Matt Ridley's Blog, page 11

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

My article for The Telegraph:

‘This pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick” wrote Giovanni Boccaccio of the Black Death, in his preface to The Decameron. The trouble with the coronavirus is almost exactly the opposite – it is transmitted to the sick by contact with the healthy. The people most at risk of dying are those who already suffer from underlying illnesses. And evidence is accumulating that the virus is passed on very early in the progression of the disease, often when you are still without much in the way of symptoms.

The arrival of fast and reliable mass antibody testing, this coming week with luck, should be a game changer. It will enable those who have had the virus and recovered to be identified and licensed to resume normal life. How long their immunity lasts is unknown, but there is a good chance it will be many months at least.

Once antibody testing and more widespread virus testing roll out we will find out just how widespread the virus is among those with no or few symptoms. Only then can we know for sure what the case fatality rate is, but the best guess is that it will be well below one per cent overall, though up to 10 per cent in elderly cohorts.

Some people show almost no symptoms – and this seems to be especially true of children. “Children are at similar risk of infection as the general population, though less likely to have severe symptoms,” says one Chinese study. Those who do get symptoms report a dry cough, fever, aches, fatigue and often – perhaps even in the absence of other symptoms – a sudden loss of taste and smell. 

The first few days are often mild, but – in contrast to Sars – this is when you are most infectious. “High transmissibility of Covid-19 near symptom onset suggests that finding and isolating symptomatic patients alone may not suffice to contain the epidemic,” concludes one study. By contrast, unlike flu, it seems to be most severe and dangerous in the second week, with people needing hospitalisation somewhere between day nine and day 12 if at all. It is killing almost twice as many men as women, perhaps because men seem to generate fewer of a key antibody type, immunoglobulin G.

The virus is very contagious. A person with Covid-19 produces a thousand times as many viruses as somebody with Sars would do. On average he or she gives it to more than two people in the absence of social distancing. But averages mislead. Some super-spreaders give the virus to 50 or more people. It is not clear why: they could be less sick and so more sociable, or just loaded with more virus. One of South Korea’s advantages here is that in 2015 it had an outbreak of the Mers coronavirus and learned a lot about superspreaders and the value of tracing all their contacts.

Most infection seems to occur indoors and worryingly quite a lot may have happened within the medical system especially in Italy in the early weeks. According to one study, on tissue paper the virus survives less than three hours, on wood and cloth two days, on glass and banknotes four days and on stainless steel and plastic a week. The hope that it would die down during the summer is fading. As one team of scientists argues: “there is no evidence to suggest that warmer conditions in northern hemisphere summer months will reduce the effectiveness of Sars-CoV-2 transmission”.

The pandemic is not under control yet. Since March the global death toll has doubled in six days twice. At that rate it would kill more than 600,000 people by the end of April and 10 million by the end of May. But of course that will probably not happen because interventions will have an effect – and predictions based on models are all over the place. Countries that have imposed strict national lockdowns are beginning to see the curve flatten, though not as fast as expected. Italy’s death toll shot up again on Friday despite people being confined to their homes for nearly three weeks.

The measures that will bring this nightmare to an end include: first, more and better testing, and the tracing of every contact that an infected person makes. What makes it possible in the modern world is the digital footprint we all leave behind: privacy concerns will have to be put on hold. Second, more and better treatment of those who get ill, including more ventilators but also experimental repurposing of drugs including anti-HIV drugs and antimalarials such as chloroquine. Third, the use of monoclonal antibody drugs specifically designed to fight the virus. Fourth, probably some time next year, a vaccine.

As research progresses, the picture is becoming ever clearer. The more we learn, the nearer a solution becomes.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter.

My new book How Innovation Works is coming in May and June, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

Watch: Coronavirus and Lessons on Innovation with Yaron Brook

I spent an hour talking to philosophy expert, business expert and Ayn Rand Institute Chairman Yaron Brook about my upcoming book, and the painful yet important lessons that the epidemic is teaching us about innovation.

Please check it out, and consider sharing and subscribing:

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter.

