In 2019, O’Neill was barred from working in her native Australia after the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) concluded that she was “misleading vulnerable people”. Styling herself as a “natural health educator”, she had told cancer sufferers that their disease was a “fungus” and could be treated with bicarbonate of soda, and she had informed new mothers that raw goats milk was a safe substitute for breast milk. Vaccines, as far as O’Neill was concerned, were poisonous.

Her authority for these pronouncements was the two years she had spent as a trainee psychiatric nurse. She never completed her qualification, though she saw that as no impediment to launching a career in health. A member of the Seventh Day Adventists, O’Neill organized most of her lectures through the church for the benefit of her fellow worshippers. Her advice is a disconcerting mixture of familiar homespun misinformation and disconcerting theology; she is a perfect example of the religion of wellness.

That HCCC’s verdict should have been the end of O’Neill’s professional life. No more lectures. No more “consultations”. No more training packages. Unfortunately, quackery has no respect for borders. O’Neill may no longer be able to practice in Australia, but there’s nothing to stop her doing so elsewhere in the world. Including in Britain: this month, O’Neill is embarking on a tour of the UK.

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For the low, low price of £700, you can experience five days of O’Neill’s wisdom at an estate hotel in Cheshire. Once attendees have had their fill of lectures, workshops, herbal teas and fruit juice, they get to enjoy a dinner dance — “the perfect way to say goodbye”. For cancer patients who go on to attempt the bicarb cure, they may well be saying goodbye to life itself. A group of doctors has published an open letter addressed to venue management alerting them to the dangers of O’Neill’s misinformation.

Not that this criticism is likely to do O’Neill much damage in the eyes of her admirers, who include the feminist-turned-5G-conspiracist and antivaxxer Naomi Wolf, and the Apprentice-contestant-turned-race-baiter Katie Hopkins. For both, O’Neill is a purveyor of truths that shadowy forces are anxious to suppress. “Big pharma,” tweeted Hopkins, “is more powerful than any government. Has more assets than any military.” Both Wolf and Hopkins seemed to be radicalized by the Covid pandemic, which proved to be a boomtime for health grifters such as O’Neill. In the isolation and confusion of lockdown, O’Neill fostered an avid following on TikTok and Telegram — boosted by the perception of her as a persecuted heretic.

O’Neill herself has leaned hard into this image of herself. On her website, you can purchase a book called (modestly) The Assassination of Barbara O’Neill, written by her husband Michael. The HCCC’s verdict, he thunders, was “an unwarranted smear campaign on a truly humble and caring lady”. Not only that, it was “part of a war on natural health more broadly” being prosecuted by powerful agencies against brave individual dissenters — a “modern-day David and Goliath story”.

The Bible allusion is not inadvertent. O’Neill’s her health claims can generally be traced back to a version of the Seventh Day Adventist theology. Adentism emerged from an apocalyptic cult that was disappointed that the world had failed to end in 1863. Like several religious movements of the Victorian period, the Adventists attempted to reconcile faith with rationalism and social purpose. The faith retains a distinctive focus on health and the body: followers believe that “keeping our bodies and minds healthy and fit are acts of service to God and a visible testimony in this world.”

Once you understand that, it becomes a lot easier to make sense of O’Neill’s health advice. Here, for example, is how she begins a lecture on the digestive system: “I’m very thankful to God that he has given us a liver that is able to detoxify us, and today I’m going to explain how the liver does this, and remember Proverbs 14, verse 6: “a scorner seeketh wisdom and findeth it not, but knowledge is easy to him that understands.””

It feels unlikely that anyone in human history has attempted an exegesis of Proverbs 14:6 based on the liver, but, for O’Neill, faith and health are inseparable. God has granted the human body “inbuilt ability to heal itself”, and when we resort to doctors (she says the “doctor” with the same kind of disgust others might apply to “parking enforcement officer”), we are turning our backs on God himself. You must “listen to the voice of your God in your body”. Much of what the voice of God is allegedly commanding is basic old-wives-tale stuff: a raw onion poultice on the foot to cure a cough, potatoes for inflammation. What goes next to the skin can harm as well as heal; she believes that breast cancer is exacerbated by wearing synthetic fabrics.

