Arise, Sir Lockdown

A flip-flopping Covid scientist who initially recommended ‘herd immunity’, then changed his mind and pushed for longer and tougher lockdowns, is to be knighted in the New Year’s Honours. The Mail has more.

Professor John Edmunds will be recognised for services to epidemiology, including the modelling work that made the case for lockdowns. …

The honours citation says the work by Prof. Edmunds and his team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was “vital for the U.K. response” to the pandemic.

In the early days of the crisis, he publicly suggested that so-called ‘herd immunity’ was “the only way to stop this epidemic”.

He then became a convert to lockdowns and irritated some ministers by using frequent media appearances to push for tougher restrictions. But last year Prof. Edmunds appeared to acknowledge that “too much weight” was given to scientific models – and not enough to the economy and wider society.

The scientist yesterday insisted he was a “bit embarrassed” by the honour as he was “not really one for the spotlight”.

However, during the pandemic he frequently headed for the TV studios in a “private capacity” to make the case for more stringent restrictions. In the summer of 2020 he said failure to lock down earlier had “cost a lot of lives” and accused Boris Johnson of “taking a risk” by easing restrictions.

Months later he warned that the U.K. needed “even tougher” restrictions to hold off another wave of the virus. In early 2021 he said easing the third national lockdown would be “a disaster”.

At one point the interventions by Prof. Edmunds and others so irritated government ministers that Boris Johnson considered scrapping the SAGE scientific committee on which they sat. One former Whitehall official said Prof Edmunds was one of a number of pro-lockdown scientists who used media performances to try to “bounce” the Government into imposing tougher restrictions.

At the time, the Tory MP and lockdown sceptic Sir Charles Walker said he was “cross with SAGE experts thinking they can advise both the Government and the [BBC Radio 4] Today programme”, adding: “You can do one or the other, but not both.”

Prof. Edmunds later attacked Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out initiative, describing it as “spectacularly stupid”. The scientist yesterday paid tribute to his team, saying: “It was an incredible time and we did amazing work over such an extended period of time. I’m very honoured that that’s being acknowledged.”

To get a sense of the “amazing work” done by Prof. Edmunds, take a look at the prediction made by the LSHTM modelling team in December 2021, urging the Government to lockdown over Christmas because if it didn’t the number of beds needed in English hospitals by Jan 22nd would be between 45,000 and 70,000 – and that was the best case. In fact, the actual number peaked at 17,120 on Jan 10th (h/t the Spectator).