My new book How Innovation Works is coming in May and June, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

The curious age discrimination of coronavirus

My article for Spectator:

The generational effect of the corona-virus is cunning and baffling. By often being so mild in the young and healthy it turns people into heedless carriers. By often being so lethal in the old and sick, it makes carriers into potential executioners of friends and neighbours.

The virus is very dangerous for people who have certain underlying illnesses, which is probably the main reason it is so serious for the elderly. It is almost as if it does not kill people by itself, just worsens other disorders. This is unlike flu, where children are as much at risk as old people. By contrast, in this case, young people in good health, even very young children, generally get such a mild coronavirus infection that they rarely have to seek treatment. An analysis of Chinese cases found that just 0.1 per cent of children under the age of nine who caught the virus needed to go to hospital and only 5 per cent of those needed critical care; just 0.002 per cent died, compared with 9.3 per cent of those over 80.

It is surely this pattern that is making the disease so difficult to stop. People are passing on Covid-19 before they feel unwell, perhaps without ever feeling sick. According to a study of 468 cases in China, where the source of infection could be traced, the average time between one person getting ill and the person he or she gives it to getting sick (the ‘serial interval’) is about four days, with 59 of the infectees getting sick even before the infector felt ill — a so-called negative interval. (This could have been, for example, a young person with no early symptoms giving it to an older person.)

 

That serial interval is half as long as Sars, and signals how contagious Covid-19 is. In the absence of social distancing, the average person gives the disease to about three people, twice as many as flu. In short, the evil genius of this virus is that it is creating an epidemic of rapid transmission without making most of its victims sick enough to stop getting out and about. That is why its lethality for a few is not such a problem for the germ itself: normally, a virus transmitted by coughing would have to evolve towards not killing people in order to keep going.

The relative invulnerability of the young probably explains the indifference of some people to the government’s increasingly desperate advice that people should keep a distance from each other. On Sunday evening, a television reporter interviewed fit young men using exercise bars in a London park in close proximity to others and -frequently swapping equipment: an ideal recipe for spreading the virus. They were not bothered. ‘I thought, you know what,’ said one, ‘this is even better because I’ve got the fresh air.’ It had not dawned on him that he might pass on the virus while feeling fine.

Many younger people feel invincible anyway, but the horrible truth is that the data from the epidemic has made them more confident rather than less, apparently forgetting their risk as carriers, rather than victims, of the virus.

Typhoid Mary was a cook who moved from one rich employer to another in New York and Long Island, infecting seven households with typhoid between 1900 and 1907 before doctors traced her as the common cause of the infections. The key point is that she was in good health herself throughout. When confronted, she indignantly refused to submit stool samples for analysis, until eventually imprisoned for this refusal.

After three years she was released while promising not to work as a cook. -Unhappy with the low wages of a laundress, she changed her name, resumed cooking and resumed causing typhoid. After a 1915 outbreak in a hospital for women in which 25 people fell ill and two died, Mary Mallon/Brown was again arrested and kept in quarantine for the rest of her life, refusing to have her gall bladder removed. When she died in 1938, an autopsy revealed a thriving colony of typhoid bacteria in her gall bladder. For some genetic reason they had not caused any symptoms in her.

I am not suggesting that people are being as deliberately irresponsible as Typhoid Mary, and of course people are infectious with the coronavirus for only a week or two, not a lifetime. But there is a disturbing echo here, in the crowds that turned up at parks, markets and shops last weekend, of her unwillingness to believe she could have been part of the problem.

There may be another reason too. This was articulated by the broadcaster -Timandra Harkness on Twitter: ‘Is it tactless to -suggest that people who have spent the past 20 years being told not to do anything fun because it’s bad for them may now be less receptive to urgent Public Health advice?’ Don’t drink! Don’t eat sugar! Don’t leave your home! The indifferent may not be very public-spirited, but they are not irrational. Most people’s chances of dying if they get the disease probably are very low. The case fatality rate overall is likely to be well below 1 per cent. It seems much higher right now because most of those being tested are the people who have fallen ill enough to go to hospital. We all now know people who have caught the virus and are showing the symptoms — including that unusual feature of a loss of smell and taste — but have not been tested. And if you are under 70, then you are almost certain not to die unless you have a serious other condition.

