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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One has to be lenient with these woke people. How should they know that unskilled labourers have to work in order to avoid starving, more so, when they even want to be able to pay for an education, and that this means taking jobs which are on offer? Or that the situation of 19th century factory workers was so bad and involved some much hard, physical labour that it was once suggested to enslave them out of clemency instead as factories owners would then have an economical interest in keeping them alive and healthy? They never had to work in all of their lives (and will never have to work) and their knowledge of history is restricted to what their leaders allow them to know, ie, only what supports the great, political cause.
I suspect that envy plays the major role in all this. People who have not been publicly noticed are attempting to glorify themselves by attacking those whose achievements have been rewarded with a statue – to be looked at by the public, to be noticed even after their deaths.
This is not moral indignation at work. It’s a particularly spiteful form of jealous attention-seeking, linked to breathtaking insensitivity to historical contexts.
Exactly
As a native of that city it saddens me this is occurring. I am at a loss as to how to stop these people.
There are a long list of people they have targeted, including James Watt and Robert Peel. Victoria and Albert must be next. Their equestrian statues are in George Square.
Yet all involved in the public sector entities that spawn this are cut from the same cloth as the SNP and green brigade. There is a fanaticism that seems difficult to penetrate.
Virtually no one opposes this either, which is perhaps saddest of all. Our national heritage written off as racist or not appropriate for the modern age. Judged by those with no comparable accomplishments as Livingstone or any of the rest our ancestors saw fit to commemorate.
What do we do?
Stop voting for the Party of Davos, would be the first thing.
Many of us don’t. It is often difficult to find anyone who does.
With respect, almost all voters do. Blue, red, green, yellow or orange, they’re all essentially the same. Regulars on this forum may be the exception but we’re not the rule.
I threw my vote away on the Scotch Libertarians last time, although I’m not even sure that it’s worthwhile bothering any more.
I know what you mean. I have opted for a few tiny parties with sensible ideas myself. But virtually everyone votes for one of the mainstream parties. I was meaning specifically it can be hard to find anyone admitting to voting for the SNP, although clearly many do.
Indeed Borgy.
I learnt a coarse, but perfect metaphor for the current political class of all spectra, from a friend in Texas….
The Uniparty, better known as two cheeks on the same arse.
When you see across the pond that 43% think Sleepy Joe is doing a good job you can only shake your head in disbelief.
And we can hardly criticise the financial shenanigans north of the border when all parties in Westminster take money from China & Russia & when we see Johnson employ a rabid remaining knee taking lobbyist for Huawei as his adviser.
Johnson has done nothing to stop the illegal immigration by dinghy while having the whole country under house arrest for 2 years, which is costing £5M a day. Continues to allow the Eu’s annexation of NI & still allows industrial fishing by Dutch fishermen in our waters. And who presently seems more concerned about Ukrainian independence than implementing what the UK voted for in 2016.
And yet he & his party will still receive support along with all the other corrupt parties in Westminster.
This is such a contradiction I wonder if it is the beginning of the end of cancel culture.
A good point. Many have always said the hard left would collapse as a consequence of internal contradictions. Perhaps it is more accurate to say this is the consequence of denying objective reality and indulging in subjective reality. If you can choose your sex you can choose to believe anything.
This isn’t the hard left – it’s an effete, metropolitial liberal-left which seems to have eclipsed all traditional left-wing influence over the past couple of decades.
Its proponents (who are mostly the Waitrose set) aren’t too bothered about a single parent living in some tower-block slum and trying to scrape a living on zero-hours contracts. What the liberal-left get het up about is the whole wokery agenda. They are constantly seeking more ways to take offence on behalf of somebody (or nobody, it really doesn’t matter!), so that they can engage in a good bout of virtue-signalling. As this story shows, their efforts in this line are becoming ever more extreme.
And ironically, although they are keen to push liberality in some areas, that absolutely does not extend to anyone who disagrees with them on anything, who will be treated with utter contempt and sidelined as much as possible.
We always hope, but when has doublethink been a problem?
or a way of distracting us?
Neo-Feudalism could be best defined as a stealthy form of slavery.
DISGUSTANG. He should have just claimed furlough benefits rather than actually doing any work for The Man.
I’m not sure it’s even that.
To me the behaviour is more akin to a riot. It is frenzied, irrational behaviour that keeps escalating and is out of control, fuelled primarily by anger, where the rioters don’t really know what they want or what they are really raging at. They have no clear conception of what they are trying to achieve. It’s just a purposeless expression of anger and discontent.
It needs to be handled like a riot. These people cannot be reasoned with or pacified in any gentle kind of way.
We either have to let them have their moment until they self destruct or it fizzles out.
Or it has to be dealt with with overwhelming force, which quite frankly I don’t see happening any time soon, but could happen if ordinary people got fed up enough.
I expect it will fizzle out but not before plenty more damage is done.
I agree. It is irrational. And it would need a strong force to stop it. Most seem indifferent. Who cares about a few statues?
But I also agree it is not sustainable. Destruction never is.
It’s more than just statues. There are historical precedents, where swathes of the population have succumbed to a form of hysteria. The circumstances now are, of course, different in precise details, but the underlying causes, as far as can be seen, are similar.
This mumbo-jumbo bollox has nothing to do with class war and everything to do with the wholesale destruction of a country and its history.
This is mind-bendingly ignorant and wilful; deepest, darkest malevolence.
i.e. classic Alinsky.
Let me get this right. Livingstone was a guy that campaigned forcefully AGAINST slavery and yet because he worked in a cotton mill at the age of 10 that was owned by someone complicit (but not directly involved) in the slave trade that his statue should be toppled and he should be cancelled? Seriously? Stop the f***ing world, I want to get off.
It’s better to get the others off. They just mindlessly imitate what’s also being done in America, hence, that’s good old US cultural imperialism. A particular destructive variant, as it’s basically De-nazification worked wonders for Germany, let’s apply it to some other bad guys we also really disapprove of.
Erasing the history of some country on the grounds that it’s irreparably contaminated because of A Really Bad Historical Event which was the logical outcome of all which happened before it, and replacing it with a cult of eternal inherited guilt is how the Germans were treated after 1945 (or really, after 1968, when the ancestors and (still) motors of the current woke generation first started to make public noises). About 35 years later, they actually came into power and could start to realize their political projects on a grand scale.
Unfortunately, their greatest political project so far – revive the 1918 flu pandemic by live-action role-playing – just acquired a new lease of life as Johnson (according to the Telegraph of today) again caved in to the Test! Test! Test! people and is planning to let them have their taxpayer-paid blackmailing kit yet longer, possibly forever.
By this reasoning, anyone in the UK who wore cotton between 1603 and 1838 was similarly linked to slavery. Women too. And LGBTQIA+. Oh dear.
Its war, us v them
wake up pussies
I look forward to the day that those responsible for the present day moral degeneracy, especially the effete libtards and mentally ill activists, with their endless denunciations, cancellations, and general idiocy, are themselves the subject of what will be a far more brutal and deserving backlash. They must pay for their monumental arrogance and the damage they have caused. They will be wiped out during the first wave of reprisals, with no mercy shown. I’ll laugh.
Dearie me. And ye thought it would stop with my statue being toppled. Most amusing are the actions of those who hath to invent new problems because thine lives be too easy.
It isn’t that their lives are too easy, there is a revolution to conduct and making certain imported people angry at the indigenous will help achieve their aims.
Soon enough, I fear, it will be noticed that Australia has a shameful history of white supremacists who invaded indigenous territories.
Those people used to be known as explorers.
Already happening. What’s fascinating in all this is that long-dead people are being made responsible for some genuine contemporary problems.
There are issues, in Australia as elsewhere, of disadvantage: of children denied fair access to a good education and good, reliable health care, by their circumstances.
Those issues are the responsibility of people living now, and they are complex responsibilities.
How can these issues be addressed without creating dependency and learned helplessness, without creating unnecessary bureaucracies and increasing state power?
We’re not even close to having a serious public conversation about this; because the issues are hijacked by virtue-signalling careerists who are flattered by governments which prefer lip service to addressing problems.
Are the sleepy masses starting to notice that they are being replaced by the third world yet?
Are they noticing how the imports are being taught to hate the indigenous by those in power?
What do you think the end game is?
I am noticing the first thin tendrils of awareness among my own control group, a kind of social barometer of average types I use to guage awareness of these things. It is there, but resisted.
Alas, as with covidmania, there is huge resistance to the notion anyone might be actively planning harm against us. Mistakes and incompetence, yes. Malevolence, no.
In recent times I’ve revisited essays and other works focusing on Nazi Germany. In particular the criticisms aimed at those who waited too long. Much of this has been airbrushed to support the Hollywood version of events, that the full horror of the Reich caught them unawares. The reality on the ground was different and slower. People cannot believe these things are happening. They continue to disbelieve even when being loaded on to the cattle carts, separated from their children. Those ignorant of history and doomed to repeat it.
But I have seen some surprising moments of awareness. In Glasgow, where the statue above is displayed, we see a growing army of sub Saharan Africans, many of them literally appearing in the last two years during a supposed pandemic. They are swiftly housed and set up. They are not dressed in rags. To be blunt, I’m shocked at how many I see in M&S foodhall. So much for being refugees. And I’m not alone in noticing this. It is not much but it is something.
I used to think that it was because solving real problems is hard. Its so much easier to solve long dead problems – “Apologies to executed witches” costs nothing, in money or effort. Much harder to find ways to help and support living people who need it. Looking forward and trying to make things better for everyone is an enormous task, probably impossible to achieve, failure is built in, and since we can’t be seen to fail, we should do something we can succeed at.
The ending of any great past injustice such as slavery can only have been on the backs of people who originally benefitted from it (since anyone with money or power must have benefitted in some way) who decided it was wrong and set about changing things. It certainly wasn’t ended by the slaves alone. It can’t have been. Britain led the way in ending slavery. When they go after Wilberforce, we’ll know.
When, in the second lockdown, my daughter’s school was doing slavery, They didn’t talk about Wilberforce and his like. She became so distressed that I wrote the school and told them we wouldn’t be doing it, we’d do Darwin instead. She did a PowerPoint on Darwin. His theories and his anti-slavery sentiments. I wanted her to see that there must have been white English folk who pushed for change.
The problem is, if they pull down the history rather than learning to understand and interpret human behaviour then I fear you are right – soon no one will remember that there were abolitionists. Or suffragettes’ husbands. Or upper class French who hated the corruption of their own monarchy. They will begin to believe that the suffering underlclasses changed the world on their own.
“The wages he toiled for were “provided by Scottish cotton manufacturing which was itself dependent upon Atlantic slavery economies”.
No. It was dependent on cotton.
have they gone after John newton yet?
He was actually involved in the slave trade until he repented, became a Christian and -a among other things -w rote “Amazing Grace.
It was discovered that he once went into a coffee house which was also patronised by slave traders