Years of printing money, Public Private Partnerships and the transfer of their nations’ manufacturing capability to polluted sweat-shop economies have kept western governments afloat under the watchful eye of their crony-corporatists looking to profit from the unequal trade.

Tragically, the current coronavirus pandemic is closely following in the footsteps of another pandemic that has swept the industrialised world since land-use, farming and agribusiness came under the control of governments in the 1950s and 60s. Afflictions collectively termed Metabolic Syndrome (diabetes, blood pressure, stroke and heart disease) have soared since governments decided to legislate for the content of the food we eat, subsidise its production and bankroll the pharmaceuticals required when it makes us ill. Factory-produced meals and ingredients have largely displaced home-cooking since the cost of living has risen to absorb the wages of both parents.

Perversely, the more of the productive economy that governments take over, the more they get wrong. An example of a nanny-state par excellence is the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP and its cruelly policed and surveilled economy has managed to release yet another acute respiratory syndrome into the world. However, this one appears to have made a fateful confluence with the raging pandemic of Metabolic Syndrome. It is being reported that patients taking prescribed medications to control their diabetes and blood pressure appear to be especially susceptible to Covid-19.

How much simpler to forgo sugar-filled prepared meals, ignore the government’s now discredited advice about the evils of fat and cook ingredients from fresh.

Prof. Christine Wheeler McNulty

Oxhey