In the Telegraph, Professor Sir John Edmunds, an adviser to the advisers during the Covid pandemic, discusses the Government’s response and expresses regret for not putting more effort into modelling the economic impact of lockdowns. Here’s an excerpt:
If asking someone how their pandemic was is a bit like asking “How was your war?”, it’s fair to say Sir John had a strange one. He is a modest sort – a scientist, not a natural talking head – but in 2020, he quickly became a kind of unlikely spokesman for science, regularly appearing on television and radio to give his take on the latest policy changes. He irritated ministers who felt he was using media appearances to push an agenda; that agenda appeared to change with the wind.
In an early interview with Channel 4 News on March 13th, he went head-to-head with Silicon Valley executive Tomas Pueyo who had modelled the virus’s spread and was calling for urgent lockdowns. Pueyo held his head in his hands as Sir John told presenter Cathy Newman: “The only way to stop this epidemic is indeed to achieve herd immunity.”
There were two possible strategies, he said at the time. “One: you can stamp out every single case in the world. Every single case in the world. And then, then you’re free. You can stop that epidemic without achieving herd immunity, but you must get every single case in the world. With a mild disease, that’s extremely difficult.
“The next phase when the genie is out of the bottle and the virus is all around the world, is spreading. The next phase, the only other way the virus is going to come to a stop, is achieving herd immunity.”
When, later on, he lobbied for stricter lockdowns, he was deemed a flip flopping hypocrite. He was vehemently against Rishi Sunak’s “spectacularly stupid” Eat Out to Help Out scheme, and called for lockdown to be extended in the summer of 2020. Britain was “taking a risk” while cases were still high. Meanwhile the Government, he says, couldn’t settle on a sensible strategy to get us out of lockdown. “The big mistakes were made in the summer. That failure to come up with a proper strategy and understand it.”
In early 2021, he warned that easing the third lockdown would be a “disaster”. Perhaps hindsight is a wonderful thing then – last May, he appeared to tell a medical conference of his worry that Britain had relied too heavily on “very scary” Sage findings. He wondered if the knock-on health effects and economic harm done by lockdowns could “in principle” have been taken into account when modelling. “In practice they were not,” he said. “The epidemiological model is only one component [of decision-making]. And I worried that we’d had too much weight.” …
Easing restrictions that summer made perfect sense, he says. “That was the other horrendous alternative – to stay in lockdown forever. I didn’t ever think that was feasible or advisable. So I think yes, we did have to ease those restrictions.”
But Eat Out to Help Out was a bridge too far. “That was actually spending Government money, and a lot of it – the best part of a billion pounds – actually stimulating the epidemic. For me that was absolutely obscene.” The scientists “had no sight of” Eat Out to Help Out before it was announced. “That was a shock to everybody, I think.”
Looking back, he regrets not putting more into modelling the potential impact of lockdowns. “I should have put more resources into modelling the macroeconomic effect. This was actually outside our official remit, though we did undertake some work in the area despite this and despite the enormous difficulties in linking epidemiological and macroeconomic models.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
‘In good King Charles’ golden time, when loyalty no harm meant,
A zealous high churchman was I, and so I gained preferment.
To teach my flock, I never missed: Kings are by God appointed
And damned are those who dare resist or touch the Lord’s annointed.
Chorus
And this be law, that I’ll maintain until my dying day, sir
That whatsoever king may reign, Still I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, sir.’
When George in pudding time came o’er, and moderate men looked big, sir
My principles I changed once more, and I became a Whig, sir.
And thus preferment I procured From our new Faith’s Defender,
And almost every day abjured the Pope and the Pretender.
Chorus
To the tune of Good King Wenceslaus?
The economy wasn’t the only downside of lockdowns, the NHS became the covid hs and all other illness took a back seat, now we are paying the price.
I’m no academic but I realised the outcomes of ignoring all other medical problems,
Why didn’t they?
There were plenty of people like Hitchens, Bev Turner pointing these effects out. These are technocrats and they must never have so much unaccountable power ever again. I will resist even if it means being in some modern Gulag.
RESIST DEFY DO NOT COMPLY!!
You realised this because you were Not an academic.
For the same reason they ignore the horrendous cost of and misery caused by Net Zero. ———-Agenda trumping common sense.
Trouble with common sense is……
It isn’t common enough
Expert in virology. immunology and vaccinology – sorry – gene therapy mRNA jabs as well.
Never forget – this man wanted every school child jabbed.
Never forgive, never forget.
He’s still not said precisely why he considers the likes of Prof. Carl Heneghan ignorant (and that’s putting it politely) as regards epidemeology,
I know who I’d rather believe..
