No10 should go back to basics on Covid science

Neutered by ministers, Sage is evolving into a lobbying outfit that further muddies the waters

If “following The Science” turned out to be a trap for the Government, “putting The Science into practice” is the only political escape route. Such is No10’s conclusion, as it trades in one devious narrative for another even more ruthless. It makes strategic sense: deferring to scientists proved an invaluable tactic for ministers, but it had the unfortunate side effect of trashing the economy. It also caught Downing Street in a vicious cycle; propelling the experts into the spotlight only highlighted the divisions in scientific opinion – and thus the absurdity of No10’s position.

But if the Blair years were all magicians’ optics, we are now in an era of “quantum politics”. It starts with the theoretically impossible feat of shoving The Science in the back of a Whitehall drawer at the same time as shamelessly using it as cover. Downing Street’s formula for achieving this is ingenious: to pretend The Science is obvious to the point of irrelevance. After all, if the right way of dealing with a crisis is indisputable, then politicians need neither take ultimate responsibility for their decisions nor rely on experts.

To this end, the scientific advice group Sage has been usurped by a new operation, the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC). While the former will now meet less often, the latter will provide real-time analysis of spikes and advise on clampdown measures, such as closing workplaces. In other words, the most influential scientific body in the country is no longer a forum, but a mechanism – a slick operational outfit that will implement rather than inform policy – and dazzle the media with tactics inspired by counter-terrorism.

The JBC occupies a dangerous new space in British politics, where the gleam of pseudo-science meets the glare of the surveillance state. And whodathunk that this next-generation hybrid would be headed by GCHQ’S Clare Gardiner – an epidemiologist who also happens to be a senior spy?

This week’s face masks psychodrama offered a glimpse of the new phase that the JBC might signal; a world where science is no longer just biased, but not even up for discussion. As ministers clashed over the question of whether masks should be mandatory, the debate over whether they work was cunningly sidelined. Nor did the country seem to notice that the Government’s move to make masks compulsory in shops contradicted Sage’s scepticism over the evidence in their favour.

Which hits on the volatile vulnerability of our highest scientific authority. Throughout this pandemic, it has swung from painful irrelevance – contesting in vain the Government’s bizarre quarantine measures, for example – to stoking hysteria with doom-mongering modelling. This week, its more activist-minded members seemed to respond to No 10’s latest rejection with a barely concealed bid to restyle Sage as a lobbying outfit.

In that it may yet succeed. In recent days, the media has savoured a paper commissioned by Sage head Sir Patrick Vallance, which warned that a second winter wave more deadly than the first is a “reasonable” worst-case scenario. Few probed the paper’s reasoning – from its pessimistic assumption that the infection rate may need to reach 70 per cent for the country to achieve herd immunity to its failure to factor in treatment breakthroughs like dexamethasone.

Whitehall, of course, has form with “unreasonable” worst-case scenarios, long predating the notorious Imperial College lockdown paper. A decade ago, in an investigation into the quality of emergency scientific advice during a flu scare, the Commons Science and Technology select committee expressed concern that the then government’s “reasonable” worst-case scenario seemed to be “influenced by the need to find a reasonable level of public expenditure for contingency planning, rather than outlining the worst scenario that might realistically happen, based on the best available evidence”.

These suspicions were swept under the carpet; after all, a plastic definition of “reasonable” worst-case scenarios has, over the years, suited both Sage’s scientist-activists and politicians who dislike being advised to do things for which they lack the means. But in the end, this obscure technocratic quirk unleashed total systems failure: when the pandemic hit, ridiculous projections were touted as viable. Astute scientists quickly twigged that action with substantial, unquantifiable costs (like lockdowns) were acceptable; actions with substantial, quantifiable costs (like testing) were sidelined.

If career science led us over the cliff, our only route from rock bottom is to go back to basics, and follow the evidence. We could start with fixating on the vulnerable, rather than face masks. Rolling out new 20-minute Covid tests across care homes and creating a single organisation dedicated to monitoring hospital-related infections should be top of the list. And as experts continue to ponder points as basic as whether it’s possible to get Covid twice – and even whether the disease predates the outbreak in Wuhan – now more than ever, No10 needs to be open to the evolving scientific debate.

In other words, it should be wargaming realistic scenarios with laser precision, at the same time as keeping an open mind. Instead, the Government is preparing for the apocalypse with paper swords.

read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion