Of all the crass misappropriations of scientific principles during the pandemic, none did more harm than the corruption of the ‘precautionary principle’ — the notion that an action or an intervention is justified only once one is clear that the benefits exceed the harms and that, as one sociologist put it, “you have looked very hard for the harms”.
That principle came to be almost wholly inverted in the context of the pandemic: an intervention seemingly could be justified on the ‘precautionary’ basis that if it might have any beneficial effect in slowing the course of the pandemic, it would be worthwhile. This justified indiscriminate measures ranging from universal masking, mass testing (including of young children), 14-day isolated quarantines and even lockdown itself for entire healthy populations, on the basis that even though the evidence base was often weak or non-existent, the intervention just might achieve something, and opened the door to a slew of harms impacting almost all cohorts of the British population.
It was to be hoped that a core task for the Covid Inquiry in this key Module 2 would have been a dispassionate objective assessment of whether the costs (financial costs, direct harms, probable indirect harms, risk of unquantified future harms) of the Government’s population-wide interventions outweighed possible benefits. So, it was deeply disappointing last week to see not only key witnesses but the inquiry Chair herself repeat the same dangerous misconception of the precautionary principle.
In one of the most jaw-dropping interjections of the inquiry to date, Baroness Hallett revealed a prejudgement that if masking people could have had even the slightest of benefits, and seemingly without even contemplating that risks and known harms might need to be weighed too, she pressed Sir Peter Horby, an esteemed epidemiologist at Oxford University, who had indicated that he believed universal masking was not a straightforward decision: “I’m sorry, I’m not following, Sir Peter. If there’s a possible benefit, what’s the downside?”
Coming from the independent Chair of a public inquiry, this is an astonishing comment. It betrays a presumption, or at the very least a predisposition, to accept that it was better to act than not to act — the reverse of the precautionary principle. When a comment such as this, from the Chair of the Inquiry, goes unchallenged, it risks anchoring the entire frame of reference for the inquiry’s interrogation of this critical topic. In our view it was a surprising and serious error of judgement for an experienced Court of Appeal judge.
What made Baroness Hallett feel this to be an appropriate thing to think, let alone say out loud? We suggest the issue lies in the fact that the Chair and the official counsel to the inquiry seem already to have the storyline of the pandemic wrapped up.
The inquiry’s counsel has been at pains to paint a picture of the country facing an almost existential threat from the virus. From the outset, counsel has framed his questioning on the basis that it was indisputable a “highly dangerous fatal viral outbreak was surely coming”, and “by February this viral, severe pandemic, this viral pathogenic outbreak is coming, and it can’t be stopped”. Even hardened lawyers and epidemiologists, it has seemed, were bunkering down because “the virus was coming, it was a fatal pathogenic disease”.
And, with the precautionary principle inverted in the collective mind of this inquiry, almost anything the Government then did against that backdrop was justified.
With preference…
Worse still, it is now starkly evident that the witnesses whose opinions and perspectives support that proposition are being overtly praised and pedestaled, while those whose opinions and perspectives might cast doubt are treated with prejudice and hostility.
For those witnesses who were part of the ‘home team’ — Government-appointed advisers, and those who have already publicly ascribed to the inquiry’s apparently favoured storyline — impeccable credentials and impartiality have been assumed.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, for example, former Director of the Wellcome Trust, member of SAGE and currently Chief Scientist at the WHO gave oral evidence to the inquiry in June. One can almost picture counsel for the inquiry scattering rose petals as he sums up Farrar’s illustrious credentials:
You trained, I believe, in medicine, with postgraduate training in London, Chichester, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Oxford and San Francisco. You have a DPhil PhD from the University of Oxford. You were a director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Institute at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam from 1996 to 2013. From 2013 you were Director of the Wellcome Trust, and from May 2023 have you been the Chief Scientist at the World Health Organisation? Have you throughout your professional career served as a chair on a multitude of advisory bodies, for governments and global organisations? Have you received a plethora of honours from a number of governments, institutes and entities?
Farrar is then treated to counsel’s softest underarm bowls and allowed to give unchallenged testimony in favour of an intervention-heavy approach to pandemic management: “when you have the countermeasures you’re talking about, diagnostic tests, treatment and vaccines, together they create a Swiss cheese model of what our public health is”.
Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, and chief architect of the dramatic scientific modelling on which the global lockdown response was predicated, was warmly welcomed to the witness box by counsel last week “as a world leading specialist in this field”, and was later thanked profusely for his hard work by Baroness Hallett: “Thank you very much for all the work that you did during the pandemic.”