For f*cks sake, you don’t need to use models to understand that locking an entire population in their homes for months on end, time and time again was going to have devastating consequences – not just economical but in every way imaginable. That, of course, was the objective. If you still fail to understand that then you’re an absolute moron.
But you need a model to understand that flattening the curve extends the time taken by an epidemic and reduces acquired immunity so that when you go back to normal you just get another wave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4kWbYlopN4
Professor Sir Nincompoop John couldn’t even see there was no pandemic? Really?
Talk about flogging a dead horse – for crying out loud.
As guilty now as he was then. Disgusting
Piers Corbyn challenges Islington Council on climate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be9FUnYDVYs
Corbyn has been on this for decades. ——But it is much easier than people imagine to challenge authorities on “climate”—-Mainly because virtually nothing they say is true or at best it is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency with no evidence.
He didn’t seem to be getting through to the Council in the video, they just repeated the ‘narrative’ ignoring everything he said, just like with Andrew Bridgen.
Funny. He says that like “Oops, looks like no one thought about this… completely fell off the radar. No one could have seen it coming…” When in actual fact you were censoring people and using the state’s power to persecute them for demanding that you carry out a cost-benefit analysis…
Meeeow
Don’t be a Kitty killer!
“Looking back, he regrets not putting more into modelling the potential impact of lockdowns. “I should have put more resources into modelling the macroeconomic effect. This was actually outside our official remit, though we did undertake some work in the area despite this and despite the enormous difficulties in linking epidemiological and macroeconomic models.”
All he needed to do was ask if he could borrow the postage stamp I wrote my calculations on the back of.
There was no pandemic.
Spending government money on economic subsidies supposed to counter the effects of the insane crusade of economic and social destruction Corona’s witnesses had inflicted on Great Britain was obviously completely obscene — imagine all the damage done for nought when it afterwards just can be healed!
Emotionally, there’s something I’d really like to do with this guy and a lamp post. He’s obviously wicked and stupid beyond redemption and thus, can only be used as warning for others.
Wicked, stupid …… and paid.
Probably. But until this can be proven, it’s best to take these people at face value. This man is responsible for untold harms done to his fellow countrymen using a sexed-up cold virus as pretext, something he’s certainly been aware of since before the great pandemic circus started and he’d do it all again tomorrow if there was a chance of it. He flip-flopped from Let’s handle this in a sensible way to Everybody keep calm and run away screaming muffledly behind a face mask! back to Maybe sensible wasn’t so bad after all, now that question are being asked and he’ll certainly flip-flop in the other direction again. This is a guy without conscience or a shadow of personal integrity, ie, he’s wicked. And he thinks he will get away by paying lip services in polished words to whatever seems most useful to him at the moment. And I think that’s stupid. At least, I very much hope it’ll turned out to be so.
If you dislike his principles, that’s okay, he has plenty of others to apply!
Sorry but this man was one of the very worst. A criminal, to my mind. A hundred adjectives come to mind. A disgrace to his profession.
And when TPTB decide to lockdown again next time because disease/climate/war/[insert other spurious reason here] fits The Current Narrative™ he’ll still be all over it like an MRNA jab-induced rash…
Typical of his mind set. We have found a central, government scheme did not work very well. Answer: more government.
Astonishing.
It seems to me that academics like Sir John have their heads so far up their backsides they can’t see the wood for the trees.
Did he acknowledge that 5 days before the first lockdown was imposed, the Government – on the advice of its Scientists – downgraded Covid from a High Consequence Infectious Disease because they knew it had low mortality rates and they knew it was only the very elderly/frail who were at serious risk?
Or has he conveniently forgotten that?
As far as I’m concerned, he’s one of the Guilty Men and should be in a Nuremberg-style Court.
They lowered it from a HCID so they didn’t have to make repurposed drugs available like HCQ. Therefore Lockdown and vaccine was the engineered path it seems.
And no mention of Sweden and how they managed to handle the so called pandemic with almost no societal consequences; a pandemic by the way with a IFR marginally worse than seasonal flu!
I read that actual flu is worse the younger you are. compared to C19.
Even if the economic outcome was modelled it would almost certainly have been wrong anyway. But economics isn’t the job of scientists in the first place. Modelling is one of the worst developments in science. It allows decisions to be made politically and economically all based on assumptions and speculations about the future put into models and then for those making those decisions to claim when it all turns out bad, they were only “Following the Science”—–No I am sorry but modelling is NOT science——–Net Zero and Covid Lockdowns are two of the best examples. —-Scientists need to stick to what they know and freely admit what they don’t know. But the lure of funding and job creation tips the balance in favour of guesses rather than knowledge.
You didn’t take any account of the economic cost, nor the social cost!