It’s fair to say that my contact with the world of public media over the past eighteen months hasn’t been without incident. When I look back at the first interviews I gave on Covid-19, including to UnHerd in May 2020, it is plainly evident that I still had no idea how politicised and nasty this controversy would become — I was still happy to share early hypotheses, not realising that they would be systematically collected and deployed to try to destroy my professional credibility, including by people I had previously respected and admired.
From the Sunday Times to the Guardian, senior MPs to Owen Jones, commentators have been lining up for months to pour scorn on my analysis. Even Tom Chivers, the Science Editor of UnHerd, (to which I am grateful for giving me the space to respond), writing in the Times this past weekend, singled me as the example par excellence of a “wrong” scientist:
But this is not the whole story. In the UnHerd interview which he is referring to, I had already discussed my paper of March 2020 which had hypothesised an Infection Fatality Rate, or IFR, in the UK in the region of 0.1%, and the interviewer Freddie Sayers then asked what I now believed it to be? “I think it would definitely be less that 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000,” I replied, and then corrected myself within seconds: “probably not 1 but perhaps 5 in 10,000.”
Obviously, it was unwise to make such estimates in a media interview and I have since learned to be much more guarded. However, the figure itself is not quite as outrageous as the journalist evidently believes.
There has been a huge amount of confusion during this pandemic around terms such as “Infection Fatality Rate” and “Herd Immunity Threshold”, with journalists drawn to the simplified idea that you can determine these by simply adding up published totals since the start of the pandemic. In reality, both these numbers are constantly fluctuating, depending on the vulnerability of a particular population (age, changing levels of immunity) and the conditions at the time (season, behaviour).
If IFR is to mean anything it must be attached to a particular wave of an infection at a particular time in a particular population. In May 2020 in the UK, particularly in London and the South East, it was indeed probable, and in my opinion remains so today, that around half the population had been exposed to Sars-CoV-2 and the Herd Immunity Threshold had been reached for that environment, which is why deaths and infections were coming down so rapidly. In this scenario, around 35,000 deaths for around 35m people would have indicated an IFR of around 1 in 1,000.
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