Indeed, perhaps that is true if you are over 70 too. The elderly are increasingly plagued with ‘co-morbidities’ — the name for those who have several different things wrong with them, all being treated with separate drugs — and this is perhaps why they are succumbing to the virus. It may have nothing to do with age itself.

Thus, if we really could isolate those with underlying conditions from the rest of the society then everybody else could get the economy back to normal, push on through the epidemic to gain herd immunity. Schools could reopen, businesses get going again and the health service might cope. Once enough people were immune, they could care for those who are more vulnerable. But can that be done? How does a care home operate if some of the staff are spending time out in the rest of the world? Delivering post or shopping to a person with heart problems is itself a risk. Besides, the death of several doctors in Italy implies that the virus can still kill healthy people sometimes — though these individuals probably received much larger doses of the virus than most people would.

With luck a better choice may present itself: test and trace, as seems to have worked in South Korea. Once we have enough test kits, including a serological test to find those who have had it and are immune, then we can test enough people to identify and trace the contacts of every carrier, and we can surely turn the tide. But by then the health service might have been overwhelmed.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter.

My new book How Innovation Works is coming in May and June, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

Delay to UK Publication of How Innovation Works

Because of the global coronavirus crisis, I have agreed with my publisher's request to delay publication of the UK edition of my new book How Innovation Works from 14 May till 25 June.

The US edition will be published on 19 May as planned, because printing has already begun.

The book already includes a chapter on public health and the role of innovation in the battle against epidemics of smallpox, polio, typhoid, whooping cough, malaria and cholera. But I will now add a short section for the end of the book about this year's pandemic and its implications for our attitude towards innovation. (Spoiler: we need more, not less.)

Thank you, and please stay safe.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter.

My new book How Innovation Works is coming in May and June, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

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

My article for the Telegraph:

In 1934, in their spare time, two American biologists, Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering, developed a vaccine for whooping cough, then the biggest killer of children in the United States. Within four years their vaccine was being used throughout Michigan and within six it was being used nationwide. Whooping cough rapidly retreated.

Since then there have been spectacular advances in biology, including the identification of the genetic material, the ability to read its code, an understanding of the structure of viruses and the proteins from which they are made, plus knowledge of how immunity works. So why are we facing a wait of at least a year, maybe much more, for a vaccine for coronavirus? It has been one of the shocks of recent weeks to realise how little progress vaccine development has made. It’s still a bit of an art.

“Vaccine development,” warned Wayne Koff, president of the Human Vaccines Project, last year, “is an expensive, slow and laborious process, costing billions of dollars, taking decades, with less than a 10 per cent rate of success…There is clearly an urgent need to determine ways to improve not just the effectiveness of the vaccines themselves but also the very processes by which they are developed.”

A vaccine is an “antigen” protein that alerts the body’s immune system to an invader and against which an effective “antibody” is then created by the immune system. First, you have to give a version of the disease to an animal so that the vaccine can be tested. Ferrets are used for Sars, for instance. Getting a good animal model took two months in the case of Zika.

Then, traditionally, you have to grow the virus itself, in chicken eggs in the case of influenza. Then you have to work out how to inactivate it without altering it too much, what chemical adjuvants to add to stabilise it and so on – which can often take years. Inadequate inactivation caused an early polio vaccine to give polio to thousands of people in 1955. Contamination of the vaccine with other viruses is another problem – the SV40 monkey virus contaminated a lot of polio vaccines in the 1960s – but this is now largely preventable.

There are now at least two other higher-tech options to bypass this gardening-cum-cookery, but neither has produced a working vaccine for human beings yet. The first involves programming bacteria to manufacture one of the proteins in the virus. Novavax in Maryland has achieved this with the coronavirus’s spike protein. The second involves injecting the genetic instructions for the spike protein into a host body so its own cells manufacture the protein. This is what Moderna in Massachusetts is trying with promising results in mice followed by experiments with humans. Fortunately, both firms were already working on a similar coronavirus called Mers that has been killing small numbers of people in the Middle East.

But even supposing you get a vaccine that prevents infection with the disease in a mouse, there are huge hurdles to overcome. You have to prove it is safe in people. Some experimental vaccines exacerbate the disease: an early vaccine against Sars did this in mice and one against respiratory syncytial disease did the same in people.

