In everyday life, it only makes sense to initiate a new action if we are reasonably confident it will not result in more harms than benefits. The importance of this notion is amplified manyfold when it is powerful actors – politicians and their public health experts – forcing the change on their citizens. The precautionary principle (PP) in its original form endorsed this important rule and complemented the Hippocratic oath of our medical doctors to ‘first do no harm’. Yet throughout the Covid event we have witnessed a total disregard for this principle with the imposition of a series of non-evidenced restrictions, driven more by ideology than science, where the resulting collateral damage has dwarfed any benefits. One stark example – the focus of this article – has been the forced masking of people in community settings, a practice that continues in many areas of healthcare today.
The precautionary principle initially emerged in the 1970s primarily in response to growing concerns about industrial pollution from toxic chemicals. The central premise was a reasonable one: in situations of uncertainty, innovation – such as the introduction of a novel process or intervention – should only proceed if there was no reasonable likelihood of serious unforeseen harms. In effect, in situations where traditional science had not yet investigated the potential for collateral damage from a new way of doing things, the PP put the burden of proof on the innovators to demonstrate that their novel project would not cause harm. If applied to the specific issue of mass-masking during the Covid era, the experts at SAGE (and all the other multi-disciplinary groups, such as the Royal Society, Independent SAGE and DELVE, who pushed for legislation to compel us all to cover our faces) should have produced persuasive evidence that masks do no harm before making their recommendations.
Instead, those pushing the pro-mask narrative often resorted to tropes and appeals to common sense: “It’s only a mask”; “It’s not much to ask, a small inconvenience”; “If it helps a little at the margins, it’s worth it”; “What harm can it do?”
In early summer 2020, our public health experts would have recognised the validity of two assertions. First, that the scientific evidence that masks significantly reduce viral transmission was – at best – weak and contradictory. Second, that the mass-masking of healthy people across the Western world had never before been undertaken and, therefore, the potential unintended harms of such a policy were largely unknown. Under these circumstances, the original PP would have emphatically advised, “when in doubt, do nothing“: do not encourage or recommend the wearing of masks, and – most definitely – do not even contemplate mandating them.
If only, if only.
If only our public health experts had heeded this sensible precautionary message:
- We would not have stunted the social and emotional development of countless numbers of our young children, many being rendered unable to recognise facial expressions;
- We would not have contributed to the inflated levels of fear in the population, fear that discouraged hospital attendances, exacerbated loneliness, and thereby increased the number of non-Covid excess deaths;
- We would not have re-traumatised many victims of historical physical and sexual abuse, for whom the sight and feel of masks triggered disturbing flashbacks;
- We would not have excluded the hard-of-hearing (one in six of the population) from full social engagement with their fellow humans;
- We would not have polluted our environment with swathes of non-recyclable plastic and contaminated our waterways with potentially poisonous chemicals.
So why did Professor Chris Whitty (the Chief Medical Officer) and his band of academic advisors disregard the precautionary principle?
Paradoxically, the experts who pushed the pro-mask narrative often deployed a corrupted version of the PP to justify their stance. Over the past three decades, the PP concept has evolved – some might suggest it has been hijacked – and is now commonly taken to mean something very different. The re-writing of the PP gained impetus in 1992 at a United Nations General Assembly meeting where global leaders asserted (Principle 15) that: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” Further re-interpretations of the PP followed, culminating in the European Commission, in 2022, espousing the benefits of adopting the “Innovation Principle” in which “the regulatory framework supports and enables the implementation of new out-of-the-box solutions to societal problems”. This revision of the original PP has – inevitably – encroached into the public health sphere, where large pharmaceutical companies welcome the freedom to deliver their ‘innovative’ new drugs to the general population unencumbered by a pre-requisite to demonstrate that their products will lead to more benefits than harms.
The major consequence of this corruption of the PP is this: if powerful, state-funded world ‘experts’ assert that we are facing an existential threat – be it from climate change, environmental pollution or a novel virus – their recommended interventions should be implemented unless opponents of the proposed actions can prove that the likely collateral damage will significantly outweigh the claimed positive outcomes. The burden of proof no longer resides with the innovators. World governments can now impose top-down restrictions on their citizens and (so long as they claim to be acting for ‘the greater good’ or be doing the ‘socially responsible’ thing) the onus is on others to prove beyond doubt that their policies are counterproductive.
Throughout the Covid event those experts beseeching us all to wear face coverings have often relied, to various degrees, upon this warped version of the PP to support their stance. Arguably the most extreme example of an ideologically-driven imposition is pro-mask crusader Professor Trish Greenhalgh, who not only pre-emptively assumes no harms of mass-masking, but also believes that the search for evidence may be “the enemy of good policy”.
So rather than the obligation to carry out a thorough cost-benefit analysis prior to compelling us all to wear masks in community settings, our paternalistic policymakers were – with the help of the corrupted precautionary principle – allowed to fob us off with dubious claims of an existential threat, appeals to altruism and meaningless platitudes like “it’s better to be safe than sorry”.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and a co-founder of Smile Free, a campaign group opposed to mask mandates.
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Par for the course from a load of professional arse-sitters, spouters and generalised planet savers, educated in subjects specialising in the latest fashionable drivel.
Incapable of doing a real job, a serious day’s work or understanding the principles of physics.
Keep up the good work, Mr Pile. In the long run, physics will prevail over fallacy and folly. Just a matter of when.
