Day: 20 April 2020

Terrible news in this morning's Sun: pubs won't re-open until Christmas. More bad news elsewhere: according to the Times, Boris is cautious about easing the lockdown, with his "overriding concern" being to avoid a second wave of infections. (The Mail has its version of the story here.) Does this mean Professor Neil Ferguson's proposal for "intermittent social distancing", whereby we relax some of the restrictions in short time windows, then reimpose them when case numbers rebound, has been rejected? That was put forward in Ferguson's March 16th paper as the only viable alternative to leaving the lockdown in place until a vaccine becomes available. Bad news on that front, too. On Saturday all the papers got excited about the fact that a vaccine might be available by September – Sarah Gilbert, Oxford's Professor of Vaccinology, announced she was "80% confident" it would be work – and trials are about to get underway. But yesterday Sir Patrick Vallance poured cold water on that idea, pointing out that no vaccine can be approved until we know it's completely safe. In an article for the Guardian he writes: “A vaccine has to work, but it also has to be safe. If a vaccine is to be given to billions of people, many of whom may be at a low risk from COVID-19, the vaccine ...

This is an early version of a paper that was published in an academic journal in 2003, but it's behind a paywall and one of its authors, Professor David Campbell, has given me permission to publish it here. David is a Professor of Law at Lancaster University Law School and this paper is a detailed critique of the Labour Government's response to the foot and mouth disease epidemic in 2001. Why is that relevant? Because the Government's response in 2001 was informed by statistical modelling done by a team at Imperial College that was led by Professor Neil Ferguson, among others. Imperial's apocalyptic predictions led to more than six million cattle, sheep and pigs being slaughtered, with an estimated cost to the UK economy of £9 billion.