Friday, December 24, 2021
Tory MPs in denial
When Michael Gove announced during the referendum campaign that he had had enough of experts, nobody expected his rallying cry to be taken up by Tory MPs when it comes to our health and wellbeing, but that is apparently where we now are.
Boris Johnson's reluctance to make decisions and take the necessary and timely actions needed to tackle Covid 19, his obvious inability to focus on the problems presented to him and the opposition of a sizeable number of Tory MPs to measures recommended by health experts to keep us safe, has put us all at far more risk that we needed to be and prolonged this pandemic, possibly at the cost of thousands of unnecessary deaths. And they are still at it.
As the Guardian reports, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser has had to hit back at accusations from Conservative MPs that epidemiological modellers had “spread gloom” about the Omicron variant:
Sir Patrick Vallance said it was not the responsibility of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) “to take a particular policy stance or to either spread gloom or give Panglossian optimism”.
He used an article in the Times to respond to criticism that was widely circulated among Tory MPs and ministers that suggested Sage’s Omicron modelling had been an exercise in fear-mongering.
The Spectator’s editor, Fraser Nelson, had a Twitter exchange with the Sage member Graham Medley over the weekend, suggesting ministers asked Sage to model worst-case scenarios. The exchange was reportedly widely shared in the WhatsApp groups of Tory MPs.
In an account of the exchange in his column in the Telegraph on Monday, Nelson complained that Sage projections that Omicron could kill up to 6,000 in a single day had been seized on in the press, and more cautious projections ignored.
Nelson wrote: “The 6,000 is the top of a rather long range of ‘scenarios’, not predictions.”
He added: “I’ve been contacted by a few ministers saying they were alarmed to think Sage modellers were not giving the probability of various outcomes but cooking up gloomy scenarios to order.”
In an apparent riposte, Vallance wrote science was “self-correcting” and about making “advances by overturning previous dogma and challenging accepted truths”.
He wrote: “Encouraging a range of opinions, views and interpretation of data is all part of the process. No scientist would ever claim, in this fast-changing and unpredictable pandemic, to have a monopoly of wisdom on what happens next.”
A widely reported statement from the Spi-M group of scientists, who report to Sage, on 18 December warned hospitalisations could peak at between 3,000 and 10,000 a day and deaths at between 600 and 6,000 a day based on models assuming no new restrictions were introduced.
Vallance said modellers were “trying to model lots of different scenarios of how the wave of Omicron might grow, determine which factors are likely to have the biggest impact on spread and its consequences, and to assess how different interventions might alter the outcomes”.
He added: “They do not, contrary to what you might have heard, only model the worst outcomes.”
Isn't it time these MPs let the scientists do their job, and stop playing politics with people's lives?
Boris Johnson's reluctance to make decisions and take the necessary and timely actions needed to tackle Covid 19, his obvious inability to focus on the problems presented to him and the opposition of a sizeable number of Tory MPs to measures recommended by health experts to keep us safe, has put us all at far more risk that we needed to be and prolonged this pandemic, possibly at the cost of thousands of unnecessary deaths. And they are still at it.
As the Guardian reports, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser has had to hit back at accusations from Conservative MPs that epidemiological modellers had “spread gloom” about the Omicron variant:
Sir Patrick Vallance said it was not the responsibility of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) “to take a particular policy stance or to either spread gloom or give Panglossian optimism”.
He used an article in the Times to respond to criticism that was widely circulated among Tory MPs and ministers that suggested Sage’s Omicron modelling had been an exercise in fear-mongering.
The Spectator’s editor, Fraser Nelson, had a Twitter exchange with the Sage member Graham Medley over the weekend, suggesting ministers asked Sage to model worst-case scenarios. The exchange was reportedly widely shared in the WhatsApp groups of Tory MPs.
In an account of the exchange in his column in the Telegraph on Monday, Nelson complained that Sage projections that Omicron could kill up to 6,000 in a single day had been seized on in the press, and more cautious projections ignored.
Nelson wrote: “The 6,000 is the top of a rather long range of ‘scenarios’, not predictions.”
He added: “I’ve been contacted by a few ministers saying they were alarmed to think Sage modellers were not giving the probability of various outcomes but cooking up gloomy scenarios to order.”
In an apparent riposte, Vallance wrote science was “self-correcting” and about making “advances by overturning previous dogma and challenging accepted truths”.
He wrote: “Encouraging a range of opinions, views and interpretation of data is all part of the process. No scientist would ever claim, in this fast-changing and unpredictable pandemic, to have a monopoly of wisdom on what happens next.”
A widely reported statement from the Spi-M group of scientists, who report to Sage, on 18 December warned hospitalisations could peak at between 3,000 and 10,000 a day and deaths at between 600 and 6,000 a day based on models assuming no new restrictions were introduced.
Vallance said modellers were “trying to model lots of different scenarios of how the wave of Omicron might grow, determine which factors are likely to have the biggest impact on spread and its consequences, and to assess how different interventions might alter the outcomes”.
He added: “They do not, contrary to what you might have heard, only model the worst outcomes.”
Isn't it time these MPs let the scientists do their job, and stop playing politics with people's lives?
