By John Micklethwaite and Adrian Wooldridge
the first an editor in chief of bloomberg and the other the political editor of the economist.
Starts of looking like a piece of crap It is a piece of crap. With its take on the covid. The nature of it makes me suspect the veracity or perspicacity of anything to come.
Saying things like '..in one day more people died of Covid in Britain than in the whole of the EU.' Meaning what? They don't say. But it is something to do with 'populists' being in command. They're making an argument that the west is bad, the east is good. But statements like that don't help it along. See what I mean? They rely on assumptions and presumptions, bias, prejudice. They're rubbish in context, contributing nothing.
If the rest of the book goes like that it will all be rubbish.
Trouble is I can detect this in the covid context but I possibly won't be able to detect it in other contexts.
Now here: 'the east's success with covid is not a lucky accident; it is the result of a change that has been several decades in the making...' this is their argument. this is what they're on about.
But the east has had no success with covid. nowhere has. covid has run its course in the way viruses do wherever it has been. the only 'success' that anyone could claim would be where they employed targeted protection for the elderly and frail and where they employed pragmatically effective prophylactic and therapeutic measures - such as Ivermectin. And that essentially boils down to nowhere.