CG Podcast

The Power of a Good Example: Nicaragua and the Covid Response

In this podcast, CG steering committee member Toby Green talks with John Perry, contributor to the London Review of Books, FAIR and other publications on Nicaraguan affairs.
Perry gives the perspective of the pandemic response in Nicaragua and Honduras, 2 neighboring countries in Central America. Honduras's neoliberal government followed the dominant lockdown policy, with harsh policing, and closed schools for 2 years: this led to high levels of excess death, and contributed to the collapse of the Honduran government at the end of 2021.
In Nicaragua, by contrast, the Sandinista left-wing government did not follow a lockdown model for fear of the socioeconomic and educational impacts. Perry describes how this policy proved to be more effective, with lower excess deaths, and a much lower socioeconomic effect to poorer communities. This was also made possible by years of health investment by the Sandinista government, with over 20 state-of-the-art hospitals built in the previous decade which helped to see the country through the first Covid wave.

Covid & the humanities

What could humanities scholars have to say about Covid? Here Caitjan Gainty, a historian of medicine and healthcare at King’s College London, discusses the Covid response with her colleague Daniel Hadas, a lecturer in Latin and Ancient Greek.
In the Covid response, governments and public health authorities opted to side-line the knowledge and discourse of the humanities, in a singled-minded focus on “following the science”. This project of setting aside the humanities was both an illusion and a mistake. An illusion, because science itself is a human activity, and the philosophical and political constraints within which it always operates must be acknowledged. A mistake, because the question of what to do in times of pandemic is not just medical or scientific, but raises that fundamental concern of the humanities, and of all human kind: how we can best live and die.
Accordingly, this conversation considers how a philosophical and spiritual analysis can both help us understand more clearly the forms taken by the Covid response, and point to how a better response, one more in accord with the fullness of human dignity, could be possible in future health crises.

Making (Historical) Sense of the Covid Response

In this CG conversation, Daniel Hadas talks to Caitjan Gainty about how the history of medicine and healthcare can illuminate our attempts to analyse and understand the Covid response. Set in the UK but branching out globally, the conversation winds through some of the thorniest of Covid era issues. Vaccines and vaccine mandates, for example, look quite different when set against the problematic and checkered history of global vaccination campaigns. And so do the logics of lockdown and the other non-pharmaceutical interventions, when considered in the context of evolving national security and public health programs over the past 50 years.
In unravelling these issues, further questions arise: what are the right historical moments, events, currents of thought to turn to when trying to contextualise the pandemic? And where does the way in which we choose to contextualise the Covid response intersect with other larger themes: the relationship between science and politics; the scientific and political imaginaries that govern our views of healthcare and medicine; the very nature and role of health in our lives.

The ethics and reality of Kenya’s Covid policy

Dr Reginald Oduor, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Nairobi, discusses Kenya's experience of lockdowns and vaccine mandates with Collateral Global SAB member Toby Green of King's College, London. The impact of the lockdowns on civil rights, the poor, education, and health are discussed -- and also the impacts that this might have into the future, as ethical and political issues mount up.
There is a big focus also on the question of how to foster debate in an environment of the censorship of dissent. How to create engagement and ensure proper debate going forward is a key task for academics and those engaged in civil society, and a duty of those with concern for the experience and lives of future generations

Fear, trust, and the sociology of pandemics

The Covid-19 pandemic was often described as an ‘unprecedented’ disaster, which required wholly new ways of thinking about, and managing, social life. But what was different about this pandemic to those that have afflicted societies over time?
Sociologists have long been interested in pandemics, because they disrupt the existing social order and throw existing problems and tensions into sharp relief. Yet there seemed to be relatively little critical discussion about the historical and sociological dimensions of the response to Covid-19, or balanced debate about the consequences of organising social and economic life around fear of infection.
In this CG conversation, Jennie Bristow talks to Professor Robert Dingwall about the role of the historical and sociological imagination in making sense of the past two years, and where sociology could have done more to put fear into context.

Impacts of Covid Restrictions on the Performing Arts

In this podcast, actor and singer Clifton Duncan discusses the impacts of the Covid restrictions on the world of theatre with CG Scientific Advisory Board member Professor Toby Green. The impacts of Covid restrictions on performers have been devastating, with a strong class dimension.
Clifton and Toby discuss the new dimension of the theatre world, segregation of venues, and the consequences for the future of the performing arts, with a special focus on New York.
Originally released March 2022

2 Years On - In conversation, Professor Jay Bhattacharya and Professor John Ioannidis

Listen to this engaging conversation between two of the most eminent scientists, Professor Bhattacharya and Ioannidis as they look back on the past two years.
Their discussion includes the early seroprevalence studies, Infection Fatality Rates (IFR), precision shielding, the collateral damages caused by lockdowns, and how we can begin to rebuild faith in public health.
Original release March 2022

Lockdown social harm in the Covid era

Collateral Global's Toby Green speaks with Dr Daniel Briggs - a criminologist from Universidad Europea in Madrid, Spain - about flaws in initial COVID-19 risk assessment, the absence of context to inform decision-making, the rush to lockdowns, and the devastating social ramifications of those choices.
Original release 2021

The catastrophic impact of Covid lockdown policy in Ghana

CG’s Professor Toby Green hosts an enlightening discussion with Samuel Adu-Gyamfi, Head of History and Political Science at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.
Topics discussed include:
- The impact of lockdown on the informal economy: "Preventing movement is simply taking away the lifeblood of virtually the entire country's economy."
- The West's misunderstanding of the importance of COVID vaccines in Ghana: "It's like dropping a sugar cube in the ocean. It doesn't make sense."
- The effect on the dependency ratio: "Those who are breadwinners have now become dependents as they are now going to depend on the government to support them."
- As well as the accuracy of the COVID death counts and how lockdowns actually accelerated the spread of COVID-19 due to the social architecture and built environments of Ghana.
Toby Green, Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King's College, London. Author, A Fistful of Shells and The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (Hurst). Writes on impacts of Covid restrictions at African Arguments, Prospect, UnHerd, The Wire. Member of CG Scientific Advisory Board.
Samuel Adu-Gyamfi is the Head of History and Political Studies of KNUST. His research focus is in Applied History including the social studies of health and medicine in Africa .Through Applied History, he makes explicit attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by analyzing historical precedents and analogues. He begins with a current choice or predicament and provides a perspective from history. His current project focuses on epidemics and pandemics in Ghana focusing on Asante.

Professors Carl Heneghan and Ellen Townsend in conversation

Originally released in 2021
An enlightening conversation between Professor of Psychology, Ellen Townsend and Professor Carl Heneghan of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine regarding CG’s latest report on the impact of pandemic restrictions on childhood mental health.
Ellen and Carl discuss:
* What systematic reviews are and why the evidence they produce is so valuable
* Why adults have an obligation to deescalate fear in children
* How pandemic policy responses violate Article 3 of the UN Conventions of the Rights of the Child
* Why older adolescents fare worse than younger children with respect to mental health
* How to support young people in recovering their mental health post-pandemic
* Why we must listen to children