Millions of people living in India live in densely populated surroundings, with only limited access to clean water, and without the resources to ensure food and other hygiene. These conditions make people additionally susceptible to being infected with Covid -19 and India has recorded almost 11 million cases of the disease to date – or some 16% of […]
You’ve probably heard by now, at least in passing on the news, about the Military Coup in Myanmar that appears to have resulted in poor old Aung San Suu Kyi being locked up again. If you haven’t heard, here’s the BBC: Myanmar’s military has seized power after detaining Aung San Suu Kyi and other democratically […]
On October 7th, last year, the Irish Times delivered its damning verdict on the British Government’s handling of Covid-19. “Fantasy as Policy”, it pronounced. “What is clear”, the paper said, “is that the British prime minister has not lost his capacity for nonsense – his speech was full of Churchillian bluster and exceptionalism about the […]
Countries across Europe saw anti-lockdown protests take place at the weekend with demonstrations in France, Spain, Italy Denmark amongst other nation states. In Denmark, protestors describing themselves as “Men in Black” protested in Aarhus, the country’s second largest city. The demonstrators chanted “Freedom for Denmar” and “We`ve had enough,” as they marched, claiming that the Covid-19 restrictions […]
Every once in a while, a bioethics article appears which is so powerful an indictment of injustice that it sends shivers up the spines of its readers. In 1949 Leo Alexander published “Medical Science under Dictatorship” in the New England Journal of Medicine, about Nazi medicine. In 1966 Henry K. Beecher published “Ethics and Clinical Research”, […]
After a long string of humiliations regarding vaccine supply, and then political chaos following the erection of a customs border on the island of Ireland, the EU has now desperately attempted to back-track by revoking Article 16. But is this really enough for the bloc to save face? The past few years have not been […]
Whenever you see something this tin-eared, there are really only two possibilities worth considering. The first is that the Labour Party, and its advisers, live in such a bubble that they genuinely don’t know how weird and odd it seems to normal people to assert that periods and menstruation are a gender-neutral experience. The second? […]
The headline most other media outlets seemed to take away from the Taoiseach’s comments yesterday was that lockdown would go on past March 5th. But that’s not really news, is it? Most of us had guessed that already. No, the far more significant news was in the small print: Micheál Martin said he did not […]
Another glorious victory for the European Union, was the subtext of Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen’s tweet yesterday claiming that the EU had secured an extra nine million vaccines from AstraZenica for the first quarter of this year. The announcement came, of course, just a few days after the EU had to engage in […]
More than 2100 doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals have signed an open letter strongly opposing a bill which seeks to legalise assisted suicide in Ireland. The letter, organised by Irish Healthcare Professionals for Dignity in Living and Dying, was published ahead of submissions being made to the Oireachtas Justice Committee which is examining a […]
Two new reports have highlighted that, while the world’s richest people have made billions during the pandemic, the number of people living in poverty has doubled, with the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs lost across the globe. The International Labour Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency, says that 8.8 per cent of global working hours […]
Promoting marriage is likely the most successful way to promote more births in Asia, according to recent research by Mengni Chen, a research scientist at the University of Cologne in Germany and University of Louvain in Belgium, and Paul Yip, the chair professor (population health) at the University of Hong Kong. 2020 estimates continue to place the […]