest,

How New Zealand won its fight with coronavirus

A milestone was reached today when New Zealand became the first country to declare that all community transmission of coronavirus has effectively ceased. We have previously seen China (whose figures are not universally trusted), South Korea and Vietnam wrestle their figures for new cases of the disease down to very low levels, but New Zealand’s

Could this antibody test offer a route out of lockdown?

Finally, the government is to start antibody tests to see how prevalent infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus – which causes Covid-19 – is among the general population. Over the next few days, testing kits are being sent to 20,000 randomly-selected households. The results will be crucial because it will inform us how effective lockdown has

What will happen to your savings after coronavirus?

What joy it has been to have some cash over the past two months. For gamblers, to be sure, there have been opportunities to take advantage of a volatile stock market (and even more opportunities to get it wrong and lose a packet). But cash is cash – it just sits there holding its value,

Is the lockdown costing lives?

Over the next few weeks we are likely to start hearing more and more about a growing death toll – not the one from Covid-19 but the one from other conditions. Disturbingly, it appears to be rising, and we are going to have to start asking what role the lockdown has played in this. In

Is Covid-19 more widespread – and less deadly – than we thought?

Last week I reported here a Stanford University study which found that infection with SARS-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid-19 – could be over 50 times as widespread in one Californian county than official figures suggested. Now comes yet another piece of evidence suggesting similarly huge under-reporting of cases. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital

Will Sweden’s social distancing-lite work?

The science of epidemiology relies a lot on modelling because, for obvious reasons, controlled experimentation would be unethical. But in the case of Covid-19 we do have something approaching a real-life experiment – in that Sweden has declined to follow other European countries into lockdown. Instead, it has followed a policy which might be summed