Richard Horton

London

Editor-in-Chief at The Lancet

welcome to a permanent attack on the present

Articles

Post-Pandemic Books on Public Health Today: 5 New Books

1 month ago | institute.dmns.org | Richard Horton

March 2025 marks the fifth anniversary of the closure of Colorado by COVID-19. Not surprisingly, five years later, there are now many accounts of this pandemic, mimicking what has happened with publications in the past. I have read some of the numerous pandemic-inspired books, the first being McNeill’s 1976 Plagues and Peoples.
Offline: Telling the truth about WHO

2 months ago | thelancet.com | Richard Horton

US President Donald Trump is angry with WHO. Me too. We are all angry with WHO for some reason. But Trump's reasons do not make much sense. Here is his charge sheet. First, that WHO is a bloated bureaucracy that needs urgent reform. Second, that the US Government pays too much to the agency compared with other member states. Third, that WHO covered up the origins of COVID-19. Finally, that WHO mismanaged the COVID-19 pandemic.
Offline: Equality must be defended

2 months ago | thelancet.com | Richard Horton

A third lever to accelerate the journey towards equality, in addition to taxation and education, is political struggle. Thomas Piketty writes in Nature, Culture, and Inequality: “Limited in extent, this gradual movement toward equality has been a halting, chaotic process in which social conflict has played an extremely important role”; and, “The real force for change derives…from concerted social and political pressure”. In other words, equality is not given, it has to be won.
Offline: The journey towards equality

2 months ago | thelancet.com | Richard Horton

Our world needs some good news. The French economist, Thomas Piketty, in his short book, Nature, Culture, and Inequality (2024), provides at least a glimmer of hope in otherwise overwhelming times: our world is getting progressively more equal. These advances have been slow and punctuated with several reversals. But if one takes the long view—from a time point beginning around 1789—the path of human development has been moving steadily towards increasing political, social, and economic equality.
Offline: Making obesity matter

Jan 24, 2025 | thelancet.com | Richard Horton

“None of us were entirely right, none of us were entirely wrong.” That was Francesco Rubino's wry comment on his Commission, published by The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology on Jan 14, 2025, and launched at the Royal College of Physicians in London. The scope of the project was narrow—the definition of obesity—but the implications were colossal. The Commission identified a major and, in truth, surprising gap: the absence of a clinical definition of obesity.
Offline: Healing Argentina's wounds

Jan 18, 2025 | thelancet.com | Richard Horton

The Haroldo Conti Cultural Centre remains closed. The official explanation from President Javier Milei's Government: “internal restructuring”. This month, thousands of protesters gathered in front of the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, home to the Cultural Centre, Argentina's National Memory Archive, and, between 1976 and 1983, a Clandestine Centre of Detention, Torture, and Extermination. ESMA was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2023.
Offline: Argentina-demanding remembrance

Jan 10, 2025 | thelancet.com | Richard Horton

An urgent plea to all concerned with the defence of health and human rights: the Argentine government's decision to close the Haroldo Conti Cultural Centre at the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada in Buenos Aires from Jan 2, 2025, is an act of violence against the families of 30 000 victims who were murdered by Argentina's 1976–83 military junta.
Offline: China-moments of opportunity

Nov 28, 2024 | thelancet.com | Richard Horton

In his book, China's World View (2024), David Daokui Li argues that western countries should not be concerned about China's emergence as a powerful competitor to the US. Why? Because China has an array of domestic challenges that preclude its engagement in geopolitical distractions. China's leaders will be fully absorbed meeting the needs of a rapidly growing—and demanding—middle class (800 million people by 2035).
Offline: Rethinking the human costs of climate change

Oct 17, 2024 | thelancet.com | Richard Horton

In the preface to Pulse to Planet: the Long Lifeline of Human Health (2023), an eloquent appeal to a world on the edge of “civilisational suicide”, K Srinath Reddy argues that the “main driver” of our mortal predicament “is a lack of understanding of how the wellbeing of humans is closely connected to one another, other occupants of this planet, and to our common environment”.
Offline: The moral drift that destroys us

Oct 10, 2024 | thelancet.com | Richard Horton

Are we living through an era of moral progress? Slavery. Child labour. Capital punishment. All gone or going, if too slowly in some countries. The creation of a welfare state. Social protection. Human rights. Progress, surely. Still, we tolerate, and our governments enable, the slaughter of civilians, whom we permit to be bombed, burned, and crushed with impunity in our name. Contradictions abound.