Then you have to prove that the vaccine works. That is, it makes people immune to the disease for a long period and that this immunity applies against the latest mutations of the virus. That means recruiting lots of healthy people for lengthy trials over many months. Many promising candidates fail this test. The whole process costs billions of dollars and it is no coincidence that most vaccine development and testing takes place in India where volunteers for trials can be recruited.

By the time all this has happened, the epidemic is often over, which is why big pharmaceutical companies do not get much involved in vaccine development. In the case of Ebola, an experimental vaccine was first developed in November 2014. By the following June the epidemic was over and the firm was struggling to find volunteers for the latest trials.

It was precisely to solve this problem that the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI) was founded in 2017, funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Gates Foundation and the Indian and Norwegian governments, based in Oslo. But, although it is now funding lots of urgent projects on coronavirus, CEPI has yet to achieve the silver bullet of a vaccine-development process that is adaptable to any new disease and ready to go.

In an emergency it is of course possible to cut corners and strip away some of the red tape that surrounds clinical trials, but not all of it. Vaccines that make diseases worse, or cause severe reactions, are a real risk. In 1976 a handful of cases of swine flu led to mass immunisation of almost 25 per cent of Americans with a vaccine that caused a severe reaction among some people. It is likely that the vaccine killed more people than swine flu did.

Cures for coronavirus may yet emerge, but a vaccine is not coming to our rescue in the next few months.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter.

My new book How Innovation Works is coming in May, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

Optimism and Innovation During the Coronavirus Pandemic

"I thought you were the rational optimist. Why are you fear-mongering over Covid-19?"

This is a real threat. But we will beat this. And we'll go on to make an even better life for people in the years ahead.

I took a deep dive into the Covid-19 epidemic, how to manage risk, solutions to past health crises, innovation in public health, and much more in a candid one hour interview with my energetic social media consultant:

I also discussed these issues in a shorter interview on Quillette:

And discussed innovation in the pharmaceutical industry and elsewhere on a small podcast with the CEO of IDEA Pharma:

Thank you for your continued support and for your vigilance in mitigating the impact of the Covid-19 Coronavirus Pandemic, and best wishes during these troubled times.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter.

My new book How Innovation Works is coming in May, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

Interviews on Optimism and Innovation During a Pandemic

"I thought you were the rational optimist. Why are you fear-mongering over Covid-19?"

This is a real threat. But we will beat this. And we'll go on to make an even better life for people in the years ahead.

I took a deep dive into the Covid-19 epidemic, how to manage risk, solutions to past health crises, innovation in public health, and much more in a candid one hour interview with my energetic social media consultant:

I also discussed these issues in a shorter interview on Quillette:

And discussed innovation in the pharmaceutical industry and elsewhere on a small podcast with the CEO of IDEA Pharma:

Thank you for your continued support and for your vigilance in mitigating the impact of the Covid-19 Coronavirus Pandemic, and best wishes during these troubled times.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter.

My new book How Innovation Works is coming in May, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

We are about to find out how robust civilisation is

On Sunday, lonely as a cloud, I wandered across a windswept moor in County Durham and passed a solitary sandstone rock with a small, round hollow in the top, an old penny glued to the base of the hollow. It is called the Butter Stone and it’s where, during the plague in 1665, coins were left in a pool of vinegar by the inhabitants of nearby towns and villages, to be exchanged with farmers for food. The idea was that the farmer or his customer approached the rock only when the other was at a safe distance.

Four modern coins were on the rock, anonymous offerings to the spirits of the moor. Never once in my six decades did I expect to be back in a 17th-century world of social and physical distancing as a matter of life and death.

There are no good outcomes from here. Many people will die prematurely. Many will lose their jobs. Many businesses will go under. Many people will suffer bereavement, loneliness and despair, even if they dodge the virus. The only question is how many in each case. We are about to find out how robust civilisation is. The hardships ahead are like nothing we’ve known.

The British government has been unusual in ramping up its social distancing measures, rather than rushing them all at once. This resulted in a good deal of bafflement and criticism, some of it justified. The driving motive was concern that a resurgence of the virus after its initial suppression would be a disastrous outcome, because people would not allow themselves to be curfewed twice, so the timing had to be right. But the vicious experience of Italy has changed everything. So when the darned models revealed that a single ‘managed’ peak here leading to eventual herd immunity might kill 260,000 people and overwhelm the National Health Service, the strategy shifted from ‘delay’ to ‘suppress’.

