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My article for The Telegraph:Fusion energy is coming. Last week’s announcement of a significant energy yield from the Joint European Torus in Oxfordshire is just a milestone on the path but all the signs are that there’s probably going to be reliable fusion power on tap some time in the next decade thanks to breakthroughs in superconductivity.Also, private money is pouring into fusion, which has forced the public projects to speed up, as it did with genomics.

Ernest Rutherford telegraph Energy Environment

Eco-extremism has brought Sri Lanka to its knees

My article for The Telegraph:Sri Lanka’s collapse, from one of the fastest growing Asian economies to a political, economic and humanitarian horror show, seems to have taken everybody by surprise.Five years ago, the World Bank was extolling “how Sri Lanka intends to transition to a more competitive and inclusive upper-middle income country”. Right up to the middle of last year, despite the impact of the pandemic, the country’s misery index (inflation plus unemployment) was low and falling.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa Sri Lanka telegraph Environment Food

The WHO is complicit in China’s Winter Olympics smokescreen

My article for the Telegraph:The news that Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organisation, is to attend the Winter Olympics in Beijing is baffling on a number of levels. Has he not got a day job to do? There is a pandemic on.“Sources close to” him say it would be a “political statement to turn down the invitation”, which indicates ludicrous delusions of grandeur: he is a bureaucrat, not a head of state, let alone a “dignitary”.But if Adhanom Ghebreyesus does want to play the politician, with most Western governments boycotting the games, his attendance shows an alarming complacency about the persecution of the Uyghurs, the crushing of freedom in Hong Kong and the lack of transparency in finding the source of Covid-19.It is worth listing the ways in which the Chinese authorities have failed to help the WHO do its job over the past two years.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Winter Olympics city Wuhan China Taiwan Hong Kong city Beijing Coronavirus telegraph origin-of-covid

I was duped by the Covid lab leak deniers

My article for the Telegraph:Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started. It is just about understandable, if not forgivable, that Chinese scientists have obfuscated vital information about early cases and their work with similar viruses in Wuhan’s laboratories: they were subject to fierce edicts from a ruthless, totalitarian regime.It is more shocking to discover in emails released this week that some western scientists were also saying different things in public from what they thought in private.

Anthony Fauci Jeremy Farrar Francis Collins Patrick Vallance Usa Britain city Wuhan China Coronavirus telegraph Science

Britain's hubristic green commissars can't see the wood for the trees

My article for the Telegraph:The one thing that cheered us Northumbrians up as we waited for power to come back on after Storm Arwen (some wit points out that naming these daughters of Boreas only seems to encourage them) was to grumble: “if this was in the Home Counties we would never hear the end of it”. But it is not funny that thousands of homes are still waiting for reconnection, some with elderly occupants.I can vouch that five days of living in the cold and dark when the nights are more than twice as long as the days does not half remind you of the value of reliable electricity, diesel cars (how else do you charge a phone?) and gas stoves to cook on – all three of which are about to be banned by the eco-commissars.The longer term devastation in Northumberland is to trees.

Storm Arwen Britain Scotland telegraph Energy Environment

Britain's hubristic green commissars can't see the wood for the trees

Storm Arwen Britain telegraph Energy Environment

The Government is still fighting the wrong war on Covid-19

My article for the Telegraph:Here we go again, fighting the last war. Because governments are perceived to have moved too slowly to ban flights when the delta variant arose in India, we jumped into action this time, punishing the poor South Africans for their molecular vigilance.

India South Africa Coronavirus telegraph politics

We're wasting our big Brexit gene-editing opportunity

My article, for The Telegraph:The Government wants to unleash innovation. If it were to be presented with a magic wand that could by 2040 feed millions more people, avoid tens of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and improve biodiversity on hundreds of thousands of hectares, while benefiting the economy and reducing the footprint of farming, it would surely grab it.That is exactly what Crispr and other gene editing technologies promise for agriculture, based on what they are doing elsewhere.

gmos telegraph biology

The radical potential of nuclear fusion exposes the folly of our net zero deadline

nearly $2 billion of private money into commercial fusion companies: several in the United States, one in Canada and two in Britain.In terms of expertise and infrastructure, the UK is near the front of the peloton in this technology. The recent progress is mainly because of technical breakthroughs.

Usa Britain Canada telegraph Energy Environment

Environmentalists have got it wrong – we're not facing an insect apocalypse

My article for the Telegraph:On Twitter this week an unfortunate hiker showed a short video of the midges swarming in their tens of thousands over his backpack and his arms in the Scottish Highlands. It was itchy just to watch.

New York Scotland telegraph biology Insects

Life science is taking off in the age of the gene

My article for the Telegraph:Back in the early 1950s scientists were baffled by one aspect of life itself.

innovation telegraph Genetics

Flawed modelling is condemning Britain to lockdown

My article for The Telegraph:Britain leads the pack on vaccination, but lags far behind America, Germany and France on liberation. A big reason is that our Government remains in thrall to a profession that has performed uniquely badly during the pandemic: modellers.