Gushing perhaps, but nothing compared to the farewell given to SAGE modeller Professor John Edmunds, who had been affirmed upfront by counsel as, “a de facto expert in epidemiology”, and one of “a number of brilliant scientists and advisers who assisted the Government and the country in the remarkable way that you did”. At the end of his evidence, Baroness Hallett delivered the eulogy:
Thank you very much indeed. If I may say so, professor, I think you were unduly harsh on yourself this morning. You had a job, and you described it yourself, your job was to provide expert advice to the policy and decision-makers, and if the system is working properly that advice is relayed to them, then they consider advice coming from other quarters about economics and social consequences and the like. I’m not sure you could have done more than you did, consistent with your role at the time, but you obviously did as much as you felt was appropriate. So I’m really grateful to you, I’m sure we all are.
This is a far departure from the rigorous testing of credentials and potential conflicts that one could expect as an expert witness in any court proceedings, and of the studious impartiality of the presiding judge. It is certainly far short of what the public should rightly expect for an exercise set to spend over £55m on lawyers alone.
None of these witnesses were asked whether their senior positions within organisations that rely on very valuable relationships with global pharmaceutical groups and private pharma-focused organisations could have had any bearing on their advice at the time or their evidence to the inquiry now.
Farrar was director of the Wellcome Trust throughout the pandemic. The Wellcome Trust is one of the institutions behind CEPI, a global vaccine development fund created in 2015 which partners with vaccine manufacturers, including Moderna. During the pandemic Farrar frequently and vocally promoted his view that vaccines would be the means for us to exit the pandemic. He is plainly someone whose professional success and credibility has become indelibly attached to the pharmaceutical industry and in particular the use of pharmaceutical interventions in public health, yet counsel and the inquiry Chair seemed uninterested in that colouring of Farrar’s evidence.
Likewise, Ferguson, of Imperial College London was not asked a single question about potential conflicts or risk of bias. Again, the inquiry seemed unaware, or at least uninterested, that a month after Ferguson’s seismic March 2020 paper had concluded that “epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time” and that “the major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available”, it was reported that Imperial College had received £22.5 million in funding from the U.K. Government for vaccine research and development; and that in that same year, 2020, Imperial received at least $108 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).
BMGF is a private philanthropic organisation which has been open about its ideological commitment to vaccine-based solutions for global health issues and which itself has very significant financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
…and with prejudice
For witnesses such as Professor Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, but not a member of SAGE, and (unhelpfully for the inquiry) not an enthusiastic supporter of lockdowns, the inquiry appeared to have made somewhat less glowing presumptions:
You are a professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University. Could you explain what that discipline entails?
Heneghan’s explanation was swiftly followed with a presumptive conclusion as to the strength of his credentials:
As you know, because I think you have been following the inquiry, we have heard this week from a series of academics who have spent, in the main, their professional careers researching, analysing the spread of infectious diseases, developing models, to analyse how such diseases are spread and how they can be controlled, and considering large-scale public health issues relating to pandemic preparedness and so on. You don’t have a comparable type of expertise in this area, do you?
Not satisfied with having attempted his own disparagement of the man, counsel took the opportunity while having Heneghan in the witness box to ask for his perspective on two ‘home team’ scientists having described him in a private discussion as a “fuckwit” (Dame Angela McLean and Professor Edmunds) — to what ends, other than to rattle, rile or embarrass, was not clear. It was the cheapest shot of the inquiry so far.
During Heneghan’s evidence session, and having seemingly felt entirely comfortable to rely on the expert opinions of Farrar, Ferguson, Edmunds et al. — the ‘good guy’ home team scientists — Baroness Hallett gives short shrift to the notion that Professor Heneghan’s opinion might be relied upon. When talking about the broad scope of evidence-based medicine Heneghan explains that “even my opinion” amounts to evidence, Baroness Hallett retorted dismissively: “Not in my world it doesn’t, I’m afraid.”
Spoiler alert
Here’s what the inquiry is going to conclude, after three to seven years and perhaps £200 million: the Government and its official scientific advisers mostly did their best in the face of what they rightly and fairly believed to be the most devastating viral threat the world had ever seen; those scientists gave the best advice they could, and were entitled to assume that the Government was taking account of other factors; if it hadn’t been for Brexit, we would have been better prepared; the Government perhaps could have thought a bit more about the impact of lockdowns on the economy, but ultimately lockdowns were unavoidable; if it had all been done faster and harder, the U.K. might have come out in a better place, clinically and economically; the sacrifices imposed on children, the isolated and those who missed diagnoses and treatments, were regrettable but had to be done (the ‘precautionary principle’); if we could have saved one more person who died of Covid we should have done; the NHS did a superb job in difficult circumstances. Oh, and COVID-19 vaccines saved us so we should devote more public funds to partnerships with heroic pharmaceutical groups and irreproachable public scientists such as Jeremy Farrar at the WHO.
The inquiry is now hopelessly compromised by the partisan and presumptive words of its own Chair and leading lawyers which are setting us up for a doom-loop of catastrophic errors we cannot afford to repeat. It has become an embarrassment to the legal profession and is jeopardising the reputation of the English legal system. Its exorbitant costs already cannot be justified, and there is only worse to come. It should be abandoned.
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And the Entente thought that they had dismantled the Turkish empire in 1919.
