Round 2 Coming:

The making of Britain’s Covid catastrophe

Dr John Lee

The way in which the British government decided to announce the latest set of restrictions on social life was something of a back-to-the-future moment. The chief medical officer and chief scientific officer were wheeled out to make dire predictions, paving the way for the prime minister to emerge from his bunker to tell us what we must do, based on the science, for our own safety.

The first time around, back in March, the tone felt about right. There was a lot we did not know about the virus, there were worrying pictures of what might be about to happen, and the idea of a short intense shutdown to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed by a surge of serious cases seemed reasonable.

But a great deal has changed since then. We now know a lot about the virus and what it has been doing, and we know that the seriousness of the disease – in population terms – is much less than was originally feared. We know that the pictures we saw on our televisions were highly selected, in the way that disaster reporting usually is. We know that the extreme predictions of disaster that did so much to frighten people in March were based on catastrophist extrapolations of models with biologically naive assumptions, models that have been shown to be wrong many times before.

So this time the tone seemed wrong. The scientific talking heads again presented a one-sided, extreme version of what might be about to happen, untempered by even an acknowledgement of the many possible alternative interpretations of the data, and without deigning to take questions. Even more striking, the government’s idea of what it thinks it is trying to do, as presented by the prime minister, appears to have drastically shifted: from a short sharp shock to protect the NHS, to a one-size-fits-all, less intense but nevertheless highly damaging slowdown, intended to reduce case incidence in all ages, despite the disease severity varying over a thousand-fold (as we now know) between young and old.

The idea now seems to be to try to suppress the virus until the cavalry come galloping over the hill in the form of a vaccine, or possibly an antiviral drug. This Covid-control strategy apparently must be pursued at all costs, without even a cursory nod to the idea of a cost-benefit analysis which might weigh the benefits accrued by the policy against the damage caused to society along all the other axes of health, economics and lives worth living.

Why has there been this radical change in policy, which has not even been properly explained? The government can only get away with it by continuing to use emergency powers, thus necessitating maintenance of the idea that we are in an emergency. And unfortunately it is aided in this by two further underappreciated factors: the nature of scientific careers, and the infiltration of bureaucracies (including, and perhaps especially, those dominated by scientists) by what has become known as the precautionary principle.

Science works best when everything is examined critically, not when there is unquestioning acceptance of just one narrative. When that happens, a particular paradigm has captured a field, and that usually results in errors and slow progress. Good science challenges every assumption, rigorously examines every self-evident conclusion for flaws, and scrutinises every consequence that follows from those conclusions for unintended wider effects that may neutralise (or even negate) their validity.

It is clearly not what has been happening during the Covid crisis, which has been remarkable for the almost complete absence of doubt expressed by government advisers, and the complete lack of alternative perspectives or interpretations aired in public, even if it were only to dismiss them. This may reflect the baleful influence of PsyOps again, or it may be that some in the fields of epidemiology, infectious diseases and public health sense an opportunity.

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