Sarah Knapton Britain France Germany Coronavirus telegraph pessimist

We no longer need to fear Covid

My article for the Telegraph:The whole aim of practical politics, said HL Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”It is hard to avoid the impression that officials are alarmed rather than pleased by the fading of the pandemic in Britain. They had a real hobgoblin to hand, and boy did they make the most of it, but it’s now turning into a pussy cat.

Britain fears Coronavirus telegraph

The World Health Organisation's appeasement of China has made another pandemic more likely

My article for The Telegraph:It is a year ago last week since the World Health Organisation conceded, belatedly, that a pandemic was under way. The organisation’s decisions in early 2020 were undoubtedly influenced by the Chinese government.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus China liking Coronavirus telegraph

The EU's petty isolationism is wrecking Europe

My article for The Telegraph:There is something rather apt in the coincidence of an Italian ban on vaccine exports to Australia and the negotiation by Liz Truss, the trade secretary, of lower tariffs on trade with the United States. One is as pure a demonstration of spiteful EU protectionism as one could imagine; the other a clear demonstration of mutual gains from freer trade.Supporting Brexit used to be difficult to explain to foreigners.

Liz Truss New York Usa Eu Australia Italy Mexico Brexit telegraph Trade

Did the Covid-19 virus really escape from a Wuhan lab?

This is a more detailed version of the long article co-written with Alina Chan on the origin of the virus causing the covid pandemic which was published in the Telegraph on 6 February.The covid-19 pandemic has killed two million people and counting. It has created medical, social, psychological, and economic misery on a scale unprecedented in peacetime.

Alina Chan France Canada city Wuhan China Japan Thailand province Hubei liking Coronavirus telegraph

Bio-Britain is leading the world in the science of Covid

My latest article, for The Telegraph:Britain probably leads the world in self-criticism. So maybe we don’t always notice when the country leads the world in something a bit more useful.

New York Britain Coronavirus telegraph domination

Lockdowns may actually prevent a natural weakening of this disease

My article for The Telegraph:Boris Johnson's fondness for the metaphor of the US cavalry riding to the rescue is risky: ask General Custer. With the vaccine cavalry in sight, and just when we thought we had earned a Christmas break, the virus has ambushed us with a strain that seems more contagious, and which is rapidly coming to dominate the epidemic in south-east England.It is now a race between the virus and the vaccine as to which can get into your bloodstream first.Lockdown sceptics are suspicious.

Boris Johnson Usa people Coronavirus telegraph

The power of science has delivered the best possible news in a ghastly year

My article for The Telegraph:Happy Christmas! The BioNtech/Pfizer vaccine’s approval, with others to come, is the best possible news at the end of a ghastly year. Vaccination is humankind’s most life-saving innovation, banishing scourge after scourge from the face of the earth.

Happy Christmas Britain Coronavirus telegraph mindfulness

The second wave peaked before lockdown began

My article for The Telegraph:There is now little doubt that the second wave of the virus crested before the lockdown began on Thursday.

city London people positive Coronavirus telegraph

Ten reasons why Boris’s green agenda is just plain wrong

My article for The Telegraph:Our fearless leader has descended from the mountain with a 10-commandment plan for a green industrial revolution. At a cost of £12 billion, he will have all Britons driving electric cars powered by North Sea wind turbines and giving up their gas boilers to heat their homes with ground-source heat pumps.

Ed Miliband lord Lawson personality telegraph Energy optimist

Correcting Britain's Vitamin D deficiency could save thousands of lives

My article with MP David Davis, for the Telegraph:As we face six tough months of curfews, isolation and economic misery, with vaccines a distant hope, testing struggling to control the virus, and the hospitalisation rate once again rising, it’s surely time to try anything reasonable to slow the pandemic down. There is one chemical that is known to be safe, known to be needed by many people anyway, known to have a clinically proven track record of helping people fight off respiratory diseases, and is so cheap no big firm is pushing it: vitamin D.

David Davis Britain people personality Coronavirus telegraph

Forget the doom and gloom. The retreat of Covid-19 is a great cause for optimism

My article for the Telegraph:It is now three weeks since thousands of protesters first gathered in Trafalgar Square, and two weeks since London filled with even larger crowds, few of whom wore masks or kept two metres apart, and some of whom got involved in fights, resulting in arrests and injuries: a perfect recipe for spreading the coronavirus. Yet there has been a continuing decline in new cases of the disease and no uptick in calls to 111 or 999 about suspected Covid-19.

people liking Coronavirus telegraph

Is the chilling truth that the decision to impose lockdown was based on crude mathematical guesswork?

My article with MP David Davis for The Telegraph:

David Davis Neil Ferguson Heath Robinson people Coronavirus telegraph beauty

It is time to take seriously the link between Vitamin D deficiency and more serious Covid-19 symptoms

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Mark Alipio Philippines people liking Coronavirus telegraph symptoms

WHO must answer serious questions before it is trusted with leading a Covid-19 inquiry

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Dominic Raab people liking Coronavirus telegraph

We all need to change how we live our lives to fight this generation of pandemics

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innovation Coronavirus telegraph

As research progresses, the nature of our enemy is becoming ever clearer

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people Coronavirus telegraph contact

A vaccine for coronavirus isn't going to ride rapidly to our rescue

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Pearl Kendrick Grace Eldering Usa state Michigan people liking Coronavirus telegraph vaccine