Martin Cohen (Twitter @docmartincohen) is a writer, lecturer and researcher who specialises in social science whose books have been translated into twenty different languages. His doctoral research involved looking at social and psychological myths constructed around the power of computers and his books, including, Paradigm Shift: How Expert Opinions Keep Changing on Life, the Universe, and Everything (2015) have explored key issues in philosophy of science including food myths and previous pandemic scares as well as the groupthink that enabled them.
“The end of everything we call life is at hand and cannot be evaded”
H. G. Wells (1946)
“The coronavirus doesn’t just make individual people ill – it threatens the whole of society too. Measures used to control the virus destroy people’s livelihoods, trample basic freedoms and, if prolonged, could eventually bring about wholesale societal collapse. . . .”