It’s interesting that Mike Jackson is such an authority on medicine that he feels free to criticise America’s health provision, widely considered to be the most advanced in the world (Don’t deny the facts, Letters, April 10). Indeed, many who have struggled under the NHS have travelled to the US and elsewhere for specialist treatment unavailable through our nationalised monopoly. Coronavirus-infected American citizens are currently receiving free expert attention. Unfortunately, our own NHS bureaucracy, like other authorities across the globe, has become increasingly dependent on cheap, sub-standard pharmaceuticals and equipment mass-produced in China.

READ MORE: Don't let facts get in the way of an argument

Ever since human beings threw off slavery, serfdom and bonded-labour in favour of what the economist Adam Smith called the market’s ’invisible hand’, societies have flourished. Wherever in the world Adam Smith’s free market capitalism has been even partially introduced, citizens have prospered. Wherever it was denied, as in the National Socialism of Nazi Germany, the Communism of Soviet Russia and of Chairman Mao, populations have eventually starved and preyed upon one another.

After WWII, we voted for Socialism, which eventually beggared the country. Now, under Blair’s ‘Third Way’ we have perhaps realised that when the NHS and its uneasy public/private partnership met a real challenge, it failed abysmally: no testing kits, insufficient equipment or protection for health professionals and ill-thought-out advice.

When the Government classified the coronavirus as a notifiable disease, they also issued instructions that death certificates could list Covid-19, even if merely suspected as being the cause of death. No wonder rampant antibiotic-resistant infections, many of them hospital-acquired, have been played down. The world’s dependence on Communist China for its pharmaceutical products has weakened general immunity and made populations susceptible to respiratory viruses. Wildly changing computer models and inaccurate reporting of Covid-related fatalities have pushed governments, aided by their big-pharma cronies, into a draconian lockdown of the global economy on a scale that even George Orwell could not have imagined.

The only ethical economic system that would have placed responsibility for their own lives in the capable hands of citizens and their physicians, free market capitalism, has been rejected by government after government in favour of self-serving crony-corporatism. There are two justifications for this:

1. ‘Original sin’, which basically says humans can’t be trusted to think for themselves.

2. Charles Darwin’s idea that evolution is a genetic lottery where something called ‘nature’ decides which life forms succeed and which fail.

Neither of these ideas has turned out to be true. As the new science of epigenetics is demonstrating, organisms, not genes, drive evolution. Organisms constantly adapt to fluctuating environments, switching their genes on and off throughout life, and some of these ‘switches’ are heritable. Uniquely, human beings adapt to the challenges of survival, not through instinct, but by thinking for themselves. This is the essence of free will.

Prof. Christine Wheeler McNulty

Oxhey