Society

Monday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Have Moderna outdone the Pfizer vaccine?

Another week, another set of preliminary results from a Covid-19 vaccine trial. This time it is the Moderna vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273. And, to judge by the figures put out by the company this morning, it has outdone the Pfizer vaccine in its efficacy. Out of the 30,000 people involved in the phase three trial (half of whom were given the vaccine and half of whom were given a placebo), 95 went on to contract Covid-19. Of those who became infected, 90 were in the control group and only five had been given the vaccine. Eleven participants had a severe case of Covid, all of whom were in the control group.

Dr Waqar Rashid Dr Waqar Rashid

Is the Liverpool mass-testing scheme a gimmick?

The revelation that both Pfizer and Modena have created seemingly effective and safe Covid vaccines that could be here by December is surely the first bit of good news 2020 has brought us. But we are, of course, nowhere near yet out of the woods. Even if a vaccine gets regulatory approval by early December, all our resources and logistics will have to be focused on procuring, delivering, and then monitoring its roll-out. Boris Johnson himself has urged caution about the Pfizer vaccine, saying ‘there is a long way before we have got this thing beat’. But while the PM is displaying a healthy degree of realism about the challenges

Sunday

Carl Heneghan

How many people are catching Covid in hospital?

One aspect of the original outbreak of coronavirus in March and April that has not received enough attention was the spread of the virus in NHS hospitals. With NHS staff lacking Personal Protective Equipment – and as we know now, suffering from a lack of preparedness – the virus spread at rapid speed between people in close proximity in hospitals – the very places where people expected to get better, not worse. In this first phase of the pandemic at least one in eight patients contracted the virus while already in hospital. These patients tended to be older and frailer, and if they survived, they ended up staying in hospital

Mary Dejevsky

Covid has killed spontaneity for good

Maybe it had to come: a note on my local (London) message-board said that the two Marks & Spencer food halls where I have taken to shopping since the first pandemic lockdown are now offering – toot the bugle, as the Prime Minister might say – a booking system. Of course, this is presented as a big improvement, ‘part of our efforts to make shopping easier for our customers,’ according to M&S. It’s called ‘express access’, the idea being that, following the introduction of Lockdown II, you will be able to ‘book a slot’ to avoid queuing. True, the system is voluntary. But how long will it be before those

Saturday

Matt Ridley

Temper your excitement about the Covid vaccine

Ever since Giacomo Pylarini, a physician working in the Ottoman Empire, sent a report to the Royal Society in 1701 that Turkish women believed pus from a smallpox survivor could induce immunity in a healthy person – and was dismissed as a dangerous quack – inoculation has been as much an art as a science. But it has proven to be the greatest life-saver of all time, eliminating smallpox and suppressing many other diseases. In Pylarini’s prescient words, it is ‘an operation invented not by persons conversant in philosophy or skilled in physic, but by a vulgar, illiterate people; an operation in the highest degree beneficial to the human race.’

Joanna Williams

Don’t censor the anti-vaxxers

Pfizer has come up trumps. Now that a vaccine for Covid-19 is more than just a possibility, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief. But before we relax too much, a new problem arises: will people actually take it? A third of people in the UK – and half of people in the United States – say they are either uncertain or unlikely to agree to be vaccinated against coronavirus, according to research from the Royal Society and the British Academy. It’s easy to scorn anti-vaxxers. They are the tin-foil hat wearing idiots who set fire to 5G phone masts at the start of the ‘plandemic’. They are the ‘reckless, ‘shameful’ and

Friday

Alice Bunn

The Alice Bunn Edition

28 min listen

Alice Bunn is a scientist and international director at the UK Space Agency. She tells Katy about falling in love with the stars, finding the right career and the threat of space debris.

Julie Bindel

Have we confronted the truth of what fuelled Peter Sutcliffe’s crimes?

Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire ripper’, is dead. What is his legacy? He of course leaves behind the countless relatives and loved ones of his victims, whose lives have been torn apart and exist in a fog of pain and torment. The women Sutcliffe killed had no dignity except in the minds of those that knew them. And thanks to the press reporting of the case, their last moments and the horrific, intimate details of their murders and defilement became embedded in true crime popular culture. One thing that has changed since the 1970s is that Sutcliffe would not be able to get away with 13 murders now. CCTV and DNA

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

What words are off limits in the race debate?

