Collateral Global Newsletter, September 2024
A round up of our progress – Summer 2024
It has been a busy Summer for Collateral Global with much planned for the months ahead. Highlights include the introduction of our CG NEWS section edited by award winning journalist Lucy Johnston, a series of analyses of the Covid inquiry’s first report in the press, two new academic studies co-written by CG members and over a dozen exciting new podcasts with host Kevin Bardosh.
On the 4th October 2024 Stanford University hosts the Pandemic Policy conference bringing together esteemed academics, public health practitioners, journalists, and policymakers from all sides of the COVID-19 policy debate in conversation with one another.
In attendance will be the CG team including Professor Jay Bhattacharya, Kevin Bardosh and Professor Sunetra Gupta
Read below to find out more!!!
Latest Collateral Global News
Collateral Global’s news editor Lucy Johnston joins our team to write exclusive weekly articles focused on ongoing harms of pandemic policy.
Lucy has been Health and Social Affairs editor at The Sunday Express for 25 years and also works as a freelance journalist for a range of national print and broadcast press. Previous roles include Assistant Editor at the Big Issue and investigative journalist at the Observer.
Read the articles:
- Record levels of speech and language problems among youngsters linked to lockdown
- Zuckerberg censorship revelation tip of “widespread and chilling” silencing of Covid science
- New Covid school closures condemned by scientists
- Scientists call for for calm over Mpox
New Collateral Global Studies
11 July 2024
Zero‑covid advocacy during the COVID‑19 pandemic: a case study of
views on Twitter/X.
CG director Kevin Bardosh together with CG network members, including Christian Rangel from Canada, review advocacy for COVID-19 elimination or “zero covid” on the social media platform X (Twitter). The study analyses the tweets of 20 influential co-signatories of the World Health Network letter.
September 2024
Panel stacking is a threat to consensus statement validity
CG network members (Simon Wood, Ari Joffe, Kevin Bardosh) joined 50 other co-authors in analyzing the biases of Covid-19 consensus statements, focused on a delphi study published in Nature.
The studies:
- Zero-covid advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic: a case study of view on Twitter/X
- Panel stacking is a threat to consensus statement validity
UK Covid Inquiry releases its first report
The UK Covid Inquiry releases its first report published 18 July 2024.
Collateral Global academics give their response to the reports initial findings.
Kevin Bardosh, CG director and infectious disease expert wrote in the Mail Online:
“The most important lesson from Covid – that Britain’s experimental policy of closing down society failed to control the virus and caused more harm than good – is never seriously considered. We must hope that future reports do better.”
Toby Green, Professor of History and associate of the Global Health Institute at King’s College, London wrote in Unherd:
“Baroness Hallett has concluded that there were devastating failings in imposing lockdown in the first place.
The report for the first module emphasises that one of the failures of the “ad-hoc” lockdown approach was that its novelty meant there was no time to
interrogate its consequences.”
David Livermore, Microbiologist, wrote in Spiked:
“Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the report was its open recognition of the harm caused by lockdown. It acknowledges that lockdown was not part of the UK’s planned pandemic response, but an untested policy adopted on the hoof. According to the inquiry, this meant that there was no time to scrutinise its potential consequences – consequences that we are still living with today.”
Read the articles:
- Did the Covid inquiry just admit lockdown was a mistake? Unherd 18.07.24
- The lesson they’re determined to ignore: lockdown was a disaster, writes infectious diseases expert Kevin Bardosh Mail Online 18.07.24
- We still need to reckon with the folly of lockdown Spiked 09.08.24
Collateral Global legacy podcast
We have had an exciting line-up of podcast guests including:
Stanford primary care physician and former deputy health officer in San Francisco, California, Rajiv Bhatia.
Professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida and British Academy Global Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Eric Winsberg.
Lawyer and the director of litigation at the Canadian Constitutional Foundation, Christine Van Geyn.
Professor of medical sociology and women’s studies at City University of New York, Barbara Katz Rothman.
Veteran journalist (Enron scandal and 2008 financial crisis) and contributing editor of Vanity Fair Magazine, Bethany McLean.
Swedish journalist and author, Johan Anderberg.
Recent podcasts:
- Learning from the Swedish Covid “experiment”
- The Big Fail: What Covid revealed about a fractured America
- The Biomedical Empire during the Covid pandemic
- Pandemic Panic: Civil Liberties in Canada during Covid
- Covid Models: What can Philosophy teach us?
- What happened in California? Missing science and murky emergency laws during Covid
To view the full list of podcasts click here
Collateral Global legacy podcast
Articles in the press May-June 2024:
- Media backs Supreme Court’s Covid-era censorship ruling
- Mass testing for bird flu risks repeating Covid mistakes
- Studies: top medical journals biased towards Zero Covid
- The WHO pandemic treaty: dead but not buried
Coming up
October 4, 2024
Stanford University is organizing a major symposium on the Covid pandemic on October 4th 2024, bringing together esteemed academics, public health practitioners, journalists, and policymakers from all sides of the COVID-19 policy debate in conversation with one another.
The symposium will include panels on evidence-based decision making, social harms from a global perspective, academic freedom and misinformation, and Covid-19 origins and the regulation of virology.
In attendance will be the CG team including Jay Bhattacharya, Kevin Bardosh and Sunetra Gupta
Support us!
Please consider supporting us through our crowdfunding campaign,
which can be accessed here.
We cannot do this important work without the support of thousands of large and small donations from the public and foundations.
Together we can ensure that future pandemic responses are evidence-based and better balance societal trade-offs in order to maximize the health and well-being of all people.
Please get in touch with us if you have any questions at info@collateralglobal.org
Kevin Bardosh, on behalf of Collateral Global
Copyright © 2024 Collateral Global Ltd., All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Collateral Global Ltd.
71-75 Shelton Street
Covent Gard