That most excellent scientist, Professor Colin Garner makes an excellent case why the Corona virus crisis would be a lot, lot worse in the absence of good antibiotics. I have taken the liberty of cherry picking the key points from his recent newsletter here

“A recent scientific paper from Wuhan, China published in the well-known medical journal, the Lancet, reported that sepsis was responsible for all the deaths in the study group. Of this group, half had a secondary bacterial infection that failed to respond to antibiotics. How heart-breaking. Sadly secondary bacterial infections are very common in coronavirus victims as the COVID-19 virus attacks the body’s immune cells. It is vital therefore that antibiotics keep on working and that new ones are found. Eventually a vaccine will be developed for COVID-19 in contrast to antibiotics where no new ones are on the horizon. This is why we believe our research to be so important.”

I have highlighted the key learning points.

This man’s battle is on behalf of us all

To gather ideas from intelligent people from all walks of life who can make things better.

Are you a teacher who can really transfer learning? Tell us here!

Are you a carer who is holding society together in the face of crisis?

A scientist with a new idea? A manager who thinks it’s wrong to bully and scream at people?

Or just got your own mind?

WE WANT TO HEAR! WE WANT YOUR STORIES!

I once had the honour and privilege of meeting Anthony Hilton at a certain party in a certain building. He should be anybody’s first go to on all matters political and economic. And as an avid reader of his column for many years, I slowly began to appreciate his advice on how important the small to medium sized business is, as an engine of innovation and dynamism. Count me among the converted for the rest of this read.

Now with the coronavirus crisis, this sector is in real, real trouble. We should all give full marks to the government for trying to help http://www.gov.uk covid 19 support for businesses. But….in a worse case scenario , what if it isn’t enough? Imagine your favourite little local restaurant deciding it can’t, it really just can’t, go over to take-aways. So it stops buying from suppliers of food, IT and labour. They in turn do the same. As the businesses shrink, the banks can no longer lend—oooops it’s 1933 all over again. And once a business is gone-well, it’s gone, there is no simple re start

So how do you jump start an economy that is completely and utterly dead. Stalled. Kaputt? I am afraid that the answer could very well be by Direction of Labour. Picking projects. And putting the recovered to work on them. Consider the following. Not far from where I live is a large wind farm .It stretches along the outshore waters from Brighton to roughly Worthing. Imagine that you took a lot of unemployed workers and made them extend it all the way to say Chichester. First, you would have created real wealth, in the form of extra power. It’s not as efficient as how capitalists would have done it, but it’s done. Secondly you put unemployed people back to work. They then take their wages and spend them in local businesses on beer, chips and goodness knows what else(this is a family blog) At this point, with money circulating again, a capitalist economy begins to reboot. Far fetched?It’s actually what happened between 1939 and 1951. After a dozen years of socialist planning, the economy was beginning to tick over so well that a Conservative Government was able to take over again.

Now the point of this blog is to generate ideas: I bet I have missed something. So….what do you think?

Firstly, apologies, we slightly misspelt the name of Professor Colin Garner in the last post

What Professor Garner has done is to :

-identify an urgent need and formulate a thoroughly professional response

-create a linked “ecology” of researchers and experts, who can now be redeployed to help with the COVID 19 crisis. If you look below, you will see how he has responded to this

If a society is to thrive and grow, it needs a few more like Professor Garner and a few less whizz kids who just want to make a million!

Below, I give the charity website link- although I cannot seem to preview it

Homepage New

The great Covid 19 crisis, however bad it gets, will one day pass. It is a serious medical emergency; yet it masks an equally great one- our utter deficiency in new antibiotics. Without them, all surgical interventions become terrifyingly hazardous-whether it is routine surgery, childbirth,or major interventions like cancer surgery.

A few years ago, a great man called Professor Colin Gardiner set up a charity called antibiotics research UK. Their aim is to promote new research, and to encourage best practice . To help him, Professor Gardiner has worked with some of the finest minds in the country, including Dame Sally Davies and Lord Jim O’Neill. In the coming months, I will be covering more of the work of this most timely charity. As soon as possible, I will post a link to their website, which I cannot reach now for technical reasons

http://www.antibioticresearch.org.uk

My first day as a blogger, Wednesday 1st April 2020. At the height of the Coronavirus crisis, in what TS Elliott called “April, the cruellest month.” My aim is to gather together interesting information on developments in science, economics, and the we way people behave. It’s stuff that has caught my eye, or that of my friends. It will be non political in nature; bitter experience has shown me that the most unexpected people can save your life. No side has a monopoly on wisdom or virtue.

I will also be trying to speak in English. Which means the use of relative pronouns such as which and that. More on this in due course

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton