Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James Davies (Atlantic, £18.99)
It’s been a great year for Big Pharma—especially here in Britain, where the government displayed considerable alacrity when it came to advance ordering Covid-19 vaccines; foresight that was notably lacking when it came to instituting the measures necessary to confine the pandemic. And of the drug companies caught up in the race to save Boris Johnson’s political career, none has had a better global press than the US giant, Pfizer. It teamed up with the German company BioNTech to develop its vaccine, two 0.3ml doses of which have been injected into my upper arm, the first in late January and the second in late April, thereby—in theory at least—delivering me from the enforced reclusion known as “shielding,” which Britons with serious underlying health conditions have had to endure.