Goodall and Sopel discussed school closures and the lab leak theory: “Legitimate questions have emerged and should be asked about, for example, whether school closures were a good idea or the lab leak theory itself.” Setting aside the fact that these questions have been asked continuously since 2020, they did not fairly represent the evidence.

On origins I’ll be brief because it is not my field. While a lab leak has not been disproven (and likely can never be), every piece of positive evidence that has emerged since 2020 about where the outbreak began points to a natural origin from the Wuhan wet market.

School closures are within my expertise^[i]. Sopel and Goodall seem to come to the view that school closures were not justified (”I am not sure that even in the first lockdown, that school closures for any length of time were a price worth paying.”). This question is not settled - the Covid Inquiry’s Module 8 on children and young people has not yet reported and what exists right now is a media consensus.

A price worth paying implies a comparison. What was said next was that there is now “plenty of academic literature and evidence to show the damage of that on children, particularly children from the least well-off backgrounds and the most vulnerable kids”. That is true – school closures were very damaging to children – but Sopel and Goodall did not say anything about what the alternative would have been. Because the alternative is not “schools open and all other outcomes the same”.

This matters because of what comes next. What we now know about how covid affected children (and it was not as mild as commonly believed) is knowledge about one virus. The next pandemic may have a very different age profile, for instance flu pandemics have often hit the young hardest. Keeping schools open is a goal not a policy, and the lessons we need to learn are about how best to get there.

First school closures in March 2020: a price paid against what?

In March 2020, we weren’t testing, hospital admissions were doubling every 3-4 days or so, we had no treatment and no vaccine. The few countries ahead of us in the pandemic closed schools along with everything else, so we did not have evidence on the differential impact of school closures over other closures. We didn’t know that much about transmission (especially in infected people without symptoms), we didn’t know whether fewer reported cases in children was because they were less likely to be infected if exposed, if they were less likely to show symptoms (and so be less likely to be tested), or if they were less likely to be exposed because schools were shut - or a combination of all three. We had no idea about long term impacts of the virus. We did know that mixing in school and at home is an important factor in annual flu epidemics.

With hindsight, it’s plausible that with everything else shut, keeping schools open would probably still have allowed the wave to be brought under control but it would certainly have meant that it took longer to come down. We do now know that children, and schools where children mix in large numbers, absolutely do contribute to transmission. OpenSAFELY followed 12 million adults in England and found higher infection risk among those living with children. Lessler et al found the same association with in person schooling. And in Sweden, where lower secondary schools stayed open while upper secondary moved online, parents and teachers of the pupils still attending had measurably higher infection rates.

Children live with adults, and many live with vulnerable adults. They are taught by adults, including many vulnerable adults. Schools are maintained by adults, including many vulnerable adults. A longer first wave means more infections, more people in hospital, more deaths, more Long Covid. Children would have carried on attending school inside a longer lockdown. And if the numbers had not come down quickly enough, schools would have closed in the end regardless, later, with more damage already done.

Schools did reopen partially in June 2020, when community transmission was very low. With hindsight, they could probably have opened a week or two earlier if protective measures had been put in place. But we are talking days and weeks, not months (because decline is exponential just as growth was).

Summer 2020 onwards: a real failure

By the end of the first wave, we knew a lot more. But there was no government effort for education (and social) catch-ups, particularly outdoors, for children over the summer and no effort to make schools into safer environments. In September 2020, schools reopened against an airborne virus with class bubbles, staggered start times, hand hygiene and cleaning of surfaces. Masks were discouraged in classrooms. Financial support for isolation was among the least generous in the OECD, so a positive test was something many families could not afford to act on (and testing was overwhelmed that September). Ventilation was acknowledged as good practice and then barely funded: carbon dioxide monitors were not promised until August 2021 (long after the last lockdown) and then arrived late, and only 3% of classrooms had received air cleaning units by 2022.

Through the autumn of 2020, schools and year groups shut repeatedly when too many staff or pupils were ill or isolating. By July 2021 (months after the last lockdown) more than a million children were out of school during the height of the Delta wave. To end the disruption, the government stopped asking child contacts of cases to isolate in August 2021. But the disruption continued throughout the autumn of 2021, as the driver became infection. By the end of 2021 prevalence was around 6% in primary and 8% in secondary pupils, and when Omicron first hit in early 2022, almost 15% of primary school children were infected in one week at its peak.

Letting the virus run through schools produced schools that partly closed, unpredictably, at no notice, with little remote provision ready. Disadvantaged children lost the most and received too little support both during and after closure.

November 2020: the lockdown with schools open

England did in fact run the experiment of lockdown with schools fully open: the second national lockdown, from 5 November to 2 December 2020. It worked but was not as effective as the first and third lockdowns. National surveillance from November found infection rates falling first in adults and then, about a week later, in children. While adults’ contacts were similar in all lockdowns, children’s contacts were markedly higher in November, when schools were open. Before the lockdown had even ended infections had started climbing again in London and the South East due to the emergence of the more transmissible alpha variant. Lockdown with schools open (and no vaccines) was simply not enough to contain the alpha variant.

From 23 November 2020 cases rose rapidly across all age groups in London and the South East. Prevalence in school age children reached levels higher than any other age group by mid-December 2020 and the December rises in children came before the rises in everyone else.

January 2021: the last and longest lockdown

Vaccination had begun on 8 December but cases were rising too fast for enough people to be vaccinated in time to either reduce spread or reduce sickness without further restrictions. I’ve already written about that devastating wave in which 87,000 people died and the NHS was brought to its knees. Modelling from the team behind the CoMix contact survey estimated that a lockdown under November conditions with schools open would have meant that R remained close to or above 1 during the Alpha wave – that would have meant a much much longer and more devastating wave. Schools – rightly – were the first things to open in March 2021.

What we now know about Covid infection in children

So far, I’ve not said anything about the impact of Covid infection on children. Media consensus again seems to be that it is minimal. It is not. Children can be at lower risk than adults and still be at risk. Note that much of the evidence I’m going to talk about in this section was consolidated after 2021, after decisions on schools had to be made.

In our study analysing a national cohort of 3.2 million children in England, published in 2023, there were 29,230 hospital admissions associated with a first covid infection. Covid was the cause of, or a contributory factor to, 21,000 of them. 1,710 involved paediatric critical care. There were 70 deaths in which covid or PIMS-TS was listed as a cause. Hospital admissions were disproportionately in children from the most deprived areas and from minority ethnic backgrounds, the same children who bore the heaviest costs of school closure.

PIMS-TS, a dangerous inflammatory syndrome that could attack children several weeks after infection, was described for the first time in May 2020, during the first wave. It is rare: in England, during the January 2021 wave, it was estimated at roughly one in 2,600 infections in children but it is serious. Of the 1,790 children admitted with it in our cohort, 30% needed intensive or high dependency care, the highest proportion of any category of admission we looked at.

Then there are the children who develop Long Covid. It is hard to measure (especially as Covid infections in children are more likely to be either ‘non-typical’ symptoms or asymomptatic and so are often missed) and so there are a wide range of estimates for how common it is. I will use conservative figures from high quality studies. Among adolescents, the CLoCk study matched those who tested positive against those who tested negative and found, three months later, 30% of children with Covid infection had three or more persistent symptoms vs 16% of those with no confirmed Covid infection. The comparison group lived through the same pandemic and the same school disruption, so that gap of roughly 14 percentage points is an excess attributable to infection.

The ONS Schools Infection Survey estimated that 1.8% of primary and 4.8% of secondary pupils had symptoms lasting at least twelve weeks after a positive test that affected their daily life. Among adults, the REACT programme’s study of 242,712 people, compared against people who had never been infected, put persistent symptoms at 7.5% at twelve weeks and 5.2% at a year, and found longer durations for infections acquired when the original variant was dominant in 2020. That is exactly the variant a first wave mass infection event would have involved.

And more than 16,000 children in the UK lost a parent to covid.

This idea that we could have simply kept schools open, without changing anything else, and all would have been fine is just not supported by the evidence.

So what are the lessons?

We need to build a system in which we do not need to close schools (and even then, a virus may emerge that makes this impossible). Evidence from Covid did find that schools with better mitigations had lower infection rates than those without.

I suggest six key learning points.

1. Do not prejudge the next pandemic. Everything in the section above is knowledge about SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus). It says nothing at all about what the next pandemic virus will do. Influenza pandemics have often hit the young hardest (e.g. 1918 or 2009). Turning “covid was milder in children than adults” into “never close schools” is fundamentally stupid.

2. Clean air as infrastructure. Ventilation and air quality standards in school buildings, should be funded and built before the next airborne pandemic rather than procured in a panic during it. This will make it easier to keep children in school during an airborne pandemic, while having a whole host of other benefits on child health and learning in normal times.

3. Invest in effective public health measures. Open schools are an outcome, and to get there we need cleaner indoor air, excellent community testing and contact tracing, generous support for isolation and a host of other public health measures including early action to suppress growth.

4. Support children in disadvantaged communities, funded in advance. This includes devices, connectivity, food, safe spaces to learn, and the staff to deliver catch up. The unequal impact of the pandemic on children was inherited from our ongoing deep structural inequalities.

5. Mental health and social support during school closures designed in from day one. If school closures do become necessary, have a planned and strong roll-out of measures to support mental health and social contact. The ongoing technological revolution should make this easier.

6. Build the capacity to generate evidence faster next time. It took years to establish what covid did to children and how much schools contributed to transmission. Surveillance and study designs that can deliver that within months, rather than years, would support schools to stay open during pandemic waves, because they are what tells us how to do it.

^[i] I’ve published quite a bit on children and covid including: a peer-reviewed BMJ analysis of how UK policy on children and schools related to the evidence available at each point; a peer-reviewed BMJ cohort study of 3.2 million children in England examining who was admitted to hospital with Covid and why; a short piece on Long Covid in Children for Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.

270 of you replied (thank you!). 174 of you wrote something in the free text box at the end, some of it quite long - thank you. I found it a really useful exercise!

Given you’ve fed back to me, I thought it would be good for me to feed back to you. So, in this post I summarise what you said, and what I have decided to change in response.

Caveats

68% of respondents are in the UK, 14% in the US, 17% elsewhere. My actual Substack subscriber base is closer to 40% UK, 40% US and 20% elsewhere, so this sample over represents the UK. Plus, there is obviously a bias in the results as those who responded are more likely to be video watchers and more likely to like the videos, but it’s what I’ve got so here goes…

First, should I continue?

83% of people who answered the question said I should carry on with the videos – but this was unsurprisingly skewed towards those who watch regularly.

Almost everyone who watched most or all of them wants me to carry on. The “no” votes come almost entirely from people who never or rarely watch. Several who said “no” explained that they follow my Substack, they value the Tracker, but that video is simply not how they take in information. Which is totally fine, of course!

My response: keep going (starting again in September)

To change the format or not to change?

I also asked people about preferred format – and this got a more varied response.

If you look at the overall numbers, the current format wins a plurality at 46%, with “written posts instead of video” second at 24%. But when we split out those numbers by how often people watch (below), the results are a bit clearer.