The government is now effectively admitting that even if drastic curfews lead to successive waves of the disease, that may be the least worst outcome. It is still a daunting prospect. Successive waves mean successive curfews and successive body blows to the economy. If we clamp down hard now and the infection rate drops, then we might be able slowly and cautiously to restart the economy in the summer but have to clamp down again when the virus resurges. Each time we do this, it will be more painful, but at least the health service will be that much better prepared, with more intensive-care beds, more isolation facilities, more ventilators, more and newer testing kits, more data on the efficacy of repurposed drugs.

Moreover, each time the virus re-emerges, there will be more immune people to help look after the sick. Once you’ve had the disease, and assuming the immunity you acquire is long-lasting (not yet certain), then you are in a special category of person who can be employed — or volunteer — for what would otherwise be risky work, and for looking after older people. Each wave of the disease can then be less awful.

One side-effect of the government’s step-by-step approach is that the people have got ahead of the authorities. Lots of people have been volunteering to give up gatherings, work from home if they can or travel less before being asked to. The chorus of complaint last week on social media that the government was not doing enough is a sign that people are now telling the government what to do — which is how it should be in a democracy. A prime minister is being criticised for not ordering us to do things, but ‘advising’ us. Better than the other way round. As the libertarian thinker Douglas Carswell put it on Monday: ‘Treat people as responsible adults and they will behave more responsibly.’

Until this year I thought this kind of infectious pandemic could not happen today. The defeat of infectious diseases as a cause of death has been so complete as to seem invincible: plague, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, measles, polio, whooping cough and many more eradicated or nearly so. The failure of terrifying new animal-derived viruses like Hanta, Marburg, Sars, Mers, ebola, swine flu, bird flu and zika to cause more than a local or temporary interruption of the march of progress left us complacent. (Only HIV went global.) The advance of science allowing the rapid reading of the genome of the new coronavirus gave us false confidence: we would know how to beat it by the time it got out of China. It seemed that only the most innocuous of common colds, and milder forms of flu, seemed capable of remaining ubiquitous. And coronaviruses are a common cause of the common cold, so (despite Sars) they seemed like pussy cats, not tigers.

It turns out that I and many others were badly wrong. The human race has been playing epidemiological Russian roulette all along. It has taken Mother Nature a long time to put a bullet in the right chamber, combining high contagion with asymptomatic carriers and a significant death rate, but she has done it.

We now know that we should have been building far more preparedness for such an event. The World Health Organization has been asleep at the switch. The Wellcome Trust did well to establish a Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation in 2017 in partnership with the Gates Foundation along with the Indian and Norwegian governments, but it should have been started much earlier.

Against many risks, excess precaution is a mistake, doing more harm than good by preventing innovation — but not in the case of threats that can explode exponentially from small beginnings. Apart from Singapore, which built a special hospital after Sars, and South Korea, which geared up to test people and gather data on a huge scale, the world had done far too little to get ready for this possibility. Everything now is catch-up. And we are trying to catch the fastest runner of them all: an exponential curve.

The number of cases outside China has increased tenfold roughly every ten days. If it continues at this rate, in two months the virus will have infected 100 million people. A vast experiment is happening as different countries try different strategies, with some in Asia having notably more success than others in Europe. But to stop the virus gaining a permanent foothold in the human population will require every single one of those experiments to work.

In the long run, we will get through this. Effective drugs will be found. Methods for keeping the very sick from dying will improve. The milder forms of the virus will probably out-compete the harsher versions. A vaccine may yet work — though it has come as quite a shock to find out just how little vaccine development has improved in recent decades. Genomics allows us to read viral genomes in a flash and make messenger-RNA vaccines, in which the body manufactures the viral proteins, doing away with the need to put killed or attenuated viruses into the body. None the less, a scientific paper that I failed to read last year warned: ‘The current state of vaccine development is an expensive, slow and laborious process, costing billions of dollars, taking decades, with less than a 10 per cent rate of success.’

