‘Since the coronavirus crisis began, Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of leading medical journal The Lancet, has been tearing across the British public sphere. Here he is on the BBC, the national broadcaster, there in the pages of The Guardian newspaper — taking the government to task for failures that have left the United Kingdom with the world’s second-highest per capita COVID-19 death toll so far (Belgium is top). Horton has never shied away from controversy (his journal published the retracted, fraudulent paper by Andrew Wakefield that alleged a non-existent link between vaccines with autism) or crusades (against the Iraq war and for political action on climate change). In coronavirus, he has found a cause that matches his energy: the Lancet journals are pumping out both the latest research and his pointed critiques of government policy; and last month, he reviewed a new book by the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek that imagines economic and social worlds after COVID-19.
‘Now Horton has a book of his own. The COVID-19 Catastrophe is a sort of history, diagnosis and prescription, in real time. It is wide ranging, querying the changing role of international cooperation and the fallout of austerity economics, and taking a deeper dive into China’s scientific and political response to the crisis than most Western media have offered. But the book returns again and again to the catastrophe in both the United Kingdom and the United States. It is haunted by the question: how did two of the richest, most powerful and most scientifically advanced countries in the world get it so wrong, and cause such ongoing pain for their citizens?’
Read here (Nature, June 18, 2020)
