tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5841910768079015534.post41999217086371831..comments2024-03-25T17:14:36.888+00:00Comments on BishopBlog: Response to Philip Ball's critique of scientific advisorsdeevybeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15118040887173718391noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5841910768079015534.post-53731717978154910212022-01-16T20:10:42.967+00:002022-01-16T20:10:42.967+00:00The problem is our Chief and Deputy Scentific and ...The problem is our Chief and Deputy Scentific and Chief Medical officers advised *in favour* of herd immunity. That notion has derailed us throughout the pandemic. Not one has apologised for the horrific loss of life. There are continuing ramifications with unmitigated infections in children. Is anyone accountable, ever?CLThttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00605919526273828762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5841910768079015534.post-92221227132588345012022-01-16T19:25:24.345+00:002022-01-16T19:25:24.345+00:00[Cont. 3/3] You say that we absolutely still need ...[Cont. 3/3] You say that we absolutely still need “a group of scientists who work directly with government to provide scientific input into rapid decisions”, i.e. Sage or something like it. I fully agree, and don’t think I implied otherwise. But I believe we need an urgent reconsideration of the way in which such a body operates. Is it proper, for example, that the scientific advisers always (or nearly so) be chaperoned by ministers when they speak to the public? That never used to happen. My sense is that Whitty and Vallance have sometimes been unsure how far they can go in pushing back on comments and decisions they think are scientifically questionable – indeed, it’s been pretty poignant seeing them try to abide by the rules that politicians have openly flouted. I think this needs to be clarified. It is quite right that advisers should be aiming to support the government as far as they can. But there is so much now that has been utterly unsupportable – not just the parties and rule-breaking, not just the fatal hesitation and delay in taking effective action (which has surely cost thousands of lives) but also, for example, the unlawful system of preference in the awarding of Covid contracts and the astonishing incompetence in management of the testing system. We are simply failing the public if the chief scientists are supposed to keep quiet in the face of such things, which seriously undermine their efforts to guide us through the pandemic.<br /><br />In short, scientific advice to policy has a moral and social-responsibility dimension, not just a technical one. This has been recognized for decades among many experts in this field. It was pointed out in 1969 by Joseph Haberer in his book Politics and the Community of Science:<br /><br />“The failure of scientists has lain in their moral obtuseness, in their incapacity to define, delineate or even recognize the nature of the problem of responsibility. Characteristically, responsibility has been recognized only in its narrower sense. Scientists have been willing to be held responsible for the calibre of their scientific work; or when acting in administrative positions for their performance in terms of the formal responsibilities attached to their positions. Beyond this methodological and bureaucratic responsibility scientists have not, at least until very recently, ventured.”<br /><br />This is, I think, overly harsh in applying it to “the community of science” today. But I think the danger Haberer identifies is still present. He was speaking in a context of far more profound abuses of political power in the earlier twentieth century, but we are now discovering just how dismaying in its own way was the political context in which UK scientific advisers were trying to do their job. I and others are baffled by why chief scientists and scientific institutions seem to want to normalize that, or to resist suggestions that the system might need an overhaul. It seems to me they can only gain, both in influence and in public standing, by being proactive and self-reflective in that capacity. No one else is going to (or can be trusted to) do that job for them.<br /><br />In any event, many thanks for your comments – and I hope we get the chance to chat about these things some day. <br /><br />Philip Ballnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5841910768079015534.post-17409631701021241502022-01-16T19:24:47.174+00:002022-01-16T19:24:47.174+00:00[Cont. 2/3] And when government officials were fir...[Cont. 2/3] And when government officials were first found to have violated lockdown rules – in the Cummings revelations in May 2020 – there is no serious doubt that the public needed to be told that this was not right, for the sake of compliance, trust and public health. To dismiss this as a matter of “politics” was quite wrong. To his credit, Jonathan Van-Tam seemed to recognize as much when, faced with that question at a later press briefing, he stressed that the rules applied to everyone. That was all it needed, not a diatribe about Cummings. Again, the chief scientists should never have been placed in that position – but sadly, that’s what happened, and I don’t think they responded as they should have done. So when you say that the role of scientific advisers is “to help ensure that policies are based on the best scientific evidence [and ] where there is a failure to adhere to policies, it’s the job of the police [if only!], politicians and the media to hold people to account”, I think that doesn’t quite cover it. When there are public-health implications, I think the scientists have to get involved – not necessarily to condemn, but to clarify. <br /><br />The endless revelations now about parties, not to mention the suggestions from some politicians that future restrictions should not be so tight and even that lockdowns should be made illegal, could make it virtually impossible for future governments to impose lockdowns if a more lethal new variant were to arise. Is it right that scientists should just cross their fingers that this won’t happen, or should they respond to such developments now by making it clear what the pros and cons of lockdowns and restrictions have proved to be, and robustly stand up for the need to retain that final measure? When political actions constrain future scientific advice or undermine current advice, it