| Smithy |
25-04-2020 11:30 AM |
The UK Government is “following the science” but why is it so secretive?
Quote:
LONDON — As the British government comes under mounting criticism for its response to the coronavirus — one that has left Britain vying with Italy and Spain as the worst hit countries in Europe — Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his aides have defended themselves by saying they are “guided by the science.”
The trouble is, nobody knows what the science is.
The government’s influential Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies — known by its soothing acronym, SAGE — operates as a virtual black box. Its list of members is secret, its meetings are closed, its recommendations are private and the minutes of its deliberations are published much later, if at all.
Yet officials invoke SAGE’s name endlessly without ever explaining how it comes up with its advice — or even who these scientists are.
That lack of transparency has become a point of contention, as officials struggle to explain why they waited until late March to shift from a laissez-faire approach to the virus to the stricter measures adopted by other European countries. Critics say the delay may have worsened a death toll now surging past 20,000, and they fault the government for leaving people in the dark about why it first chose this riskier path.
With all the secrecy, even some of Britain’s top scientists say they don’t know whether they can trust the government’s approach.
“Is the science being followed by the government on coronavirus?” said David King, a former chief scientific adviser to the government. “I don’t know, because I don’t know what the advice is, and there isn’t the freedom for the scientists to tell the public what their advice is.”
Professor King, who counseled Prime Minister Tony Blair on the foot-and-mouth disease that infected British farm animals in 2001, said there was no justification for the government to withhold either the advisory group’s membership or the minutes of its meetings. Doing so, he said, eroded public trust in the government, especially given the bewildering twists and turns in its response.
It also raises questions about an academic group that ought to be a point of pride for Britain: the country’s best scientific minds, in fields from epidemiology to behavioral science, assembled from cutting-edge labs at Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
“The names are likely to come out at some stage,” said David Lidington, who served as a deputy to Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May. He warned that the government’s lack of disclosure would only cause more headaches later. “There is the risk that if names leak out after a time it becomes a great shock-horror,” he said, adding that it would be better to make a virtue of transparency.
Even now, outside scientists and doctors are second-guessing the advice of these unnamed authorities.
Why, for example, did SAGE recommend less stringent social-distancing measures on March 9, when France and Ireland were banning large events and ordering lockdowns, and there was ample evidence from Italy of the epidemic’s rapid and lethal spread? (The unusual disclosure came in a report the government posted about the predicted effects of various social-distancing measures.)
Why in late February did a subgroup of SAGE experts underestimate the percentage of people who would have to be hospitalized as a result of contracting the virus, and why did their models underestimate the speed at which the pathogen spread?
Why did those scientists agree to classify the risk level of the contagion to the public as “moderate,” even after weeks of evidence that it was being transmitted between humans in China?
Why, after Imperial College London published a frightening study on March 16 that projected up to 500,000 deaths if Britain did not act more aggressively to curb the virus, did Mr. Johnson wait another full week to close nonessential shops and order people to stay in their homes?
“Political decisions are often framed as following the best scientific advice,” said Connor Rochford, a physician and former consultant at McKinsey & Company. “But science is nothing more than a normative claim about how we ought to make a decision. These are best-guess estimates.”
Some said the frequent references of Mr. Johnson and his aides to the scientists should be a warning sign. If, as is likely, the government’s handling of the crisis is scrutinized in a future parliamentary inquiry, officials are likely to justify their actions by saying they were listening to the experts.
“It has become a shield for them,” said Devi Sridhar, director of the global health governance program at Edinburgh University. “If things go off, you can always say, ‘Well, it was the experts who told us.’”
The government has deflected pressure to identify the group’s members or how many there are by noting that Patrick Vallance, the current chief scientific adviser, who chairs the group, regularly appears in public at news conferences. The government also posts brief reports from some of SAGE’s subgroups, and the data that go into its models, on the internet.
In a recent letter to Parliament, Professor Vallance said anonymity protected the security of scientists and also shielded them “from lobbying and other forms of unwanted influence which may hinder their ability to give impartial advice.” He added that people were free to disclose their membership.
One member who has — Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease specialist who is the director of Wellcome Trust — acknowledged the limitations of the system when he recently told the BBC that the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, which advises SAGE, underestimated the threat of the contagion in March.
“The U.K.,” Dr. Farrar added, “is likely to be certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, affected countries in Europe.”
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A long article but an interesting read |
