This week the Covid inquiry continued to hear evidence about the political incompetence of Boris Johnson’s government not “following the science” during the early days of the pandemic.
Long-standing accusations resurfaced about the Covid policy “rollercoaster” and the need for earlier and more stringent measures, according to Prof. Thomas Hale, leader of the Oxford Covid-19 government response tracker.
Yet this narrative obscures one of the main political failures of how the UK dealt with Covid: a lack of serious thinking about the predictable collateral damage from non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as lockdown.
While responsibility for this abysmal failure is multifaceted, a few specific challenges with the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) merit further attention during the second investigation of the UK inquiry, focused on political decision-making.
First, Sage suffered from a dominance of biomedical expertise, and hence disciplinary groupthink that promoted an incorrect vision of what a “pandemic” really is: a whole-of-society problem rather than just an epidemiological conundrum to be solved through the language and heroic slogans of medical science.
This was built into the Government’s main request to focus on the epidemiological impact of control measures. Biomedical sciences, led by physicians and modellers, brought their unique worldview to Sage because that was what the Government wanted. This muddied the waters about the high level of uncertainty for the real-world effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions and expert disagreements, which remained sidelined and neglected. According to testimony this week from Lord O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary from 2005-2011:
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