No 10 is hiding behind Sage pseudo-science

The Government’s approach to expert advice is untransparent, onesided and utterly reckless

Downing Street’s use of Covid pseudo-science to justify lockdown could be the greatest scandal of our time. Granted, the initial decision to shut down the country was taken in a gormless panic of bugridden modelling and media hysteria. But since then, has the Government’s strategy become more sinister?

There’s almost a whiff of superstition about No 10’s secretive “evidencebased” approach to lifting lockdown. Ministers are peddling an esoteric assortment of “precautionary” measures, from a scientifically baseless two-metre rule to a pointless 14-day holiday quarantine. They are obscure and enigmatic on risks and trade-offs. And, in the daily press conferences, they continue to bewitch an already hyper-paranoid public with lurid graphs and charts that propagate bogus science.

All the while, No 10 has failed to publish the full advice of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) that has apparently been so influential in its decision-making. It is worth taking in the full weight of this particular point. We are under a virtual house arrest that, judging by the spiralling care homes tragedy, may not even have been effective at preventing deaths. We are trapped in a lockdown that may yet trigger thousands of non-covid fatalities, and wreck millions of lives for decades to come. And yet our Government refuses to publish in its entirety the scientific advice that informed this seismic decision, nor share with us the up-to-date recommendations that supposedly justify ongoing lockdown.

It gets murkier still. As the goalposts slide from “flattening the curve” to “driving down the R number”, the Government is still yet to share with us our basic national goal: suppression, or managing, the virus? Then again, this secrecy may be a hint of what is really going on. Perhaps No 10 is reluctant to publish Sage documents because that might expose a scandalous truth. Namely that, in the absence of reliable, uncontested science, it has pursued a political strategy, selectively exploiting scientific advice and using Sage as a smokescreen. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to realise the political logic of the Government’s move to ditch herd immunity – nor its extreme caution over lifting lockdown, as a care home inquiry looms, and the public fixates on a second wave.

It also doesn’t take an “expert” to twig that the “science” being peddled by No 10 to justify its positioning is guff. Its travel quarantine move makes no sense at this point in the pandemic, given that the UK no longer has a lower infection rate than many EU countries. The two-metre rule is a rule of thumb unsubstantiated by scientific evidence – unlike the one-metre rule used in other countries that is at least informed by studies in clinical settings. It is further discredited by the lack of agreement over the extent to which Covid is airborne.

It gets worse. Despite the fact that “driving down the R number” is now at the forefront of the nation’s collective mission, No 10 still won’t tell us which R number Sage is providing. Is it the basic R number, which tells us how many people a Covid-positive person infects? This is not valid in real life, as it assumes everyone is equally susceptible to the disease. Or is it measuring the “effective R number” which takes the number of immune people into account? In which case, given the lack of certainty about who is immune, from where exactly are Sage modellers getting this data?

We know even less about Sage’s deliberations on the likelihood of a second wave. This is a vital question, not least because Covid-19 seems very different from pandemic viruses that inform second-wave theories. In particular, coronavirus has, in the fashion of a seasonal outbreak, disproportionately affected the elderly. In contrast, pandemic viruses from Spanish flu to swine flu have, over the last 100 years tended to disproportionately affect younger people. Which is why Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-based Medicine has posited that current data supports the theory that coronavirus is “a late seasonal effect in the Northern hemisphere on the back of a mild influenza-like illness season”. Has Sage taken this into consideration?

Of course, a second wave might still materialise, but it comes down to a balance of risks. A concept to which No 10 seems allergic. Why is it up to pubs to lobby to halve the two-metre rule? It is a disgrace that the economic impacts of these two options have apparently not been weighed up against health risks. So, too, is the revelation that politicians did not initially consider the seemingly small viral benefit of border closures against the fallout if tourism is decimated.

It says it all that, as economists lobby for a cost-benefit approach to coronavirus, Boris Johnson prefers to chat vaccine efforts with Bill Gates – a man whose very success is down to his tunnel-visioned approach to gambles (the minds of the epidemiologist and software entrepreneur are surreally similar in that respect).

No 10’s ruse of “following the science” slowly unravels with each day. The question is, when the gig is up, can it shift to a more honest and nuanced position after brainwashing the public so effectively with its one-sided account of this pandemic?

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