Scientists report flaws in WHO-funded study on 2-metre distancing

Senior scientists have reported flaws in an influential World Health Organization-commissioned study into the risks of coronavirus infection and say it should not be used as evidence for relaxing the UK’s 2-metre physical distancing rule.

Critics of the distancing advice, which states that people should keep at least 2 metres apart, believe it is too cautious. They seized on the research commissioned by the WHO, which suggested a reduction from 2 metres to 1 would raise infection risk only marginally, from 1.3% to 2.6%.

But scientists who delved into the work found mistakes they believe undermine the findings to the point they cannot be relied upon when scientists and ministers are forming judgments about what constitutes safe physical distancing.

“The analysis of infection risk at 1 metre versus 2 metre should be treated with great caution,” said Prof David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at Cambridge University, who has participated in the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies . “I’m very suspicious of it.”

Prof Kevin McConway, an applied statistician at the Open University, went further and called the analysis inappropriate. He said the work “should not be used in arguments about how much greater the infection risk is at 1-metre minimum distance as opposed to 2 metres”.

The study, published in the Lancet, is the latest to come under fire from experts who fear that in the midst of the pandemic some research papers are being written, reviewed and published too fast for sufficient quality checks to be performed. Earlier this month, the Lancet and another elite publication, the New England Journal of Medicine, were forced to retract coronavirus studies after flaws in the papers emerged.

Doubts about the study emerged as Boris Johnson announced a formal review of the 2-metre physical distancing rule, which is expected to report by 4 July, the earliest date pubs and restaurants may reopen in England. In recent weeks, Johnson has come under intense pressure from Conservative MPs to relax the advice to help businesses, particularly in the hospitality sector.

Led by researchers at McMaster University in Ontario, the report pooled data from previously published studies to estimate the risk of becoming infected with coronavirus at different distances. It also considered how face masks and eye protection might help prevent the spread of disease.

But in the analysis the authors assume the proportional impact on risk of moving from 2 metres to 1 metre is the same as moving from 1 metre to zero. “They are forcing the proportional fit to be the same,” Spiegelhalter told the Guardian.

McConway believes there is a more fundamental problem in the way the risks of infection at different distances are compared in the study. He said: “The method of comparing the different distances in the paper is inappropriate for telling you exactly how the risk at 2-metre minimum distance compares to a 1 metre minimum distance. It does not support, and should not be used in, arguments about how much greater the risk is with a 1 metre limit versus a 2-metre limit.”

Another scientist, Prof Ben Cowling at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and

Control at the University of Hong Kong, flagged further issues with the work. He tweeted that he was “not taking the whole paper very seriously” because it looked only at distance and not how long a person was exposed for.

McConway said he had raised questions about the analysis with the authors and was waiting to hear back. He believed peer review by the Lancet and the WHO should have spotted the problems. “I think they did it in such a rush – the authors, possibly the WHO, and the Lancet peer reviewers – that important things were missed,” he said.

“Everyone believes that the risk of infection at 1-metre is higher than at 2metre and we need to know how much higher because there’s a trade-off between the increased risk and the gains from moving to 1-metre. But if you don’t know how the risks at 1 metre and 2 metres compare, how do you know how to trade it off? It’s finger in the air stuff,” McConway said.

The most recent public Sage document on physical distancing, updated on 2 May, makes clear that multiple streams of evidence are used to advise on safe distancing, including how long people are together, ventilation and room size, and that the 2-metre advice is no more than a ballpark guide for face-to-face meetings.

In a statement, the WHO said it recommends keeping a distance of 1 metre or more.

“The evidence used to inform this guidance was based on a systematic review of all available, relevant observational studies concerning protective measures to prevent transmission of the coronaviruses that cause Sars, Mers and Covid-19. After checking for relevance, 44 comparative studies done in health-care and non-health-care settings were included.

“The findings of this systematic review and meta-analysis support physical distancing of 1 metre or more, which is in line with the existing WHO recommendation that people should physically distance at least 1 metre,” the statement said.

The Lancet and the authors of the study have been contacted for comment.

in the Green Zone on 25 July.

Yates and a Reuters colleague met the two US generals who had overseen the investigation into the killings of Namir and Saeed.

It was a long, off-the-record meeting. The generals revealed a mass of detail, telling them a US battalion had been seeking militias responsible for roadside bombs. They had called in helicopter support after coming under fire. One Apache had the call sign Crazy Horse 1-8.

