Scare stories over variants ‘form part of project fear’
COVID mutations are being used as a stick to get the public to behave, and scare stories about new strains are becoming “a bit ridiculous”, experts have said.
They believe attempting to stop variants through lockdowns and border controls is akin to “King Canute trying to hold back the tide”.
It came after an Indian “double mutation” was identified in Britain.this followed detection of the South African strain, which resulted in a surge of testing in some areas.
Last week Public Health England detected 73 cases of the Indian mutation, said to be “almost certainly playing a part in the very sharp spike in the epidemic in India”.
But Professor Hugh Pennington, a leading expert in public health at the University of Aberdeen, said while it is important to keep track of changes to the virus, the public did not need to know
about them while their significance was still so unclear.
He said the use of modelling or lab studies to examine the mutations did not show how the different strains played out in the real world, and they can be affected by the environment, a person’s individual immune system and people’s behaviour.
Prof Pennington said: “These are being used as a useful stick to beat the public on the head and get them to behave as part of project fear. But just as the vaccine rollout has been more successful than we thought, we also have a world-beating surveillance system to pick up new variants.”
His comments were echoed by
Professor Francois Balloux, director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, who last week said that variant scare stories were getting “a bit ridiculous”. And Professor Robert Dingwall, a public health sociologist at Nottinghamtrent University, said: “Trying to stop variants happening with lockdowns or border controls is like King Canute trying to hold back the tide.”
India is not on the Government’s “red list” for travel, where people who have been in those countries in the previous 10 days are refused entry to the UK.
A Downing Street spokesman said the list was “under constant review”.