becomes a scientific issue. <br /><br />And there have been examples of egregiously bad policy or management that called for more forceful clarifications from the scientists. The decision to send schools back for a single day at the height of the lethal second wave in the new year of 2021 was one such: a quite staggering mistake. And I don’t feel scientists should be as relaxed as they seem about the political abusing of the vaccine rollout, which has been falsely used to claim that we couldn’t have done it without Brexit. <br /><br />I did not criticize Whitty for being too timid in pushing back on Johnson’s eagerness to encourage Christmas parties in December 2021. Rather, I pointed out that even Whitty’s very mild response was seized on by opponents of restrictions and used to accuse him of being “undemocratic” or some such – in other words, this was a sign of how emboldened some have become in challenging the right of scientific advisers to do anything other than slavishly back up what the politicians say. It is a warning we need to heed. I was glad that Whitty said at least this much (although I think he could have gone even further).<br />Philip Ballnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5841910768079015534.post-10100015918843935132022-01-16T19:23:22.475+00:002022-01-16T19:23:22.475+00:00I’m pleased to see your response to my article, Do...I’m pleased to see your response to my article, Dorothy. I have always found your comments on the pandemic (and much else) helpful and constructive, and I am glad to see my piece getting this discussion going. I don’t want my own response here to seem like a “You said… No, you said…” argument – in fact I welcome the chance to clarify some of the issues I raised, and I don’t think we disagree as much as you might have imagined.<br /><br />You rightly point out that much was not known in the early days of the pandemic, and that it would be unreasonable to criticise scientists for getting some things wrong in their advice. I totally agree. It’s important to acknowledge that mistakes were made, but I don’t think that at any point in my piece I was criticizing errors of scientific judgement. Well, maybe just in terms of Harries, whose statements on masks and WHO advice had no grounds and were strongly criticized by Farrar himself. I’m not sure I could see how anyone could defend the latter in particular, even at the time.<br /><br />What dismays me is not that the “herd immunity” approach was so wrong, but that there does not seem to be either proper reflection about why it was adopted, or efforts to correct misstatements about that from ministers such as Patel and Hancock (and from Harries herself). It seems clear from Farrar’s book that their claims are not supported by the evidence, but I think the scientists involved in making that mistaken decision have now a responsibility to stand up and say “No, actually herd immunity was a key aspect of our original strategy.” Farrar does say essentially that in his book, and explains that Vallance probably regrets the way he advocated the herd-immunity goal initially. But this could have been said much earlier, when ministers were making misleading statements. <br /><br />But my key point here is that it is not enough for the scientific advisers and advisory groups to be saying “Ah, we called that one wrong.” They surely have to ask themselves how they ended up with an initial policy that not only conflicted with much international opinion at the time, but which even at the time was patently flawed (as Farrar told me in the summer of 2020, we really knew nothing about immunity to the virus, and so could not have plausibly made it a target) and which, most of all, led in precisely the direction that a libertarian and exceptionalist government would have wanted. They must surely ask themselves if there was inadvertent collusion. They should ask if it was proper that lockdowns were not considered or modelled at an early stage, even though they were being implemented elsewhere, simply because this did not seem to be a policy option on the table – and why Sage did not push harder for them until a very late stage.<br /><br />You say you have not seen ministers and senior politicians making claims that were wildly wrong. But what about the example I give of Rees Mogg on masks? If scientific advisors can’t stand up and correct that sort of thing, or criticize the politicized refusal of Tory MPs to wear masks even while they debate their reintroduction, surely something is amiss?<br /><br />You say that it isn’t reasonable to expect advisors to openly criticize bad policy when there’s no consensus about what is a good policy. That’s an entirely fair point. But it’s not what I was calling for, I think. There is no serious doubt, and was not at the time, that it was a bad policy for the prime minister to be shaking hands with everyone in a hospital containing Covid patients in March 2020. It is outrageous that such idiotic behaviour put Vallance and Whitty on the spot. But that’s the job they signed up for, and they needed to be able to say “Well actually prime minister, we are strongly advising people not to do that now…”. That would have better served the interests of public health. They didn’t have to say “For God’s sake man, what were you thinking?!”<br /><br />[More to follow, but I'm at my character limit now...]<br /><br />Philip Ballnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5841910768079015534.post-85669687878955269482022-01-16T13:44:05.011+00:002022-01-16T13:44:05.011+00:00I live in Canada where health is a provincial resp...I live in Canada where health is a provincial responsibility so I get to watch the antics of 13 provincial/territorial governments and their (long-suffering?) Chief Medical Officers of Health. <br /><br />As in the UK, the Chief Medical Officers of Health do not publicly disagree with their premiers. It does not seem to me to be their responsibility to do so. They are civil servants.It is not their job to spread panic and dissension in public. If the CMOHs disagree with Gov't policy they should resign. Then complain. Personally I think some should but anyway…. <br /><br />In my own province of Ontario we do have an outside advisory committee to the Gov't on and members there have been known to imply that the premier is a blundering idiot.<br />jrkrideauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04869979887929067657noreply@blogger.com