81% of people who watch every video want the format kept as it is. 4% of them want written posts instead. Among people who hardly ever or never watch, 82% want written posts.

Hardly anyone wanted less frequent but deeper dives, while some people did want shorter videos – particularly those who say they only watch occasionally. Similarly, when I asked people what they want more of, 62% said “just the facts, keep it as is”.

That is consistent with what many of you wrote in the free text part. The value people described was seeing everything at once, me pulling the different strands together and organising the chaos of constant news. A few of you said the stripped-down style is exactly why you watch, that it is the “opposite of clickbait”. One person called it “all substance no dopamine”, which I am going to take as a compliment, although I apologise for regularly leaving so many of you depressed (obviously it’s Trump who should really be apologising!).

Several of you told me the topic ranking question (see below) was impossible precisely because the topics all connect and contribute to the overall pattern. I had been wondering about splitting the videos by theme and rotating through themes every 4-6 weeks but based on this feedback I am not going to.

So there are two groups here. People who watch, who broadly like what they get. And people who read my Substack, do not watch video, but would appreciate written content.

My response: I already produce a script for each video, with sources, to help my video editor, so I will polish this up a bit and published this as notes in the Substack post underneath the video. That way people can choose to either watch/listen or read as they prefer. In terms of length, I do actually produce YouTube shorts (3 minute or less videos) which are clips of the longer videos. You can find them on my YouTube Shorts channel – I don’t post them to substack to avoid spamming people who’ve already watched the full video. YouTube seems to be throttling my shorts recently as views have gone from ~800 to ~50 from one week to the next but they are there regardless.

Which topics you value

I asked you to rank eight of the most common recurring sections. Every topic had some people rank it top and some people rank it bottom. The chart below shows the full spread of ranks people gave each section (the orange line shows the median rank, 1 is the highest rank), which makes the overlap clearer than any ordered list can.

A lot of you told me in the free text that the question was unfair because it all matters and it all connects. I agree. That said, there are three clusters here – most preferred are round-ups around disinformation and science/health. Then next popular are corruption, attacks on enemies, and civil rights. Least popular are foreign policy, nationalism and elections. I suspect the latter two are because over 85% of respondents were not from the US and so these topics might feel less relevant.

But I also want to acknowledge why many of you (particularly in the UK) started following me in the first place, which was through Covid and Independent SAGE. Indeed, a surprising number of people mentioned both in the free text. In that sense, a ranking that puts science and disinformation at the top also reflects what matters to people who started following me then. They also matter a lot to me and I think are often under-reported, which is why they feature in a lot of my videos. That said, elections and immigration are hugely important to what is happening in the US (not least in terms of understanding the descent into populist authoritarianism) and so I’m not going to stop covering them.

The free text

Overwhelmingly, most of you said thank you and keep going and that was really lovely to read – thank you back! I send this stuff out in the ether and I have no idea if anyone cares, so it’s nice to know that so many of you do!

Other than that, here are the substantive things that came up more than once and my response:

Worry about my time. 22 of you, unprompted, told me to rest, or not to burn out, or that you understood if I stopped. Nobody asked me to do more. Which is good, because I won’t! I don’t feel like I’m about to burn out but thank you for caring 😊

Audio only. 23 people said they’d rather listen than watch. Several of you already listen through the podcast feed. An audio-only option already exists because Substack generates it automatically from every post and it goes to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or you can sign up directly via an RSS feed. Instructions for how to do this are here.

Production quality. Some people said that the sound is inconsistent, the blurred background is distracting, the colour key is poor, and one of you cannot hear speech frequencies well and needs captions. So in turn: the sound quality depends on where I am recording; I blur my background for privacy reasons; and captions are already included in every video. I’m afraid there’s a limit to how much equipment I’m prepared to buy or set-up I’m prepared to do to significantly improve the audio/visual. 😊

UK content. Some of you asked what the equivalent picture looks like here. This is actually a project I’m actively exploring doing (effectively starting a UK tracker) but I can’t unless I find significant funding to support it. You’ll know if it happens!

Heather Cox Richardson came up a few times, either as a comparison or as a suggested collaboration. Would love to collaborate with her but she’s way more important than me and must be run off her feet producing her daily newsletter, so not sure what would be in it for her!

Summary of next plans!

1. Keep the videos, keep the round up, keep it roughly every one to two weeks. Multiple topics in one video, 10 to 15 minutes.

2. Publish the full script as text in the Substack post with every video. This is the main change. I write a script anyway before I record, so this costs me little in extra time and it gives people the option to read or watch.

3. Signpost the podcast feed properly. Podcast option exists – set-up instructions.

4. Keep covering elections and nationalism even though they ranked lowest because I think they are vitally important.

Finally, sources and the full database of actions are always at trumpactiontracker.info.

A quick video explaining that I’m taking a summer break from these. While I’m currently planning on coming back in September, I might not.

I am really interested to find out a bit more about you! Who watches these and why? What do you like or dislike about them? Can I improve? Should I continue?

I’ve designed a short anonymous survey to help make the decision - please do take it!

Bear in mind that these videos take several hours each by the time I’ve curated the actions, wrestled them into a script and then recorded them.

It then takes my fabulous volunteer a few more hours to edit them into something nice. I’m not really in a position to become way more professional (partly time constraints, partly video talent) but I am definitely open to (reasonable) suggestions!

Thanks for watching and taking the survey!

****

PS I’m hoping to use some of the time saved by not recording these on being able to write a bit more on substack.

And three people died in 7 days during encounters with ICE agents during traffic stops. In two of the cases, witnesses directly contradicted ICE’s account. In neither case was the victim the intended target of the operation. ICE briefly paused vehicle stops only for Trump to publicly overrule his own agency the next day.

Subtitles available and all actions logged at TrumpActionTracker.info

Non-partisan should mean refusing to take sides between political parties: no endorsing candidates, no campaigning, no bending findings to help one side win. I agree that scientific institutions should be non-partisan in this sense. The problem is that “non-partisan” is increasingly being interpreted by institutions as “stay out of anything that has become politically charged, avoid controversy, say nothing”. I believe such silence is neither non-partisan nor harmless.

Evidence - and evidence-based policy - needs defending

The integrity of evidence itself is not a partisan issue: whether peer review is independent of political appointees, whether researchers can publish findings without being punished for them, whether public health data is ethical and transparent, whether advisory committees are chosen for expertise or for loyalty. Politicians on the right or left who agree on nothing else should both want the evidence underlying their different policy agendas to be sound.

Scientific institutions as ‘referees’ over use of evidence is a useful analogy. A referee should never favour a team but if they see one team commit foul after foul and stay silent for fear that penalising that team would look like favouritism, then they have failed at being a referee. Indeed, their silence is favouritism but for the side committing the infringements. In our analogy, scientific institutions don’t decide the winner between political parties, but they should ensure that ‘shared facts’ (the rulebook) are adhered to.

Of course, evidence is not always clear-cut, and there can be legitimate debate over the meaning or veracity of emerging findings (e.g. the pandemic was characterised by policy making under considerable uncertainty), or how to incorporate evidence into policy (e.g. which vaccines to offer to which populations), or uncertainty at the edges of accepted evidence (e.g. second- or third-order effects of a changing climate). But just because some evidence is less certain does not mean it all is (e.g. we may not fully understand the second-order impacts of climate change, but we do know that climate change is a major problem) while the underlying conditions which support the integrity of evidence and its production are not themselves in doubt.

Two attacks at once

The populist right’s tactics are two-pronged. One is an assault on the process: handing political appointees the power to overrule scientific review, removing experts who produce inconvenient results, removing funding from, or starting investigations into, institutions that do not fall into line. The second is the denial of plain evidence in order to enact policies that do real harm: expanding fossil fuels while calling climate change a “hoax”; or rolling back newborn hepatitis B vaccination against the evidence and the experts.

Silence answers neither attack. It does not defend the process, and it does not challenge the harm. And this is why scientists and scientific institutions need to speak up for science.

******

Note: this piece is adapted from some of the discussion in this new editorial: McKee, Correia, Pagel, “Europe must learn from America’s assault on science”, European Journal of Public Health, 2026

That is why, today, we are publishing a new reference guide with Unchecked and the UCL Policy Lab to 33 of these scientific public bodies and 11 scientific advisory committees, detailing exactly how exposed each one is to political interference. Alongside that, and easier to use, is a new webpage where you can explore any of them yourself. These important bodies are much more vulnerable to political interference than I think most people realise.

Some are well known like the Met Office, Food Standards Agency, or Office for National Statistics. Others few people have heard of (Office for Nuclear Regulation or Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority anyone?). But they all do important work and the public does see the value in such functions being independent from politics. Polling we commissioned from More in Common last summer found that seven in ten Britons (71%) say it is more important for these bodies to be independent of government than controlled by it. Support holds across every party. Liberal Democrat voters were most in favour at 83%, and Reform voters were close behind at 79%.

In our UCL Policy Lab Report released last October, we identified six different vulnerabilities that can lead to these bodies having their political independence undermined – especially if an incoming government were determined to do so. These are:

1. whether they have statutory protection;

2. whether the minister appoints its leadership;

3. how reliant they are on government funding;

4. how much influence ministers have on their priorities;

5. whether they are accountable directly to parliament or via their minister;

6. whether they are free to publish without government permission.

In today’s report and webpage, each body is assessed on each of the six domains and its overall vulnerability, which reflects how exposed a body could be to interference. Whether interference actually happens depends on the government of the day.

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The overall picture is of a fragmented system, built piece by piece over decades, where each body has its own patchwork of protections. Very few have none and very few are protected across all domains. Around a third of the bodies have no statutory basis at all, so can be much more easily abolished. Almost all have their leaders appointed by ministers, making them vulnerable to leadership capture. Most depend on a government department for their money, agreed year by year.

The webpage allows you to filter by overall vulnerability, each domain of vulnerability, body type, parent government department or direct name search. For each, we give key takeaways on what its key function is, why a government might want to interfere and how it might do so.

Take the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). When a farmer reports sudden deaths in a poultry flock, or suspects foot-and-mouth in cattle, it is APHA scientists who visit, take samples, confirm the disease in their labs, and arrange controls that stop it spreading. The APHA underpins the country’s biosecurity and its response to outbreaks of bird flu, bovine TB, and foot-and-mouth, but it is one of only two bodies that is not protected on any domain. It has no statutory basis for its own existence and sits under Defra (Dept for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs). Its Chair and Chief Executive are appointed by the Secretary of State, its funding comes largely from Defra, and its communications run through Defra integrated corporate services. A government wanting to relax biosecurity standards to secure a trade deal, or under pressure from agri-business donors, would not find it difficult to undermine the APHA’s function.

Or take the Marine Management Organisation, which licenses and polices activity across UK seas, from fishing quotas to offshore development and marine protected areas. Its leadership is ministerially appointed, and Defra operates a two-week pre-publication review of its reports, a window that could be used to influence what it says about fisheries or developer compliance.

Neither of these is a household name. Both do work that matters and helps keep our population and environment safe. Both are rated as highly vulnerable, open to being redirected, leaned on or scaled back without much public notice.