Greg Clarke, the chairman of the Football Association, stood down this week after saying some politically incorrect things. Chief among his offences, it seems, was his use of the word ‘coloured’, when referring to black players. On the Today programme, an interviewee explained that this term was deeply offensive to ‘people of colour’, as it reminded them of the era of segregation. I can’t have been alone in noticing that the offensive term is similar to the approved term that she used, and in being struck by the apparent irrationality of this. A few weeks ago, the headmistress of Benenden, Samantha Price, got in trouble for giving a talk about racism in

Thursday

Patrick West

Barnardo’s should know better about ‘white privilege’

Corporations and charities virtue signalling has become a familiar spectacle in everyday life. Sainsbury’s, Virgin West Coast, HSBC, Ben & Jerry’s, Gillette and Nike have all pronounced their various anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-gay, pro-trans principles. The latest to join in this festival of conspicuous compassion is Barnardo’s, which yesterday pronounced on the matter of ‘white privilege’. Unveiling its new guide on this hot topic for parents, the children’s charity said:  ‘Talking about white privilege means looking at how our own actions maintain and support racist systems and structures.’ Unsurprisingly, this has generated some angry responses. ‘As a former Barnardo’s Boy, I find your stance as disappointing as it is nonsensical,’ was

Luke McShane

The Brick

I own a few chess books that could serve as a murder weapon, but none so hefty as Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games. Nicknamed ‘The Brick’ by its fans, its thousand-odd pages forgo instructional text in favour of an escalating procession of puzzles, mostly mates in 1, 2 or 3 moves. These illustrate the most important patterns in chess, which form the vocabulary of any skilled player. This is a primer with a pedigree: the book was written by Laszlo Polgar, the father of the famous Polgar sisters, who believed that geniuses are made, not born. The manifest effort of compilation demands commensurate exertion from the reader. Later in

Luke McShane

No. 630

White to play. Mista–Kloza, Poland 1955 (supposedly). Which move does White play to force a quick checkmate? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Tuesday 17 November. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Kd7! If 1…Bg7 2 Nd6 and 3 Ne8 mate. Or if 1…Kg7, 2 Nd6 and Nd6-e8, Nd6xf5 or Ng5-e6 mate. Last week’s winner Anca Gramaticu, Oadby, Leicestershire

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 14 November 2020

It’s been a busy week of bridge. First came the Lady Milne, the women’s home internationals. As the host nation, England had two teams; my partner Qian Li and I qualified for the second. I’ve played in the Lady Milne quite a few times before, and it felt strange and slightly unreal to be doing so online this year — especially as my partner was in China. Still, it was fun, and we finished third, a hair’s breadth behind Wales (but some way behind England’s first team). Next came the OCBL international mixed teams: I was lucky enough to be on Jonathan Harris’s team. Jonathan is one of the most

Taki

The cultural elite has a new enemy

New York Election night parties are usually dreadful affairs, with the idiot box blaring and hysterical listeners screaming out the latest info. American TV pundits are smug trained seals, over made-up and blow-dried, and they all sound the same with their rehearsed stentorian voices. Brian Williams, or the ‘hero of Iraq’ as I call him after he was caught lying about a rocket attack on the chopper he was riding — he was safely on the ground and trembling — sounded sombre announcing that South Dakota had been called for the Donald. These so-called anchors no longer even pretend to be objective, and they had long faces when the predicted

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Vaccine hopes up, Zoom shares down and Biden calls Boris

Home Pfizer and BioNTech announced a vaccine against Covid-19 of 90 per cent efficacy from two injections three weeks apart. It was not known if it prevented transmission of the virus. The vaccine has to be stored at an ultra-low temperature of minus 80˚C. In July, the British government had bought 40 million doses, enough for a third of the population, with ten million available by the end of the year (along with access to five other vaccine candidates, totalling 340 million doses in all). The army and police planned vaccination centres. Shares in air transport went up; shares in Zoom went down. Asked whether we could say with confidence

Toby Young Toby Young

Will my kids report me for hate speech?

When Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s cabinet secretary for justice, announced that his new Hate Crime Bill would remove the ‘dwelling exemption’ in the Public Order Act 1986, people were understandably horrified. As things stand, you cannot be prosecuted for stirring up racial hatred because you’ve said something inflammatory about race or religion in the privacy of your own home. But that’s far too wishy-washy for Yousaf. Not only does he want to enlarge the number of ‘protected’ groups, he also wants the new speech restrictions to apply in people’s homes. Henceforth, Big Brother will be watching you in the kitchen and the bedroom. If Humza Yousaf has his way, there

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I cope with cooking for food snobs?

Q. I have a delightful young goddaughter who, thanks to the virus, I have not seen since last year. Her next birthday is looming, but since she never thanked me for my present last year, I am disinclined to give another. However, there may be a mitigating factor. Last year while her mother and I were cheering her on in a hockey match, I handed the mother a bundle of cash to give her daughter on her birthday a few days later when she had an exeat. Now I wonder if the mother even remembered to pass it on. The trouble is I can’t ask her directly: first because, if

Dot Wordsworth

What’s the difference between ‘gifting’ and ‘giving’?

Boris Johnson, the Telegraph suggested last week, is understood to have a personal interest in rewilding, ‘recently gifting his father beavers to release on his own Exmoor estate’. I started at the word gifting like a horse shying at a carrier bag caught in the hedge. Why didn’t I like it? My first thought was that there was a perfectly good word, giving. My second was that gifting is an obtrusive case of verbing a noun. Thirdly, it seemed like an Americanism. Fourthly, it belongs to a kind of speech adopted by copywriters for luxury cruises and retirement homes. In 1996, Robert Burchfield in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage