Scandalously, Neil Ferguson is still advising #10. His truth-twisting during a Tuesday chat displayed government’s culture of denial despite facts that Covid-19 lockdown was greatest blunder in history-UK Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs

[Image, June 3, 2019, Trump and his pal, the Queen, during dinner at Buckingham Palace]

June 4, 2020, “The architects of lockdown must not be allowed to rewrite history," UK Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs, columnist

“People deserve candid debate about potentially seismic errors – not panicked political positioning and scientific doublespeak.” 

“Britain’s lockdown nightmare may be far from over, but an attempt to rewrite the history of the country’s greatest political blunder has already begun. With the UK now past the peak, the lack of evidence that lockdown served any useful purpose is glaring. And crucially, thanks to a growing abundance of raw data – from deaths and hospital admissions, to Covid-related 111 calls and mobile tracking intelligence –we now have the power to piece together what Britain’s lockdown achieved (or didn’t) in hideous technicolour. 

Getting at the truth will be an uphill struggle, however: Downing Street has shown no appetite whatsoever for sifting through the evidence, even though it could inform (or, let’s face it, rip apart) its uniquely odd approach to easing lockdown. We must also beware the shape-shifting, scientific architects of the stay-at-home order; as criticism grows, are they attempting to dress their reconstructed reality in the language of scientific pedantry? 

Take Neil Ferguson. One might wonder whether Professor Lockdown’s generous display of humble pie before the science and technology committee on Tuesday [June 2]– admitting that Sweden “got a long way to the same effect” as the UK without resorting to lockdown – was in fact a cunning attempt to defend his junk modelling. Despite depicting Sweden as an extremist outlier just weeks ago, accusing it of pursuing an approach “most other countries would not tolerate”, on Tuesday Ferguson not only oozed that he had the “greatest respect” for Swedish scientists, but even suggested that while the Nordic country “came to a different policy conclusion”, this was “based really on quite similar science”. 

[Image: UK math prof. Neil Ferguson, prescribed global lockdown. Apparently the US has no math professors of its own.]

The latter assertion, of course, conveniently implies that the Nordic outlier’s success doesn’t pose a challenge to Imperial modelling. It is also an insult to the nation – Britons deserve the unvarnished story, not pedagogic half-truths. 

Granted, Sweden’s aim was the same as Britain’s: to flatten the curve. And like Britain, it embraced measures such as closing schools and social distancing. But while our entire strategy apparently hinged on the terrifying projections of a single non-peer-reviewed modelling paper, Sweden rejected working with models due to their limited reliability. This, incidentally, includes two Swedish papers inspired by Ferguson’s model, which wrongly projected that critical care demand in Sweden would peak above 16,000 or even 20,000 a day in May (the reality has been nearer 500). 

Other basic differences abound. Sweden assumed a significantly higher rate of compliance with measures such as self-isolation than the likes of Imperial. Not to mention that while Sweden is optimistic on herd immunity, Britain is sceptical. Conversely, while Britain is overwhelmingly hopeful about a vaccine solution, Sweden is largely hesitant. 

Ferguson’s truth-twisting is a chilling symptom of the culture of denial that pervades No 10 (which he is, scandalously, still advising). This is in shameful contrast to the open debate taking place in other countries: having crunched the numbers,and discovered that the R number may have fallen to 1.1 by the time it announced lockdown, the head of Norway’s Public Health Institute has made the staggering admission that the country’s stay-at-home order in March may have been unnecessary.

Meanwhile, the architect of Sweden’s strategy, Prof Anders Tegnell, has been frank about the fact that, despite ambitious projections, Stockholm did not reach herd immunity by the end of May, while top Swedish politicians have apologised for their “big failure” to protect care homes. 

Contrast this with the narrowness of the discussion in the UK, where the only notable admission has been the justice secretary’s barely veiled suggestion that, with testing resources stretched, the UK had no choice but to sacrifice care homes on the altar of the NHS. Even on that, there remain serious questions about whether decision-makers properly countenanced the risk to care homes in the first place, let alone weighed this up against the needs of the NHS. Care homes were only mentioned twice in five months in SAGE reports dating back to January. Nor did the Government publish a specific action plan for social care until mid-April.”… 

[“The [UK] Government has managed to contort itself into the bizarre position of being both draconian and ineffectual, which is why the revolt in the Tory party is growing….The scientists have been just as scathing. Throughout the Covid-19 crisis, the Government has insisted that it follows the science, but that is obviously not true in this case. At yesterday’s briefing Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Officer, revealed that the experts on SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) had not been asked to provide advice on the quarantine scheme. Openly sceptical of its effectiveness, he said that decisions on such a measure are “something for politicians to make.””] 

(continuing): “Pinning down what went wrong matters. No 10’s refusal to grant a post-mortem on the Covid debacle threatens to cripple our economy with permanent rigor mortis. Early economic data shows a terrifying correlation between countries that locked down hard and the severity of their downturns.

There has been no notable rise in Covid hospital admissions in countries easing their lockdowns. And yet No 10 refuses to end this pantomime of scientifically risible caution. 

With the Government committed to concealing its mistakes, and those who question “the science” dismissed as cranks, there is no certainty that Britain will be able to have a sensible conversation about lockdown. But try we must. This catastrophe is a textbook case of what happens when people are treated like swing votes to be polled, prodded and pandered to rather than thoughtful, responsible citizens. And so it goes that, unable to protect us from risk, politicians end up protecting us from truth in this new post-Orwellian dystopia.”

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Added:

June 3, 2019, Ivanka Trump at Buckingham Palace. (Victoria Jones/Pool Photo via AP)

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Note from blog editor: Images above were added by me. They weren't part of UK Telegraph column.




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