Some of her advice is merely eccentric. “What can you do if a child’s got autism?” she wonders in one TikTok clip. “One of the best things is the trampoline. The trampoline rebalances the brain.” Some of it is simply dangerous. Feeding babies raw goat milk will make them sick, if it doesn’t outright poison them (O’Neill later claimed she meant goat milk formula, but that isn’t what she said). Co-sleeping, which she recommends without reservation, is a major risk factor for sudden infant death syndrome. Meanwhile, the O’Neill approach to cancer is harrowingly ineffectual: one patient on the Cook Islands following her advice used a combination of baking soda, lemon juice and boiled water in place of chemotherapy. That man died, of course.

Such apparent setbacks do nothing to impinge on O’Neill’s self-belief. Again, you have to understand her faith to understand her. As she says in one video: “A lot of people are sick. They’re sick because the body will heal itself if you give it the right conditions.” By implication, if you don’t get better, it’s because you didn’t give your body the “right conditions”. You didn’t listen to the voice of God inside you. And if you die, so be it. Not all alternative health influencers are openly religious, but O’Neill’s logic of sin and punishment is a clear echo of the wider movement.

However caring they pretend to be, all “natural health” philosophies, are fundamentally without compassion. Think of the “freebirth movement”, which told women they were failures if they couldn’t go through labor without medical assistance, and callously deserted mothers and babies who were harmed or killed by this approach. Or Andrew Wakefield, whose discredited theories of vaccine-induced autism fed families a toxic mixture of blame and hope: blame for vaccinating their child, and hope that a “normal” child existed underneath the purported injury.

O’Neill’s content is rife with implicit accusations: there is little room for grace. Got cancer? Well, it’s your own fault for wearing petrochemicals. Still got cancer despite the baking soda poultice? That’s down to too much glucose in your diet. Child got autism? You probably caused it by allowing them to be vaccinated (or rather “giving them the V-word”, which is O’Neill’s circumlocution to get around YouTube censorship). You’re also probably making it worse by not giving them enough trampoline time. Every ailment is a morality play.

This should be repugnant. But because it comes masked within O’Neill’s grandmotherly manner, the cruelty can be overlooked. What people hear instead is a heartening message of self-determination. “I am the master of my destiny, I am the one who chooses what goes into my body,” says O’Neill in one of her more rousing moments. It’s a promise that, by living right, you can avoid punishment. It’s an assurance that purity — physical and moral — is within your grasp, if you just try hard.

So much of wellness culture is about, precisely, purification. A horror of contaminants. A belief that you can run your body like a gated community and keep the undesirable elements out, with your liver acting as a kind of security service to clean up any invaders that make their way through the barricades. (It’s never explained why the liver is supposed to be instilled with the will of God when it comes to general “toxins”, but impotent against the forces of nylon.)

This is seductive. Wellness adherents pursue the vision of a perfected self. In the language of health, they articulate a longing to be purged of all their sins, baptized in the holy waters of clean living and moderation. All you have to do, as Proverbs 14:6 says, is believe hard enough: “scorners” will be denied the rewards of both heaven and earth. Only the righteous can be saved, from environmental toxins as much as from damnation. The wages of sin is cancer.

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Even when it’s formally secular, wellness carries the imprint of the Christian culture that created it. The yearning for salvation is an understandable reaction to feeling isolated, confused and disempowered — emotions that were rampant during Covid, feeding demand for O’Neill-style influencers. But you don’t need a pandemic to create those conditions. You can also generate them very effectively by exposing someone to social media: that’s why woo-woo thrives in the wilds of the internet.

But though Christianity’s grammar is deeply embedded in our habits and thinking, it also evolves in response to social change. The original Adventists were trying to reinvent their faith for a scientific age. Now O’Neill does the same for the modern world. Her gospel, like our age, is highly individualistic: your duties are to your own body, not to society as a whole. It is a sad, pinched endpoint for the mysteries of faith. It is also a doctrine that seems sure to flourish. Today, wellness spawns cults, but in decades to come there’s every possibility that one of them could become a denomination.

It is hard to save people from their own psychological foibles. Banning O’Neill from shilling in the UK would be the right thing, but it is harder to stem the demand that gives people like her their living than it is to keep one hustler from practicing. The fault of logic that O’Neill exploits in her followers is too deeply human to be expunged. We cannot be made pure, in reason any more than in body. Which is why quacks like O’Neill will always prosper.

In his new book Rationality, Pinker is adamantly opposed to telepathy and other kinds of extra-sensory perception (ESP). His position is that they do not happen because they cannot happen. He freely admits that he pre-judges the evidence by claiming that these purported phenomena are extremely improbable, assigning them an infinitesimal “prior probability”, in the language of Bayesian statistics. He acknowledges that “believing in something before you look at the evidence may seem like the epitome of irrationality”, but he justifies his refusal to look at the evidence by classifying these phenomena as “paranormal’, lumping them together with seemingly unrelated topics like homeopathy, astrology and miracles.

He then invokes an 18th-century argument against miracles by David Hume. As Hume put it, either miracles are impossible because they “violate the laws of nature” or because “no testimony is sufficient to establish” they contradict what has “frequently been observed to happen”. In Pinker’s paraphrase: “Which is more likely – that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?”

To clinch his argument, Pinker invokes physics. He is not a physicist himself, so he relies on the authority of Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical physicist who claims that the laws of physics rule out ESP. Other physicists disagree. Pinker rounds off his discussion by quoting Carl Sagan’s mantra: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

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In a recent interview in the Harvard Gazette, Pinker explains why he rejects the “primitive intuitions” that lead most people to believe in ESP. He and his fellow rationalists “unlearn these intuitions when we buy into the consensus of the scientific establishment — it’s not as if we understand the physiology or neuroscience or cosmology ourselves”.  Instead, they buy in as an act of faith.

For readers wondering how acts of faith might bias our judgements, Pinker helpfully identifies “the Myside bias” as “probably the most powerful of all the cognitive biases, namely, if something becomes an article of faith within your own coalition, and if promoting it earns you status, that is what you believe”.  This surely applies to himself.

Is Hume’s argument against miracles relevant to ESP? Hume was writing about descriptions of biblical miracles. He was right that they are not frequently observed. But is telepathy a unique miracle that is said to have happened far away and long ago? No. It is frequently observed today.

The most common type of telepathy occurs in connection with telephone calls. Research carried out in Europe and the Americas shows that most people say they have thought of someone for no apparent reason, and that person then called, or that they knew who was calling when they heard the phone, before looking at the caller ID or answering. Similar kinds of telepathy occur with text messages and emails. (I give details of these surveys and summaries of experimental tests in my book The Sense of Being Stared At).

Telepathic experiences are not an extraordinary claim, but an ordinary claim. It is Pinker who is making an extraordinary claim by asserting that telepathy cannot happen and that most people are wrong about their own experience. Where is his extraordinary evidence? He has none, and, even worse, believes he doesn’t need any.

Telepathy is frequently observed in animals. In random household surveys in the UK and the USA, roughly half of dog owners said that their dog anticipated the return of a member of the family by waiting at a door or window, in some cases more than 10 minutes in advance. About 30% of cats did the same. In many cases, people said that this happened when the person came home at a non-routine time, and by public transport or in unfamiliar vehicles such as taxis. The animals’ responses were not simply a matter of routine or hearing familiar vehicles approaching; they seemed to depend on some other kind of connection between owners and their pets.

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Sceptics will reasonably ask whether people could be mistaken in making these observations. Perhaps people know who is calling because they are familiar with that person’s habits and unconsciously anticipate when they will call. Or perhaps they think of people frequently and forget all the times those people do not call. Perhaps people dote on their pets and are victims of wishful thinking, remembering when their dog or cat was seemingly waiting for them, and forgetting when it was not. Perhaps, or perhaps not.

Fortunately, science and reason provide a way forward: the scientific method. Scientists test hypotheses. Several researchers, including myself, have carried out hundreds of experimental tests of telephone telepathy to investigate whether random guessing explains the results, or whether something else is going on. For these tests, the subjects chose four people they knew well to serve as potential callers. Then, in filmed experiments, they sat beside a landline telephone, with no caller ID. For each trial, one of the four potential callers was selected at random and asked to call the subject.

When the phone rang, the subject said to the camera who she felt it was, for example ‘Jim’. She was right or wrong. She could not have anticipated that Jim would be calling by knowing his habits, because he was selected at random. By chance, about 25% of the answers would have been right. In fact, in hundreds of trials, the average hit rate was 45%, hugely significant statistically. You can see a film of one of these experiments and the results of many randomised experiments published in peer reviewed journals here. We found similar positive effects in experiments on email and text-message telepathy.

I have also carried out more than a hundred filmed experiments with dogs that behave as if they know when their owners are coming home. The filmed evidence showed that the dogs anticipated their owners’ arrivals even when they returned at random times, unknown to them in advance, and in unfamiliar vehicles. You can see a test independently filmed by the science unit of Austrian State television (ORF) and results of numerous tests published in peer-reviewed journals here.

Pinker is not alone in his denialist stance. He is a prominent member of an advocacy organisation called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), which publishes the Skeptical Inquirer: The Magazine for Science and Reason. His CSI colleagues include Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel Dennett. CSI’s well-funded campaigns are designed to discredit “claims of the paranormal” in the serious media and the educational system. Organised skepticism is remarkably effective, and CSI has an international network of affiliated groups, as well as many local skeptic chapters and online vigilantes, ever ready to ‘debunk’ the paranormal. (In the UK, organised skeptics use the American spelling with a ‘k’ rather than the British spelling ‘sceptic’ to indicate their affiliation with the American Skeptic movement.)

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With their support, Pinker thinks he has bought into the “consensus of established science” — but this consensus is sometimes illusory. His understanding of scientific consensus is not based on empirical data, such as surveys of scientists’ opinions worldwide or on experimental research, but rather on the beliefs of his CSI colleagues. He puts his faith in a denialist coalition in which rationality is unfortunately scarce. Their echo chamber is now greatly enlarged through Wikipedia. CSI encourages groups like ‘Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia’ to train committed skeptics as editors and administrators.

Dogmatic skeptics currently control practically all the Wikipedia entries on subjects they regard as ‘paranormal’ as well as the biography pages of those who research these taboo topics, including me. The Wikipedia entry on parapsychology portrays the entire subject as ‘pseudoscience’. The entry on pseudoscience defines it as “statements, beliefs or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method”.

By this criterion, Pinker is a practitioner of pseudoscience. He makes statements that claim to be scientific and factual but which violate the scientific method by ignoring the evidence. His particular kind of pseudoscience is especially damaging. As a professor of psychology at Harvard, he models dogma and prejudice in the heart of the scientific establishment.

How different from one of his predecessors at Harvard, William James, who was refreshingly open-minded and curious about experiences that could not be readily explained. If Steven Pinker is prepared to defend his views on telepathy in a public debate, chaired by UnHerd, I would be happy to argue that it is more rational and scientific to look at the evidence than to ignore it.

The dietary supplement industry knows this, but it wants you to buy its vitamins anyway. It can’t say “Buy our vitamins, they’ll make you healthier,” because that’s not true, and they can’t say “Buy our vitamins, you’ll piss them straight down the toilet,” because that’s not the most effective sales pitch. So they choose a third way: they make a true scientific statement which heavily implies, without ever quite saying, that the supplements will help.

For instance, they might say “iodine contributes to normal growth”, or “iron contributes to normal cognitive development”. Both of which are entirely true. But what they don’t say is “taking our iodine supplements will help your children grow”, because as long as your child is getting a healthy, varied diet, it won’t. Your child will essentially be acting as a middleman between Holland & Barrett and the sewage system. The supplement producers have not broken any advertising rules, but – I would argue – they have not been completely honest about their product’s effectiveness, either.

Recently, the Government agreed a £161 million deal with a British company called DnaNudge to provide 5.8 million Covid tests, as part of its “Moonshot” programme for mass testing of the population at the point of care. The CovidNudge test is “a rapid, accurate, portable and lab-free RT-PCR test that delivers results at the point of need and in just over an hour”, according to DnaNudge’s own promotional material. DnaNudge is a spinoff company of Imperial College London.

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The CovidNudge test is what is known as a lab-on-a-chip, or chip microfluidics: it carries out a PCR (DNA) test at small scale, using vanishingly tiny quantities of sample. “Chip microfluidics are exactly what they sound like,” a microfluidics academic who has his own spin-off company told me. “It’s the classical image of a scientist with a pipette doing mixing different mixtures, heating, cooling, running it in a big instrument, except it’s doing it all on a single chip the size of a matchbox.” 

CovidNudge, as I understand it, is a classical PCR test. Users take a swab sample from the mouth and test the mucus for the viral genome. There’s one difference – the SARS-Cov2 virus doesn’t have DNA, it has the related molecule RNA, so CovidNudge has to look for that instead. That means it has to include one more step that a normal PCR test doesn’t have, a reverse-transcription from DNA to RNA, so it’s called RT-PCR. None of this is new or revolutionary technology – it’s essentially next-generation sequencing, which has been around since at least the late 2000s – but it is solid. 

I am a little concerned, though, for several reasons. One, while I’m happy to accept that the test does indeed detect Covid, there is a shortage of good evidence that it’s as effective as we would like or need. Two, there are a few questions over its procurement — the timeline is a bit strange. And three, DnaNudge’s other, non-Covid-related products, and those of its founder Christofer Toumazou, seem to be advertised in a way that is somewhat reminiscent of those vitamin supplements I was just talking about.

Let’s look at these in order. First, the evidence. Because DnaNudge is a private company, it – understandably – doesn’t release all its research. That’s fine, but when a company is in receipt of £161 million in taxpayers’ money for its scientific products, some sort of evidence that those products work is probably in order.

Luckily, a study was published last month in the journal Microbe, a subsidiary journal of the Lancet. It took two samples from each of 386 patients. One sample from each patient was tested for Covid-19 in a laboratory; the other was tested by the CovidNudge kit. The results were then compared, to see if CovidNudge spotted all of the positive cases that the lab tests did.

Superficially, the results were quite promising: 71 of the 386 patients tested positive in the lab; CovidNudge detected 67 of them, suggesting that it was 94% as sensitive as the full laboratory test. And it had no false positives.

There are some concerns, though. First, this is already a small sample; an effective sample size of 71. I’d be pretty wary of placing a £161 million investment on the back of it. Second, 94% sounds pretty good, but it’s far from perfect. A biotech investor and former academic I spoke to said “If you take today’s numbers, we had about 6,000 new cases [when I spoke to him in late September]. That means this test would tell about 360 [infected] people that they’re fine and don’t need to isolate.”

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In their response, DnaNudge say that “symptomatic individuals should remain in isolation regardless of negative tests”. But NHS guidelines under the current testing regime say that if someone tests negative, then they don’t need to self-isolate unless they feel unwell (which is not the same as being symptomatic).

And there’s a more specific worry. The study validated its own work by not only checking for SARS-Cov2, the virus that causes Covid – it also looked for human RNA. If the test came back negative for that, then they decided that the sampling must have been ineffective. As well as the 386 valid samples, there were 32 invalid ones, 24 of which were being tested with CovidNudge. The other eight were samples tested in the lab.

That’s fine – sampling is imperfect. The concern is that those failed results were then excluded from the analysis. Of the 24 invalid CovidNudge tests, 22 had a corresponding lab test. Of those, apparently, “16/22 (73%) tested negative”. I take that to mean that six of them tested positive. If I’m right, that means that instead of CovidNudge detecting 67 out of 71, it detected 67 out of 77, reducing its sensitivity to about 87% rather than 94%. “I don’t know how it got through the Lancet, honestly,” the microfluidics expert told me, meaning Microbe, the subsidiary journal. DnaNudge say that the invalid tests can be redone, which, they say, would mean this is less of an issue. 

And just as important, this testing is under ideal situations, run (presumably) by highly qualified testing staff in a laboratory situation. If 5.8 million of these tests are built and rolled out, then the overwhelming majority of them will not be used by experts but by ordinary people after a few minutes’ training. It is hard to see the errors in the sampling process becoming less of a problem. “PCR is a very sensitive technique,” said the biotech investor. “Once you let it loose in the hands of people who are not well trained, that 94% will get lower.” DnaNudge suggested the best case for sensitivity was actually 98% and that this figure would not get lower as the test was simple to operate. 

None of this is devastating to CovidNudge, but – again – I’d want to ask a lot more questions before giving the company £161 million. DnaNudge say, in their response, that “CovidNudge is not being evaluated or deployed for community testing at this time,” which rather raises questions about what we’re spending all this money for.

Second, I mentioned concerns about the timeline of the procurement. According to the health minister Helen Whately, responding to a written parliamentary question from the shadow cabinet minister, Helen Hayes, the DnaNudge contract award was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 31 July. Imperial College London announced it on 3 August.

Again, that’s fine, but I don’t know what the Government was basing its decision on. The Microbe paper – the only study so far carried out – wasn’t published until 17 September. It was published as a preprint on 15 August, but that’s still two weeks after the decision to award this contract was apparently finalised. It may well be that the Government had access to the data before it was made available publicly, but it’s hardly ideal, again with so much public money going into it. 

I put these serious questions about the timeline to DnaNudge, who confirmed they had awarded the contract prior to and in the absence of any peer review because “the study results [had] already been made available to the key groups using the CovidNudge test in clinical practice”. But they didn’t make it clear whether the Government had seen the data. If the Government had not, it is hard to see how the necessary due diligence could have been performed on such a significant contract. And even if they had seen it, the data would not have been peer-reviewed: the Government’s decision to avoid peer-review is questionable, given how important it is to the due diligence process.

None of this would be so much of a problem if the company had a track record in providing diagnostic PCR tests for viral illnesses – which, for instance, Oxford Nanopore, the other company granted money in the Moonshot programme, does. Nanopore was providing real-time PCR tests for the Ebola virus back in 2016. “If you wanted to drop the Moonshot budget on something,” says the microfluidics expert, “[Nanopore] have a longer track record and the technology they use is more precise.” 

The geneticist Adam Rutherford, who is on record expressing concerns about the contract award to DnaNudge, agrees: “[Nanopore] is tested in the wild, it’s a reputable and good company who do quick-turnaround DNA sequencing for scientists who use it.”

That is not true of DnaNudge, which Rutherford says on Twitter “tests the boundaries of where direct-to-consumer genetics meets snake oil”. Their main product is a DNA test (“NudgeBox”) that, they say, reveals  “your genetic predispositions and risk levels – red, amber or green – to a number of nutrition-related health traits”, and uses that to tell you what foods you should avoid. It comes with a wristband (“colour-customisable DnaBands”) that you can then wear to the supermarket, and use to scan the barcodes of food products. It will then “[flash] red or green to tell you if it’s a good match for your biology”.

Which brings us back to the vitamin stuff. It’s not that our DNA tells us nothing about our diets. When scientists carry out enormous genome-wide association studies (GWAS), looking at tens or hundreds of thousands of subjects, they often find statistically significant correlations between certain “single-nucleotide polymorphisms”, SNPs – that is, single letters of DNA somewhere on our genome – and, for instance, our ability to digest certain foods. But they’re the sort of correlation that requires a sample size of tens or hundreds of thousands to detect. 

“They work at a population level, not individual level,” says Rutherford. “So the identification of those variants might have literally no effect on the individual, but at population level might have some statistically significant role in processing sugars per carbohydrates or whatever.” 

So while the DnaNudge website shows examples of its NudgeBox saying that Heinz Baked Beans are suitable for someone’s DNA profile but that Heinz Organic Tomato Ketchup isn’t, it’s just not plausible that a DNA test could tell us that, at an individual level.