We must not despair or return permanently to autarky and localism. With the right precautions, an open, free-trading, free-moving, innovating world is possible without pandemics and is essential for raising living standards. Government must both splash the cash and slash many of the things it does that are not urgent to alleviate human suffering, and there are a lot of them. But in the midst of our misery let us be thankful for one thing: unlike many plagues, this one spares children.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter!

My new book How Innovation Works is coming in May, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

Coronavirus is the wolf on the loose

My article for Reaction:

In Aesop’s fable about the boy who cried “Wolf!”, the point of the tale is that eventually there was a wolf, but the boy was not believed because he had given too many false alarms. In my view, the Covid-19 coronavirus is indeed a wolf, or at least has the potential to be one. Many people, including President Trump, think we are over-reacting, because so many past scares have been exaggerated. I think that’s wrong.

Coming from you, a friend said to me the other day, that’s scary. I am known as an obsessive and serial debunker of false alarms. I have been at it for almost 40 years ever since I realised as a science journalist in the 1980s that acid rain was being wildly overblown as a threat to forests (I was right). This scepticism has served me well. I did not believe that mad cow disease would kill hundreds of thousands of people, as some “experts” were claiming in the mid 1990s. In the end just 177 died. Likewise, I refused to panic over bird flu, swine flu, SARS or ebola.

I set out to debunk exaggerated claims about the population explosion, peak oil and peak gas, nuclear winter, the ozone hole, pesticides, species extinction rates, genetically modified crops, sperm counts, ocean acidification and the millennium bug. In every case this made me unpopular and unfashionable, but close to the truth. I said climate change would happen more slowly and with less impact on storms, floods, droughts, sea ice and sea level than even some experts were claiming in the 1990s, let alone the extreme environmentalists, and it has.

It is very easy, in other words, to bet on the tendency of journalists and their readers to engage in a competitive auction of unjustified alarm. “The whole aim of practical politics,” said H.L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” And no, the fact that the millennium bug was a damp squib was not because we were well prepared; some countries and industries did nothing and were still fine.

So why don’t I think this hobgoblin is imaginary? First, because lethal plagues have a long track record. From the plague of Justinian to the Black Death to the Spanish flu of 1918 to the HIV epidemic, new diseases have proved they can burn through the human population with frightening efficiency. It’s true we have got better at eradicating infectious diseases through vaccinations, pills and public health, but most viruses are still very hard to cure and some are very easy to catch.

The second reason is that new diseases are often more dangerous than existing ones and this one has jumped from bats, possibly via pangolins. In the past respiratory viruses have generally proved to be low in virulence once they become highly contagious: hence the large number of rhinovirus, adenovirus and coronavirus strains that we call collectively, “the common cold”. Even flu has been relatively less lethal since the special wartime conditions of 1918. But when they first infect our species, viruses can encounter a vulnerable immune system and run riot.

The third reason for alarm in this case is the speed with which Covid-19 has crossed regional and international boundaries. It does seem to have acquired an unusual skill at getting passed on from one person to another, usually not making them so sick that they stay away from meeting other people, which is what prevents ebola causing pandemics, but yet being capable of killing about 1% of people it infects. This is the frightening combination of traits that we have feared might one day arise.

Then there is the effect of globalisation, and the huge growth in international travel. I wrote in my notes in 1996, when reviewing a book on new viruses, “If we persist in creating conditions in which viruses can be easily transmitted and amplified, then we will persist in experiencing waves of new viral epidemics. The problem lies in the ecology of our society, not destruction of the environment.” Human beings are just too tempting an ecosystem for an ambitious virus.

But we have indeed cried wolf over so many issues, that it has contributed to us being underprepared. We should have seen that globalisation would cause such a risk to grow ever larger and taken action to prevent a new virus appearing. We should have worried about things other than climate change. Here are a few of the measures we could and should have taken in recent years instead of going into hysteria about the gradual warming of the temperature mainly at night, in winter and in the north.

We could have pursued an international agreement to ban the sale of live bats in markets. Bats are especially dangerous because they are fellow mammals and share with us a tendency to live in huge aggregations. We could have funded more research and development in antiviral therapies, vaccines and diagnostics. We could have built a better infrastructure to isolate cases in healthcare systems, and at transport hubs. These might have been expensive, yes – but nothing like the money we are spending on precautionary measures against dangerous climate change which is still decades away.