“They described a group of men spotted by this Apache,” Yates says. “Some appeared to be armed and Crazy Horse 1-8 … had requested permission to fire because we were told these men were ‘military-aged males’ … and they appeared to have weapons and they were acting suspiciously. So, we were told those men on the ground were then ‘engaged’.”

The generals showed them photographs of what was collected after the shooting, including “a couple of AK-47s [assault rifles], an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] launcher and two cameras”.

“I have wondered for many years how much of that meeting was carefully choreographed so we would go away with a certain impression of what happened. Well, for a time it worked,” Yates says.

There was some discussion about what permitted Crazy Horse 1-8 to open fire if there was no firefight. One of the generals insisted the dead were of “military age” and, because apparently armed, were therefore “expressing hostile intent”.

Yates says: “Then they said, ‘OK, we are just going to show you a little bit of footage from the camera of Crazy Horse 1-8.’”

The generals showed them about three minutes of video, beginning with a group including Saeed and Namir on the street.

“We heard the pilot seek permission from the ground to attack.” After the pilot receives permission, the men are obscured. The chopper circles for a clear aim.

Yates says: “When the chopper circled around, Namir can be seen going to a corner and crouching down holding something – his long-lens camera – and is taking photographs of Humvees. One of the crew says, ‘He’s got an RPG’ … He’s clearly agitated. And then another 15, 20 seconds the crew gets a clear line of sight … I’m watching Namir crouching down with his camera which the pilot thinks is an RPG and they’re about to open fire. I then see a man I believe to be Saeed walking away, talking on the phone. Then cannon fire hits them. I’ve got my head in my hands … The generals stop the tape.”

The generals downplayed a slightly later incident when they said a van had pulled up and Crazy Horse 1-8 assessed it as aiding the insurgents, removing their bodies and weapons.

“At some point after watching that footage it became burnt into my mind that the reason the helicopter opened fire was because Namir was peering around the corner. I came to blame Namir for that attack, thinking that the helicopter fired because he made himself look suspicious and it just erased from my memory the fact that the order to open fire had already been given. They were going to open fire anyway. And the one person who picked this up was Assange. On the day that he released the tape [5 April 2010] he said that helicopter opened fire because it sought permission and was given permission. And he said something like, ‘If that’s based on the rules of engagement then the rules of engagement are wrong.’”

Reuters asked for the entire video. The general refused, saying Reuters had to seek it under freedom of information laws. The agency did so, but its requests were denied.

During the next year, Yates checked when it might be released. All the while he and other executives from foreign news organisations continued their good faith meetings with various US generals to enhance the safety of their Baghdad staff.

On the anniversary of Namir’s and Saeed’s killings, Yates wanted to break the off-the-record agreement with the generals. He argued that enough time had passed for the Pentagon to give Reuters the tape. His superiors insisted the agreement be honoured. A passage in the article he wrote for the anniversary read: “Video from two US Apache helicopters and photographs taken of the scene were shown to Reuters editors in Baghdad on July 25, 2007 in an off-the-record briefing.”

Yates stayed in Baghdad until October 2008. He did not get the full video. Reuters continued to ask for it. Yates was reassigned to Singapore. He displayed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including noise aversion and emotional numbness. He avoided anything to do with Iraq and had trouble sleeping.

On 5 April 2010, when Wikileaks released Collateral Murder at the National Press Club in Washington, rendering himself and WikiLeaks household names (and exposing how the US prosecuted the Iraq war on the ground), Yates was off the grid,walking in Cradle Mountain national park on a Tasmanian holiday with his wife, Mary, and their children.

Namir and Saeed would have remained forgotten statistics in a war that killed countless Iraqi combatants, hundreds of thousands of civilians and 4,400-plus US soldiers had it not been for Chelsea Manning, a US military intelligence analyst in Baghdad. In February 2010 Manning, then 23, discovered the Crazy Horse 1-8 video and leaked it to WikiLeaks. The previous month Manning had leaked 700,000 classified US military documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. Assange unveiled the Crazy Horse 1-8 footage (a 17-minute edited version and the full 38-minute version remain on WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder site). The video was picked up by thousands of news organisations worldwide, sparking global outrage and condemnation of US military tactics in Iraq – and launching WikiLeaks as a controversial truth-teller, publisher and critical enemy of state secrecy. WikiLeaks later made public the cache of 700,000 documents.

‘Look at those dead bastards’

Collateral Murder is distressing viewing. The carnage wrought by the 30mm cannon fire from the Apache helicopter is devastating. The video shows the gunner tracking Namir as he stumbles and tries to hide behind garbage before his body explodes as the rounds strike home.

The words of the crew are sickening. There is this, after Namir and others are blown apart:

“Look at those dead bastards.”

“Nice.”

And this:

“Good shoot’n.”

“Thank you.”

Saeed survives the first shots. The chopper circles, Saeed in its sights, as he crawls, badly injured and desperate to live.

“Come on buddy … all you got to do is pick up a weapon,” the gunner says, eager to finish Saeed off.

A van pulls up. Two men, including the driver (whose children are in the back), help the dying Saeed get in.

There is more urgent banter in the air about engaging the van. Crazy Horse 1-8 promptly attacks it.

“Oh yeah, look at through the windshield.”

Two days after Assange released the video, Yates emerged from Cradle Mountain. It was hours before he turned on his phone and checked emails, finally learning of Collateral Murder in a local newspaper.

“I thought, ‘No, this can’t be the same attack … that leads on to all this other stuff that we never knew about’ … This was the full horror – Saeed had been trying to get up for roughly three minutes when this good Samaritan pulls over in this minivan and the Apache just opens fire again and just obliterates them – it was totally traumatising.”

Yates immediately thought: “They [the US military] fucked us. They just fucked us. They lied to us. It was all lies.”

The day Collateral Murder was released, a spokesman for US Central Command said an investigation of the incident shortly after it occurred found that US forces were not aware of the presence of the news staffers and thought they were engaging armed insurgents.

“We regret the loss of innocent life, but this incident was promptly investigated and there was never any attempt to cover up any aspect of this engagement.”

Edited into the story Reuters published about Collateral Murder was that line from Yates’s first anniversary article: “Video from two US Apache helicopters and photographs taken of the scene were shown to Reuters editors in Baghdad on July 25, 2007 in an off-therecord briefing.”

Reuters’ outraged Iraqi staff were under the misapprehension Yates had seen the whole video.

“I hate to admit it, but this was my chance to set the record straight and I didn’t do it,” Yates says. “I just, I don’t know, didn’t have the courage to do it … I should’ve picked up the phone and said to [Reuters] ‘we cannot let this go and we have to say what we knew’.”

In one email to a senior editor that night, Yates wrote: “I think we need to push the issue of transparency strongly with the US military … When I think back to that meeting with two generals in Baghdad … I feel cheated … they were not being honest … We met afterwards with the military several times to work on improving safety for reporters in Iraq.”

The editor replied: “I appreciate how awful this is for you. Take good care; rest assured that we’re not letting this drop.” that. Right

Then Yates let it go.

He moved to Tasmania, endured PTSD and eventually, after three inpatient stays at Austin Health’s Ward 17 in Melbourne (a specialist unit for PTSD) grappled with his emotional pain – the “moral injury” now articulated in his shoulder tattoo – over the deaths of Namir and Saeed. Reuters paid for his treatment in Ward 17 and agreed to create the role of head of mental health and wellbeing strategy for him when he could no longer work as a journalist (he has now left the company).

It was in Ward 17, in 2016 and 2017, that he came to understand the moral injury he was enduring by unfairly blaming Namir for making Crazy Horse 1-8 open fire. The other element of his moral injury related to his shame at failing to protect his staff by uncovering the lax rules of engagement in the US military before they were shot – and for not disclosing earlier his understanding of the extent to which the US had lied. Yates made peace with Namir and Saeed – and himself.

Assange, he says, brought the truth of the killings to the world and exposed the lie that he and others had not.

“What he did was 100% an act of truth-telling, exposing to the world what the war in Iraq looks like and how the US military lied.”

Of the US indictment against Assange, Yates says: “The US knows how embarrassing Collateral Murder is, how shameful it is to the military – they know that there’s potential war crimes on that tape, especially when it comes to the shooting up of the van …They know that the banter between the pilots echoes the sort of language that kids would use on video games.”

Fight Back, read the words inked on to Yates’s left shoulder.

Amid the continuing attempt to extradite Assange to the US, many more words are likely to be spoken about the events of 12 July 2007, the lies of the US military – and their exposure through Collateral Murder.

How shameful it is to the military – they know that there’s potential war crimes on that tape