These aren’t just hypothetical vulnerabilities either, and we’ve seen similar weaknesses in other countries exploited to devastating effect. In the United States, the second Trump administration has shown how fast equivalent agencies can be subverted or destroyed, from USAID to the Environmental Protection Agency to the National Institutes for Health. Agency heads have been replaced with people openly hostile to their organisation’s purpose. Internal watchdogs have been fired. Funding has been frozen and cut. Scientists have been told what they can and cannot publish, with banned-word lists running to hundreds of terms.

The Unchecked webpage is there so you can explore vulnerabilities for yourself for the UK context. There are achievable ways to fix these vulnerabilities but they won’t happen on their own. It needs MPs to take an interest, to defend these bodies, and to act before there is a crisis rather than after. It needs an executive willing to give up some of its power. It needs a public willing to express its support for all of these crucial functions and the independence of these bodies. And it needs the bodies themselves to live up to their responsibilities, communicate clearly (if allowed) what they do and work with the communities they serve.

Acknowledgements

The report was led by me and Prof Martin McKee. The primary research was conducted by Luke Flynn (as part of the first report) and then Research Assistant and law graduate Hannah Smith, who also wrote the first draft of the report. The website was designed and implemented together with Unchecked, who are hosting it. The work was funded by UCL Public Policy through Research England’s QR-PSF funding and by UCL Network funding through EPSRC IAA.

How different industries were targeted

The Trump administration wanted control and capitulation, using whatever levers they thought would work to get there. Universities were among the first targets. On 29 January 2025 the administration issued an executive order on campus antisemitism and opened investigations at five schools, later widened to around sixty. It then used federal agencies to withhold billions of dollars in grants and contracts from individual universities while pressing for an end to diversity programmes, and oversight of admissions, promotions and curricula. In addition to funding, the government pressured income from international students, through visa restrictions, surveillance and even trying to ban Harvard outright from enrolling international students.

Law firms were pressured through executive orders that stripped lawyers of security clearances, barred them from federal buildings and threatened their clients’ government contracts, alongside letters from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission demanding details of their diversity hiring. The firms singled out had mostly represented Trump’s opponents or employed lawyers who had investigated him.

Other corporations faced a still different set of pressures: tariffs or the threat of them, spurious lawsuits, threatened broadcast licences for media companies, and merger and antitrust decisions the White House could speed up or hold back.

Universities

Many universities did not withstand the pressure. Columbia agreed to a $200 million payment, a federally endorsed definition of antisemitism, and an end to its diversity programmes under threat of losing at least $400 million in grants. Brown paid $50 million and changed its admissions and gender policies. Penn revoked trans athlete records and apologised after $175 million was suspended. Cornell, Northwestern and the University of Virginia cut their own deals.

Harvard refused. It was hit hard, losing access to more than $2 billion in funding and faced threats to its tax status and patents. Harvard fought back in court and in September 2025 a federal judge ruled the funding freeze illegal. The government is appealing and has continued to find ways to pressure the university. The Crimson reported that Harvard had spent $126 million in legal fees in 2025. Harvard is, of course, much richer than almost all other universities. Its endowment of over $50 billion gives it resources to fight back that other institutions do not have. But alongside the resources to resist, universities need to make an active choice to do so. Harvard could still have capitulated.

UCLA faced a $1.2 billion settlement demand and a $584 million funding freeze, but it did not pay. A federal judge blocked the settlement in November 2025, and the administration dropped its appeal in February 2026. The resistance there however did not come from UCLA’s leadership, which argued in court that disclosing the settlement terms would cause “irreparable harm”, but from faculty associations and labour unions, who forced the issue.

So far, the scales favour resistance. Harvard and UCLA have been winning in court, meaning that the universities that settled have no obvious advantage to show for it. When four federal agencies imposed near identical caps on research funding indirect costs across all universities, courts blocked all four.

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Law firms

Law firms appeared in a much better position than universities. They had much more independence from the state, legal expertise and deep pockets. But despite this, many still chose accommodation with the State. Nine firms pledged a combined $940 million in free legal work to causes Trump favoured, in order to avoid or settle executive orders against them. Paul Weiss, which had branded itself a bulwark against Trump in his first term, sent its managing partner to the White House to make a deal.

Four firms fought instead: Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block and Susman Godfrey. Each won a federal ruling that the orders targeting them were unconstitutional. The government then abandoned its appeals. Bloomberg Law’s assessment afterwards was blunt: “Anyone in Trump’s current crosshairs would do well to pay attention to the brave firms that made the decision to fight—not fold”. The firms that surrendered “ended up losing,” shedding partners and clients while remaining bound by deals with Trump, whereas those that fought emerged stronger.

Corporations

In Trump’s first term, CEOs of major companies publicly opposed controversial policies such as the ‘Muslim travel ban’ and the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. By the second term, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, once a Trump critic, appeared at the inauguration and Meta scrapped its fact checking programme. During his second term, the relationship between corporate America and the presidency evolved from cautious disengagement to strategic alignment. Many corporations have actively recalibrated their public posture and internal strategies to align with the administration’s priorities, often at the expense of democratic norms. Companies channelled political money through dark money networks, settled spurious lawsuits, promised to fund Trump’s ballroom, and gave him golden gifts.

Leadership

Institutional resilience is not a fixed property an institution has. It is a choice its leaders make, repeatedly, often at real short term cost. Harvard had the money but still had to decide to use it and carry on using it. The four law firms had no guarantee of winning when they filed. UCLA’s faculty pushed when its leadership hesitated. None of this was inevitable, in either direction.

The Trump era has exposed the ambitions of authoritarian leadership, and it has exposed the weaknesses of the institutions meant to contain those ambitions. Ultimately, resistance to creeping authoritarianism depends on institutional courage with institutions backed by principled leadership and civic engagement.