There are already several different strains of the virus, one of which, the L strain, looks to be more lethal than others. I fully expect that the milder strains will eventually prevail and this virus will settle down as a form of seasonal fever. But before it does so, in this first pandemic, it is now likely, though not inevitable, that it will kill hundreds of thousands of people.

Donald Trump takes comfort from the fact that it has killed only a handful of Americans so far. He forgets that the chart of an epidemic is exponential, as each person infects several people, and the power of such compound interest is, as Albert Einstein supposedly said, the eighth wonder of the world. The economist Tyler Cowan points out that it’s hard to beat an exponential process once a certain point has passed.

Last week Greta Thunberg was still telling the European Parliament that climate change is the greatest threat humanity faces. This week Extinction Rebellion’s upper-class twits were baring their breasts on Waterloo bridge in protest at the billions of people who they wrongly think may die from global warming in the next decade. These people are demonstrating their insensitivity. They are spooked by a spaniel when there’s a wolf on the loose.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter!

My new book How Innovation Works is coming in May, and is available to pre-order in the UK, US, and Canada.

The Government’s energy policy could cripple global Britain

My article for GlobalVision:

As Britain relaunches itself as an independent trading nation, its fate will depend on how competitive it is. We have lots going for us, but we also have a heavily regulated economy, high labour costs and low productivity, so we may be in for a shock. And there is one slug of self-inflicted burdens that we are in the process of making much worse, perhaps crippling: our energy policy.

Britain has uniquely legislated to reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions in 2050, which means going cold turkey on the 85% of our energy that currently comes from gas, oil and coal. That means finding ways to run not just the electricity grid, which is about 20% of our energy, without net emissions, but all our heating, transport and industrial processes too. Surprisingly, the Committee on Climate Change failed to produce a detailed costing of this ambition before recommending it, but reputable estimates put the cost at around £3 trillion in the absence of any breakthrough in nuclear fusion or carbon capture.

The cost of some existing policies is already being passed on to consumers at the rate of £10 billion a year. Subsidies for wind, solar and biomass electricity have made household electricity prices about 35% higher than they would otherwise have been, according to the government’s own estimates. The prices paid by businesses – which are also passed on to consumers in the prices of products and services – are more like 60% higher. Industrial electricity prices here are among the highest in the world. That is a big drag on competitiveness, and is a large part of the explanation of our falling within-country emissions. Carbon dioxide has been one of the most successful exports of the last decade.

The main beneficiaries from these policies are the renewable energy industry, and the government itself, which charges VAT on top of these subsidies. Fortunately for politicians the pain of these increases has been dulled by two factors: first, a fall in gas and oil prices during the past decade; and second, a decline in the quantity of electricity consumed. Had this not happened, as Professor Dieter Helm of Oxford University wrote in 2017, “there would then have been a serious capacity crunch and much higher prices.”

The world, and Asia in particular, is electrifying more and more processes, because it is such a versatile and efficient source of power, but we and the EU seem to be moving in the other direction. One of the reasons for the fall in electricity consumption is the emigration of industry to cheaper locations. An EU study published last year showed that industrial electricity in the EU28 is not only 50% more expensive than in the G20, it is actually more expensive than domestic retail electricity in the G20. No wonder factories are moving. We have already lost our aluminium industry and much of our steel industry. We still need these materials but we import them from countries with higher emissions, which makes no sense. Even our successful digital economy is not immune to energy costs: server farms are huge users of power. High energy costs are a non-tariff barrier against our own exports.

Energy is not just another raw material, like paper or cement. It’s the very source of wealth. An economy is a thermodynamic engine, creating useful structures and patterns by harnessing energy to undo entropy. High energy costs are extremely dangerous for an economy over time. They become embedded in the costs of the capital they create and they deter experimental innovation. The Germans are now recognising that their extremely expensive Energiewende has poisoned their export economy, and only an undervalued exchange rate is keeping the show on the road.

In the past few weeks, the government has made a string of announcements relating to energy, all attempting to appease the green lobby. Every single one will raise costs to consumers but reward special-interest lobbies of crony capitalists: building HS2 at public expense, complete with its own trackside wind farms; backing off Heathrow’s privately funded third runway; bringing forward the date of banning diesel and electric cars; banning coal and wet-wood stoves used by the less well off in rural areas; mandating the use of subsidised ethanol from wheat; reopening subsidy schemes to wind and solar power. In that last case, ministers argue that onshore wind power is now cheaper than fossil-fuel power and no longer needs subsidies, so they have reopened the subsidies for it. Eh?

The falling cost of offshore wind power is a big myth, by the way. The system cost, connections and back-up required to stabilise a grid relying heavily on intermittent energy is huge, growing and not included in the headline figure for wind subsidy. On top of that, two studies have now confirmed that capital expenditure per megawatt of new capacity in the wind industry has not fallen significantly. Gordon Hughes, CapellAris and John Constable presented public-domain data suggesting that capex in offshore wind was falling only slightly due to technical progress, and that this was completely offset by moving into deeper water. And economists at the University of Aberdeen used a different data set to come to almost the same conclusion, that it will still cost £100 per MWh to get electricity from UK offshore wind farms.

So why are the operators of offshore wind farms bidding lower prices than this? The subsidies take the form of “Contracts for Difference”, but these are misnamed. They are not binding futures contracts, obliging the generator to supply at a bid price. The penalty for non-supply is trivial. The CfDthus gives the generator an entitlement to a price, but puts them under no binding obligation to supply.

As John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation puts it: “Consequently, generators have bid very low in order to obtain an entitlement to a price, and an option for development. This option secures a market position, inhibits competition, and generates excellent public relations. In essence the generators are gambling on future market prices rising above the CfD for whatever reason, in which case they will bail out and take the market price.”

In the case of transport, fuel tax is already exceedingly high in this country, leading many hauliers who come here from the continent to carry extra diesel tanks so they don’t have to refuel while here. Insisting on biofuels will increase the underlying cost and that will be multiplied by Fuel Duty (is that the Chancellor’s cunning plan?). In any case, it takes almost as much diesel and gas to plant, fertilise and harvest a crop of wheat as you get ethanol out of it.

Britain deludes itself that it is setting an example to the world by decarbonising faster. But China, India and even Germany are still building hundreds of coal-fired power stations. The UK is unlikely to be able to manufacture attractive high-value exports if its energy costs are higher than the competition.

Nor can we sell the energy technologies themselves. The experience of Scotland clearly shows that even when government colludes with the renewables industry, there is almost no local employment in the manufacture of wind turbine parts, because renewables are already expensive, and insisting on substantial local content drives up costs still further. Wind turbines will not be made in the United Kingdom, unless labour costs are driven down, and the only way to do that is to force down living standards. Does that sound like good politics to you? Me neither.

The purpose of decarbonisation is to alter the climate for the better. Yet nobody in their right mind thinks that net zero emissions will prevent wet winters and flooding. Such bad weather happened in the past anyway, and flood prevention and mitigation would be necessary even if the climate ceased warming. Rather than wasting money on subsidies to renewables, how about some flood defences? They work!

Our energy policy is centrally planned but it resembles the practice under fascist regimes rather than socialist ones, because it rewards favoured private firms. As Dieter Helm wrote in 2017: “In the current decade, the government has moved from mainly market-determined investments to a new context in which almost all new electricity investments are determined by the state through direct and often technology-specific contracts. Government has got into the business of ‘picking winners’. Unfortunately, losers are good at picking governments, and inevitably – as in most such picking-winners strategies – the results end up being vulnerable to lobbying, to the general detriment of household and industrial customers.”

I fear that the Conservatives have fallen into the error of thinking of the nation as a business. This is both illiberal and makes the classic mistake of answering to the interests of producers rather than consumers. Businesses are command economies on the inside (which is why business people generally speaking do not make good politicians). But populations and the nation states they create to represent their common interests are not businesses: they are voluntary collaborations. The green agenda, as with any ‘crisis’, gives a pretext for the creation of a command economy. If we continue down this road it will not only make us uncompetitive, but also, like all the other corrupt and inefficient command economies before us, very, very dirty.

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