Poor Germany. If only Britain had allowed Imperial Germany to achieve her aims in eastern Europe in 1914. Germany today would be socialist but without the stain of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust.
And the Entente thought that they had dismantled the Turkish empire in 1919.
They did, at least insofar the provinces mainly settled by Arabs were concerned. In the aftermath of the first world war, Greece made an attempt to reconquer traditionally Greek Asia Minor which ended in a military defeat while the Entente powers were watching from the sidelines. Afterwards, they engineered the first case of large-scale ethnic cleansing in modern times, driving large numbers of Greeks from their ancient homes in Anatolia and forcing equally large numbers of Turks to quite their homes in Europe in order to move to Anatolia instead.
BTW, imperial Germany never had any war aims beyond saving itself from combined French-Russian onslaught. Anything beyond that grew out of the war itself, eg, German eastward extension to lessen it’s vulnerabilty against remote-controlled famine aimed to starve the whole population (insofar possible). It’s estimated that about 700,000 Germans starved to death after hostilities had formally ceased because the remote-controlled famine was kept in place as political tool for peace negotations (among the Entente powers only, obviously, which needed time to agree on who was to get which parts of the spoils of war).
I’m questioning these achievements of the European Convention of Human Rights as well because it’s widely acknowledged that democractic countries exist (the insignificant minority of basically, all of them) where no one plans to extend the general franchise to all legally resident foreigners. I think what we’re really looking at here is a frantic attempt of the Red/Green coalition of anti-Germans to secure a second term in office by doctoring the electorate, in exact repetition of a similar and successful maneuvre of the last Red/Green coaltion of anti-Germans in office around the turn of the millenium.
Brecht being a lifelong communist, they’re obviously aware of his advice that the government ought to dissovle the population and elect a new one if the population has lost trust of the government, ie, if an incumbent government is reasonably certain of heading for a landslide defeat in an upcoming election. All true democrats agree that voters mustn’t be allowed to force democratic parties out of government in a democracy, that wouldn’t be democratic.
Democracy is very simple when you’re Saskia Esken or Max Lucks: Seize government by (cheap) false promises of everything to everyone. Once attained, plunder the people as hard as you can and employ every procedural trick at your disposal for this to continue for as long as humanly possible.
Indeed. It has worked well for the US Democrats.
And what is happening in the UK? Well, the muslims have realised that far from benefitting by handing their postal votes over to the Labour Party by the sack full they are being shafted just as badly as the indigenous population and have decided to set up their own political party and F. Labour.
Kneel can’t get his head round this treachery so democratic reforms will be essential once he reaches Downing St.
People whose everyday life is very much dominated by an alien (to us) religion and who categorically do not desire to integrate with mainstream Consume and be entertained!-society and who actually (very likely) consider a cornerstone of that, the contraceptives-fuelled merry (sex-blind) shagaround, morally deviant, have obviously no real common interests with so-called progressive political forces.
OTOH, that’s cold comfort. I still unfondly remember a drunk Turk (muslims only claim that they don’t drink) boasting in a pub in Mainz about 20 years ago how they (ie, the Turks) would now take over Germany because the post-1945 Germans who were all spineless creeps couldn’t possibly hinder them. That’s obviously true for people like Esken and Lucks but I don’t want to become a spear carrier in their rude awakening.
Here’s the Russian Reversal for the street marches recently organized by the Scholz goverment to ‘protest’ against the existence of opposition parties:
In America, you demonstrate government, in Soviet Russia, government demonstrates you.
I never cease to be amazed that left wing politiicans come up with these sweeping policies, and then have the temerity to be open-mouthed when someone decides to thoroughly take advantage of them instead of meekly playing by the rules. Do they not understand that people are cunning and duplicitous, and want to tilt the game in their favour..?
How interesting that the Turkish word “dava” means “litigation”. So it seems that, in addition to Erdogan vowing to conquer Europe with “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks and the faithful our army”, there is now “litigation”. I think he also said something about conquering with “the wombs of our women”, perfectly realistic considering that every Muslim man is legally allowed 4 wives and unlimited concubines (“war captives”). This fact is used as an incentive for recruiting western men. No one can say Wannabe Sultan Erdo hasn’t been clear about his intentions.
I have migled with Turkmen. I will say that in terms of educaton they are possibly one of thickest groups I have ever met but they can be an asset to a country in lots of other ways.
They must be very good at cutting hair. There are three Turkish barbers even in my little two horse town.
They’re extremely talented at ensuring that surplus taxes are consumed in form of social security payments as a Turkish family is invariably composed of a lot of people eligible for them who don’t work or work only very part-time in a family business. They also like prolonged public wedding ceremonies with seriously grating
musicnoise and – in case of more important families – long caravans of cars honking their horns while blocking the streets. This is technically illegal in Germany but that’s never enforced, due to the sheer impossiblity of doing so. One would need to to airlift one car after another by helicopter in order to get rid of the blockage.