1. How Republicans are trying to secure the midterms despite deep unpopularity - gerrymandering, mail ballot restrictions, manufactured fraud claims, and an FBI raid on a voter registration group.

2. A series of corruption stories: a conflict of interest over a herbal supplement, a White House crypto payout, a 96% breach of pardon guidelines, and two stories about loyalty to Trump that go beyond self-enrichment.

Subtitle available and all actions logged at TrumpActionTracker.info

• attacks on civil rights and institutions, where the pattern of firing professionals and installing loyalists continues;

• immigration and detention, where conditions and oversight are both getting worse;

• science and the environment;

• press freedom, which is under attack from outside and from within.

I end on something a little different — what Trump chose to post on the 82nd anniversary of D-Day.

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The results of the 2026 local government (England) and national elections (Scotland, Wales), held in May, confirm the collapse of the old political order. Reform, a populist radical right party led by Nigel Farage, emerged as a clear victor in England, alongside the Greens on the populist left. Although these results might not translate directly into success at the next general election, it would be imprudent to dismiss the possibility that a populist party could enter government. In the case of right wing populism, characterised above all by hostility to expertise and evidence, this would have serious implications for public health. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report identifies societal polarisation as one of the world’s top 10 threats. A failure to prepare for a political environment in which expertise itself is contested would amount to gross negligence. At stake is not only policy direction, but the status of expertise itself in public life.

Government in the UK has traditionally rested on what Peter Hennessy termed the “good chaps” theory, which assumes that well intentioned actors govern in the public interest. This assumption was exposed as fragile when past UK prime minister Boris Johnson unlawfully prorogued Parliament, and pandemic procurement scandals showed private interests overriding public ones. Reform supporters propose dismantling remaining guardrails, many of which exist to protect the independence of scientific and professional expertise. The latest Health bill introduced last month already makes future political interference in the NHS easier. The central risk lies not only in specific policies but in hostility to expertise itself, combined with policy incoherence, creating space for unaccountable and harmful action.

We do not need to speculate about what this might mean. The second Trump administration offers a warning. In the US, institutions safeguarding health were politicised, scientific agencies were weakened, and expert advice was sidelined or replaced by ideological appointees. The result has been measurable harms, including the resurgence of diseases that are preventable with vaccines and reduced support for people most at risk.

Although the UK context differs to the US, Reform’s leaders have signalled admiration for the US approach. Meanwhile, many UK science, health, and environmental public bodies are vulnerable to political attack. The UK also lacks a written constitution, which would enable citizens to hold the government directly to account. Appeals to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) are likely to cease if Reform leaves the ECHR, as it has repeatedly stated it intends to do; protections under the Equality Rights Act might also fall if it is repealed, as Reform has proposed. Ministers often exercise considerable control over public bodies that provide expertise, by determining who leads them, how they are funded, and what they can say. We have proposed measures to reduce these risks, including placing institutions on a statutory footing, making them directly accountable to parliament rather than via ministers, and securing more stable funding. Given what might lie ahead, these reforms are urgently needed.

In such a situation, the health establishment will stand as the key protector and advocate for population health and evidence led policy. Where expertise is delegitimised, policy decisions can be driven by ideology, patronage, or expediency rather than evidence. How, then, should the health establishment prepare? The royal colleges and learned societies are themselves vulnerable. Their charitable status brings financial advantages, many receive government funding, and all depend on relationships with politicians. They might soon face difficult choices: whether to engage in “anticipatory obedience,” aligning with a new administration’s agenda, even if it is damaging to public health; or to resist.

As charities, they operate under constraints. The scope of permissible advocacy under charity law is contested and unevenly enforced, creating uncertainty as to rights under a hostile administration. Although they may advocate for specific policies, as the Royal College of Physicians has done on smoking, there remains an expectation of deference once government policies are enacted.

This deference rests on the assumption that governments respect expertise through evidence based decision making, scientific integrity, and independence of advisers. It also depends on shared democratic norms. What happens when these assumptions no longer hold?

Health organisations in the UK must work out how they can defend the integrity and authority of expertise itself. They should start with a thorough review of their own situation, the views of their members (where applicable), and learning from others from history and currently internationally to answer the following questions:

• What protections do they have in law?

• To what extent is their income dependent on government funding?

• What are the views, opportunities, and risks of and for their members?

• Do they have public support for their work?

• What will they do if their officers are subject to politically motivated prosecutions or investigations?

• How do they distinguish issues that involve differences of values, such as the role of the state and the individual, from those that involve attacks on their role in providing the evidence that underpins democratic debate?

• Have they learnt from counterparts in Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, and the US, and built alliances that can offer support if needed?

The risks are all too real, and there is no excuse not to prepare for a political environment in which expertise itself is under sustained attack.

But I thought it was worth taking the time to just show people quite how low levels are now in the UK. This isn’t to say we’ll never see another wave, but there has been drastically less prevalence over the last two years (just one major wave since the autumn of 2024), and if people do become infected, they are far less likely to become seriously ill or die. This is a good thing! I believe, as a country, we made far too many mistakes from there to here, but 6 years later, we seem to have amassed sufficient immunity from vaccines and previous infections to keep Covid suppressed for the most part.

Prevalence

The best measure available of the prevalence of Covid in the community is wastewater measurement. For inexplicable reasons, England stopped its wastewater monitoring in March 2022, but Scotland has been running it since June 2020.

The latest data show the very large spike in the summer of 2024 and smaller waves that autumn. The only wave since then, in the autumn of 2025, is evident. Since then, levels in Scottish wastewater have been low and declining. The most recent week is the lowest recorded since the summer of 2020 when Scotland almost eliminated Covid.

