There was a good letter in the Telegraph today co-signed by Lockdown Sceptics contributor David Campbell and his colleague Kevin Dowd. It was a pithy summary of a piece they co-authored for Spectator Australia earlier this month.
SIR – Matt Ridleys criticism (Comment, June 21st) of the distorted presentation of scientific predictions in order for those predictions to have political impact identifies the worst feature of current public policymaking.
Amazingly, however, in the case of Covid policymaking his criticism is insufficient. The crucial prediction was that of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, which said that 510,000 deaths would occur in the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour. This was misleading in the extreme, for there was absolutely no possibility that the outbreak of this disease would not be met by widespread spontaneous changes in behaviour, or that the Government would not take extensive measures to support them.
The world has been turned upside-down by an absurd, alarmist prediction of what was always a zero-probability event, as it was this prediction which panicked the Government into adopting a suppression policy.
Professor David Campbell
Lancaster University Law School
Professor Kevin Dowd
Durham University Business School
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