DnaNudge say, in response, that their NudgeBox uses “well-established genetic markers that relate to the genetic risks for obesity, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and blood cholesterol”, and that by helping users make better food choices, they can postpone those diseases. But, says Rutherford, “Any geneticist would tell you that there’s nothing that this test can tell you that’s more personalised than ‘eat less doughnuts and more lettuce, and do more exercise’.” 

DnaNudge also say that their product might recommend, for instance, that users replace “Paleo Foods Co. Honey & Pecan Grain-Free Granola” with “Essential Waitrose Porridge Oats with Wheatbran”, and that by doing so for a year, you would consume 135,200 fewer calories and expect to lose nearly 8lb in weight. But that would be true whatever your NudgeBox told you.

Toumazou, the founder, was previously the scientific adviser to another company called GENEU, now defunct. It had a similar idea – it would take a PCR test and use it to give personalised DNA information, except this time for cosmetics. They had a shop on New Bond Street in London and an “exclusive” deal with Selfridges; its creative director was the Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes.

The idea was that you would pay £200, do a DNA test, have a consultation, and then an hour later you’d get your genetic report and advice and your profile-matched skincare products. Again, this just isn’t something that DNA tests can reasonably do – or, at least, if your skin is greasy, you don’t need to know that you have some SNPs that make it more likely that your pores will overproduce sebum. You can already tell that your skin is greasy; the DNA test doesn’t add anything new.

Toumazou “is a great inventor”, the biotech investor I spoke to said. “The work he has done is groundbreaking and phenomenal on building models of human systems. He’s a world leader in that, no doubt.” But, he says, the problem is overhyping. “I’m a cheerleader for these technologies,” he says. “But I’m also the guy who feels I need to protect them from overhype. I’m in the business of investing for a long time, 10 years, and what we don’t want is that there’s a flash in the pan and everyone hates it and no one invests in the long run.” DnaNudge is “overstating what DNA can do for us”, he says.

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The microfluidics expert agrees: “It’s an example of using a technology that doesn’t really work but they’re very precise on what they claim. ‘This [SNP] has been shown to be involved in diabetes,’ yes, but so are a million other things.”

Another microfluidics scientist, who works in the private sector, is a bit more cautious, but essentially agrees. She says it’s “not rubbish science, it’s more like lipstick science. ‘This is what you need to eat for your genetics’ comes across as bull, but there is genuine science behind it. But you need to look at hundreds of thousands of people to get a proper signal.”

The scientists I spoke to also raised concerns about its scalability, wondering whether they have the facilities to build the millions of testing boxes needed – DnaNudge made a loss of £9 million last year, which isn’t unusual for a relatively new startup, but does, according to the biotech investor, raise questions about how they’ll be able to “raise the capital to build the hardware”. DnaNudge did point us to the fact they have announced two manufacturing agreements which they say will facilitate production at the required speed and scale. 

One scientist suggested that the use of point-of-care tests like CovidNudge are a strange way to go, when there are 150 or so laboratories around the country, in universities and testing facilities, that could perform the tests more rapidly if you can get the swabs to them quickly. “Ramp up the facilities, ramp up the testing,” he said. “I can get a McDonald’s in 10 minutes from Deliveroo, I can get those turnaround times down.” It’s not as sexy, it doesn’t have a beautifully designed box, but it would probably work. And then you’d have a testing infrastructure that would be in place for the next pandemic. The other scientists I spoke to all agreed.

Or if you do want to do point-of-care tests, then there are other companies that have been doing it for a long time. Oxford Nanopore is one; GeneDrive is another; the Cambridge researcher Helen Lee developed the “SAMBA” lab-on-a-chip years ago which tested for HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

More important, though: the really key thing we need to sort out is track and trace. That’s “the cornerstone of fighting the pandemic,” according to Rutherford, and at the moment it doesn’t seem to be working. 

So what I think we need to know is how the Government knew CovidNudge would work — and agreed to spend vast sums of money on it — before anyone had even seen the data. It’s one thing to piss a fiver away on vitamin supplements, but pissing £161 million on a Covid test from a company with no track record in disease diagnostics is quite another thing.