We see the same pattern across Europe. Below is the plot from the Netherlands which is nice because it overlays all the different years. This year (2025/26) is in red and again, record low levels are evident.

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Hospital admissions in England with Covid

The UK Health Security Agency has been collecting data on hospital admissions with Covid since the beginning of the pandemic. However, testing protocols changed in April 2023, and now people are really only tested if doctors suspect that Covid might be a reason for their admission or a positive Covid test might affect their treatment (e.g. decision to operate).

Plotting hospital admissions since the April 2023, we can see the many waves of 2023 and 2024, followed by low (but certainly not negligible) levels for 10 months last year. This was broken by the significant September 2025 wave. Since then the number of admissions with Covid have continued to fall and now are at the lowest level ever recorded.

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Deaths in England and Wales where Covid is a contributing cause

ONS Death registry data is the gold standard source for determining the number of people who died either wholly or partially due to Covid. Below, I’ve plotted the weekly number of deaths where Covid contributed as a cause since the beginning of the pandemic.

Overall over 225,000 people have died from Covid. That is a horrific number. But the over half of those deaths were in the first year, before we had a vaccine, and the majority of the rest were in our second and third year of the pandemic. Last year there were 4,000 deaths from Covid and in the most recent week of data (w/e 22 May 2026), there were just 8. This is a combination of far lower numbers of people getting Covid, and then far fewer people infected with Covid getting very sick. Our vaccination booster campaigns for the extremely vulnerable remain crucial in keeping it that way.

Caveats and summary

I am not saying that Covid is over and we will never see another significant wave. I do believe that Covid is simply no longer - and has not been for a while - a public health emergency. There is far less surveillance now for Covid and people often suggest that the statistics only show how little testing is happening and actually far more people are getting infected. I cannot see how this view is consistent with the wastewater data that there is, which does not depend on people getting tested or people even feeling sick.

I do wish we had a wider vaccination programme. Babies and young children remain vulnerable because when they first meet Covid they don’t have immunity from either a vaccine or a previous infection. This is why I wish the UK would offer Covid vaccines to pregnant women and to young children. I also wish the booster vaccine was widened out to more people, or was at least cheaper. I pay for it every winter because I would rather meet Covid exposure with more antibodies. The good news that as prevalence has continued to fall, it matters less as we are all simply less exposed to infection.

There is a lot about the current state of the world that is deeply depressing. But Covid is now not one of those things - and with any luck won’t be again (at least not SARS-CoV-2) - and I choose to celebrate that.

In this video I cover:

• Science: attacks on vaccines, drinking water, and research funding.

• Immigration: the human cost of mass deportation, who gets in and who doesn't, and conditions inside detention.

• Suppressing dissent: Republican primaries, the justice system, and threats to Democratic cities.

• Foreign aggression: Cuba, and the boat strikes that keep killing people.
  
  Subtitles available and all sources logged at TrumpActionTracker.info

  Thanks for reading Making sense... of evidence, data, and the stories they tell! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

But after the US launched its attacks on Venezuela on 3rd January 2026 and toppled Maduro, things rapidly escalated. That very same day Rubio warned Cuba’s leaders to be concerned.

Once the Venezuela operation was successful, the US was in a position to choke off Cuba’s access to energy - firstly by stopping Venezuelan oil exports to Cuba only a week after the Venezuela military, then by threatening tariffs on other countries supplying oil to Cuba and finally with a naval blockade stopping all Cuban oil imports in mid-February. Let’s be clear - naval blockades are acts of war, even if neither the US administration nor Congress want to label them as such.

While waiting for the oil blockade to bite, Trump escalated his rhetoric against Cuba throughout March, from floating a “friendly takeover” to warning (more than once) that “Cuba would be next”. He was not however really in a position to act, given this month saw the height of military strikes against Iran. Trump entered into a continually-extended ceasefire with Iran on 8 April 2026. As that ceasefire extended into the ongoing stalemate with little military action but both Iran and the US blocking the straits of Hormuz, the US administration turned its attention back to Cuba in early May.

In the six weeks leading up to the January action against Venezuela, the US insituted a series of sanctions against Venezuelan business and officials, including the Maduro family. The day the US took Maduro, he was indicted on drugs charges. The last two weeks have seen three rounds of sanctions on Cuban business and officials, and last week it was reported that federal prosecutors were preparing to indict former president Raul Castro. At the same time, the US military has increased surveillance flights over Cuba and the CIA director visited Cuba to warn them to stop intelligence collaboration with China and Russia. Last week too, the Cuban government announced that its oil reserves were dry and most of the country is without power for most of the day - an enormous humanitarian crisis.

I don’t know exactly what will happen next, but as Trump faces stalemate with Iran and mounting disapproval at home, it feels as if moving in on Cuba could be his next move to bolster support from Cuban Americans, his MAGA base and his own fragile ego. There doesn’t appear to be a large military presence in terms of the US Navy (unlike for Venezuela), although Cuba is of course much closer to the US allowing it to be attacked (by air or missiles) more easily from the US mainland. Still, I suspect some sort of a ‘deal’ is more likely, where the US ‘extradites’ Raul Castro and the current regime is toppled, in return for lifting the US blockade.

Certainly, Trump’s appetite for foreign conquests does not seem to have been extinguished by his failure in Iran.

• Republican gerrymandering

• So many attacks on opponents

• Aggression in Latin America

• Corruption (again!)

• Undermining science & health

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In the three weeks since I wrote that post, various things have happened. Firstly, one of the Supreme Court decisions on the Voting Rights Act came early, in time to tilt the midterms in favour of Republicans. Southern states have been quick to take advantage. Secondly, the assumed gerrymandering “offset” between Florida and Virginia materialised but then collapsed after intervention from the Virginia Supreme Court, further tilting the midterms towards the Republicans. Meanwhile, Trump’s rhetoric deligitmising elections that don’t go his way is escalating.

The ultimate conclusion of my previous post is unchanged - Democrats can still win the House, and turnout is still the lever – but it’s become much more difficult.

Overview of changes in the last 3 weeks

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The Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision

On 29 April, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Court rules that challengers would need to prove “present-day intentional racial discrimination” to challenge congressional district maps on the basis of racial discrimination. Any challenge that “cannot disentangle race from the state’s race-neutral considerations, including politics” will fail. Given that minority groups tend to vote Democrat, this is impossible. It’s perfectly legal for Republican States to disenfranchise Democrat voters and the side effect of disenfranchising minority voters is now legal too.

This means that many Republican-controlled Southern states now have the chance to gerrymander majority-black districts in such a way as to increase the number of safe Republican congressional seats before 2028. But it wasn’t clear that the ruling would come in time to materially affect the 2026 midterms, but, on 4^th May, the Supreme court granted Louisiana’s request to finalise the judgment immediately, explicitly so that states could redraw maps in time for the 2026 elections. This violates the Purcell principle, the Court’s own long-standing doctrine that election rules should not be changed close to an election.

A new round of Republican gerrymandering

This has led to a cascade of Republican states responding.

Louisiana has suspended its 16 May primary, after more than 100,000 voters had already cast early ballots and 42,000 absentee ballots had been submitted. The state is now redrawing its map, with Republicans expected to pick up one to two seats.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee called a special session on 5 May and signed a new Republican-friendly map into law on 7 May. The new map carves up the state’s only majority-Black district, centred on Memphis, potentially netting the Republicans an extra seat. Trump had publicly claimed on 30 April that Governor Lee had personally promised him a redistricting.

Alabama is attempting to revert to a 2023 congressional map that federal courts had already ruled was an illegal racial gerrymander. On 8 May Alabama sought an emergency order from the Supreme Court; on 11 May the Court cleared the path for the 2023 map to be used in November, sending the case back to a lower court to reconsider. If that 2023 map is allowed, it nets the Republicans another 1 to 2 seats.

Missouri’s gerrymander was passed back in September 2025, when the new map carved up Democrat Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City district, netting Republicans one additional seat. Opponents organised a petition for a referendum on the new map, but on 12 May the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the map would be in effect for the 2026 elections. This is despite the fact that opponents had submitted over 300,000 petition signatures (well above the threashold needed for a referendum) – instead the Missouri Supreme Court rejected Democrats’ argument that Missouri’s map be suspended until the referendum was properly considered. In every previous instance in Missouri history going back 100 years, submitting referendum signatures has automatically suspended a law pending a public vote. This time, the court ruled otherwise.

South Carolina is the most recent example. On 12 May, the state Senate five Republicans sided with Democrats to derail a Trump-backed effort to eliminate Democrat Jim Clyburn’s majority-Black district in a new map. But the next day, Governor McMaster announced he would call lawmakers back for a special session on 15 May to force the issue. If he succeeds that would be another additional House seat for the Republicans.

Florida out-gerrymanders Virginia

In my post 3 weeks ago, I had assumed that Florida and Virginia’s planned gerrymanders would offset each other. At first, it looked like I would be right. On the 21 April, Virginia’s Democratic legislature passed a gerrymandered House map following a state referendum, netting the Democrats four more House seats. A week later, Governor DeSantis revealed a new Republican Florida map; the Florida House passed it on a party-line vote on 29 April and De Santis signed it into law on 4 May, adding up to four Republican seats.

But then, on 8 May the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the Democratic redistricting measure, citing procedural defects. Trump had already claimed on 22 April that the Virginia ballot was fraudulent and threatened to litigate it but, in the end, he didn’t even need to. This now leaves the Republicans with as many as four more seats.

How does this shift the Midterms mathematics?

In the original post I estimated that, with a current D+5 generic ballot, a free and fair election would deliver Democrats roughly 10–15 seat gains and a clear majority, but that with the combined suppression mechanisms in play they could be looking at anywhere from a narrow loss to a bare 3–5 seat majority.

Since then, the generic ballot has shifted to D+6 but the map has shifted a further 8-11 seats towards the Republicans, meaning that with the other suppression mechanisms in play, I think that Democrats are now more likely looking at a narrow loss.

A Democrat victory has become harder – but still very achievable

Significantly expanded Republican gerrymandering in the context of ongoing attempts at voter suppression and rhetoric delegitimising elections makes a Democratic House win very difficult – despite significant poll leads. But the argument in the original post stands - a Democrat win remains eminently doable but only if every Democrat voter who can vote, votes.

8 things every voter can do this summer

1) Check you are registered and haven’t been removed from the lists

2) If you aren’t registered, register as soon as possible.

3) Vote early if you can

4) Vote in person if you can, since the Trump administration is more likely to try to bring challenges against mail-in ballots

5) If your State requires Voter ID, make sure you have at least one form of ID (check the latest rules here)

6) If you are voting on election day, vote as early as possible in case of long queues - you don’t want to be caught in the queue when the polls close.

7) Volunteer to get out the vote in the run-up to the Midterms.

8) Tell your friends and family to follow these steps too.

America – you can do this.

Subtitles available and all actions available on TrumpActionTracker.info.

Subtitles available & all actions available on TrumpActionTracker.info.

Also, you might want to check out my recent in depth discussion on the US midterms with Alex Andreou on his Quiet Riot podcast!

Subtitles available

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