Reading your comment Art, it just occurred to me that Rayner is emblematic of the malaise afflicting our ‘governing’ party. Your three points in order: 1. She isn’t educated at all. 2.She’s never tried a ‘real job’ having been steeped in Trade Union lore prior to local government, then politics. 3.I doubt she could spell physics. ‘Room for improvement.’ as her end of term report might read would be a colossal understatement.
Ms Nobrayner is a bit of an outlier among the spouting classes. Having said that, anecdotally the two working people currently re-roofing our house have worked it all out for themselves. Work doesn’t get much more real, or educational, than being up on a roof at 8.15 in a cold, frosty February sunrise.
Been there, got the tee-shirt. Re-roofed our 8m x 5m barn in Yorkshire 40 years ago. Nothing like jumping in at the deep end. Never again!
I am not convinced it has much to do with understanding of physics. I know little about physics. There are useful idiots who find comfort in the religion of signalling their virtue, and there are others who just want to lord it over everybody and have cottoned on to “climate change” (or “pandemics”) as a good way to do that.
You know more about physics than you give yourself credit for. Less about O- and A-levels, more about grasping reality. Most career politicians don’t get that – witness Miliband (who has a physics A-level…).
Agreed on motivations – in my experience, one half of people revel in telling the other half what to do. The other half just wants both halves to work it out for themselves. Controllers vs responders, chalk and cheese mindsets.
Each to their own, live and let live. You see what you see, I see what I see, best we can do is each say what we’ve seen and discuss from there.
Some people seem to want to be told what to do.
As far as physics goes, I think it’s a case of doublethink or “there’s none so deaf as those that refuse to listen”.
Oh, I expect you’re right for too many of the people too much of the time. Bring up Feynman and Popper and watch eyes glaze over. Cue Dietrich Boenhoeffer on stupidity…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
“…Against stupidity we are defenceless. The stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”
I don’t think using the word “stupidity” in that way is overly useful. I think most people understand “stupid” in the sense of being intellectually challenged, inarticulate, incapable of higher order reasoning. If “stupid” people “go on the attack” then they are malicious. I know malicious stupid people and highly moral ones.
Let’s not get too hung up on a single word. I’m assuming Boenhoeffer used it in good faith in the circumstance of the time he was up against.
I’m sure he was wiser and certainly more courageous than I am.
We’re now fully in the grip of a socialist, central planning regime.
It’s been advancing for 100 years but now all the major and essential elements of our economy are for all intents and purposes centrally planned.
The remaining pockets of free market are in small enterprises. Sandwich shops, bits of the tech industry, basically the scraps.
Indeed. If memory of O-level history serves right, all those canals, railways and Victorian sewers had little to do with the governments of the time, and everything to do with men with spades and civil engineers of genius.
Credit where credit’s due, government did rule the waves, abolish slavery and foster civil engineering on foreign soil (but gets little historic thanks for it from present day arse-sitting and spouting classes).
Basically all the bits that are being forced out of business by the blob/govt.
You could mage an argument that the last 50 years or so of history have all been ‘about oil’. As one philosopher proposed ‘things’ change into their opposites over time… so perhaps the current history being formed is about ‘fake oil’. Oil you don’t extract and use to fuel (pun) the economy and standard of living.
Can we borrow Elon Musk
What happens in America never stays in America.
A large number of exceptionally fat backsides in the climate change/green energy taxpayer rip off business will be emaciated shadows of their former selves by 2015….
Bring it on.
Government Hates Wealth Creation
This one does – but of course they do, because they are socialists.
Socialism leads to denial of reality, poverty, economic collapse, totalitarianism, famine and death. History abounds with examples.
Socialism. Always. Fails.
“Labour’s manifesto promise to “create new high-quality jobs, working with business and trade unions, as we manage the transition””
Do governments create jobs? Don’t “jobs” arise because people want their needs fulfilled? Didn’t people do work thousands of years before we had “governments”?
Government create non-jobs that the private sector won’t because they see no value in them. The secret of the success of Donald and Elon is that they are successful businessmen and understand value for money. Governments can destroy jobs and 100 days on from the worst budget in history from probably our worst Chancellor this one is doing just that. With inflation about to rise again after the brief blip in December, the Bank of England has been forced to gamble in reducing the interest rate to prop up the failing economy. I see far too much optimism in rate reductions for this year. And don’t expect to see your mortgage rate come down as they are driven by 10 year bond rates.
100%
Yesterday is a good illustration of the variability of renewable power. At the start of the day wind was producing 14GW, by the following midnight it had dropped to just 4GW. Try coping for that sort of variation without reliable, dispatchable energy
January is obviously a critcal month in UK. The percentage graph from Gridwatch shows nuclear as grey, gas as dull orange and wind as pale blue.
PS You can see how pathetic solar is by the little flashes of yellow where the sun broke through.
It’s worth mentioning that the chart is %age of power generated. The nuclear power generated does not peak each night – it continues at the same level of power but represents a larger percentage because less is generated/required overnight.
On the other hand, solar…
Right now CCGT (gas turbines) contributing 54.46% towards our 42.91 GW demand today in spite of a glorious clear sunny February day in East Yorkshire (solar 6.43%).
Only slightly on topic, I fell about laughing this morning watching the article about vegan pets on GBNews. The woman from PETA (not British by the way), said that vegan foods for dogs is readily available, nutritious and reduces your dog’s carbon footprint. She then held up a tin consisting mainly of jack fruit. This comes from tropical countries, so massive food miles and carbon footprint and costs about £3.00 per 400g tin. Pedigree chum costs £1.00 per tin. What planet do these idiots come from?
You’re so right. And did you see the item on dog meat ‘made in the lab’ (for the lab??) guaranteed to reduce your dog’s carbon footprint!