Football, like life, is full of those ‘sliding doors’ moments. What if Ali Bin Nasser had spotted Diego Maradona’s handball against England in 1986 and sent him off with the score kept at 0–0? What if Paul Gascoigne had not checked his run when Alan Shearer played the ball across to him against Germany in 1996? The butterfly effect in chaos theory would have us believe that just small changes can lead to differences far bigger than we could predict. …

“Give me liberty or give me death”

Patrick Henry (1736–1799) American politician

A group of influential backbench Conservative MPs calling themselves the ‘COVID Recovery Group’ have put pressure on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to lift lockdown restrictions by April. They argue that if the vaccination programme continues as planned there would be

“no justification for legislative restrictions to remain.”

Their leader Mark Harper argued that ‘vaccine = immunity from lockdown and restrictions”. Once again there are arguments about ‘the cure being worse than the disease’

The times they are a-changing. The last fortnight has seen the return of knock-out European football. Last autumn it was announced that UEFA look set to change the format of the Champions League in favour of a ‘Swiss system’ with four more matches. This will be a mistake. This is not the change needed. We got an idea of the change needed last summer.

Out of the horror of the COVID-19 pandemic have been glimpses at something different. Some of this has been profound: pollution reduced or the daily commute eliminated. Another change, albeit meaningless in the grand scheme of…

In the pantheon of appalling Premier League titles Chelsea 2015/16 and Leicester City 2016/17 stand front and centre as the worst examples. Following this, however, would have to be David Moyes’s Manchester United 2013/14. Moyes’s nine-month stint went from being handpicked as Sir Alex Ferguson’s ‘chosen one’ to his banner being almost torn down by angry fans. Liverpool fans at the time gloated about the Scotsman’s troubles. Yet, now in the defence of their first Premier League title, the Merseysiders are officially worse in terms of points than Moyes’s Red Devils.

On 9th February 2014 Manchester United found themselves, after…

This week the respected German broadsheet Handelsblatt published an article claiming that the German government had leaked that the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine only gave pensioners eight percent protection against COVID-19. They hastily released a clarification: the article resulted from a mishearing of a statistic: that 8% of the subjects in the AstraZeneca efficacy study were between 56 and 69 years of age. From this mishearing came a snowballing and a potentially damaging piece of misinformation.

Misinformation comes in many forms. It’s easy to spot the obvious lies: that COVID-19 doesn’t exist, that it’s spread by 5G towers, that Bill Gates…

Masks are safe to wear. Thanks to analytics I’m aware that only about a third of readers of my posts actually read them in their entirety. So before you go I want you to know: masks are safe to wear. Whatever you may have read online, they are safe. If that’s all you take away that’s enough for me. My ego can take it. If you’d like to know more then please read on. It’s really very simple: size matters.

I’ve argued before that if you get 100 scientists in a room, broadly speaking, you’ll get consensus. The fact that…

The United Kingdom has approved the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine and the very first people in the world have received their first jabs against COVID-19. The end should be in sight of this pandemic. Following previous posts, I’ve been asked a lot in person and online about the COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination in general. Here I’ve tried my best to answer them. Hope you find them useful. Please note although I am a doctor I am not involved in any of the trials mentioned.

How does the immune system work?

The human immune system is divided into two parts: the innate and adaptive. We’re born with the innate immune system whilst the adaptive is something we develop. The innate immune system is broad while the adaptive is specialised. The innate immune system consists of cells (phagocytes) which ‘swallow’ and destroy bacteria, viruses and other disease-causing organisms (pathogens). This happens quickly after being infected. These cells break up the pathogens into smaller parts which they then display on their surface. Cells called helper T cells ‘read’ these smaller parts and start the adaptive immune response. Cells called B lymphocytes are activated…

So, here we are the end of England’s Lockdown 2. Lockdown, the word of the year, was supposed to be a one-off as we ‘learned to live’ with COVID-19 until the white knight of a vaccine arrived over the nearest hill. Yet the second lockdown was near-inevitable due to the nature of COVID-19 and the attempts in the UK to control it. This is why.

“So what do you think should be done about COVID-19?”

Chances are you’ve asked, or been asked, this, probably over Zoom, as your region moved up a Tier or as you contemplated a Christmas without…