Do you think that at times what we have referred to as ‘the science’ has got it wrong?

[MarshaBradyo]

I’m thinking about the many times people said well it’s going to go badly wrong and the science backs this up

But a few times this hasn’t happened

July opening
Omicron and not doing ‘circuit breaker’ and not ending in lockdown
Not getting close to best case for omicron

And so on - maybe other examples

What do you think - was it unnecessarily pessimistic?

Yes at times. Although of course science develops over time. I think the advice to vaccinate healthy children against covid will prove in time to be unwise. I hope I'm wrong.

@noblegiraffe

many, many MN's are against the removal of the final restrictions, due to fear of the unknown, and mistrust in data and science

As far as I'm aware, the decision to remove the final restrictions has come from the Treasury, not from scientists?

Yes - I don’t think it’s unreasonable to mistrust Boris Johnson in the circumstances.

It’s not just a question of whether he is right or wrong or the reasons behind the announcement, it’s also whether he would even bother to check whether there is any justification for the lifting of restrictions.

Agreeing with restrictions being lifted =/= trusting Boris Johnson

@RichTeaRichTea

Agreeing with restrictions being lifted =/= trusting Boris Johnson

I agree that many will think restrictions should be lifted regardless of Boris. However I don’t think many will change their opinion or have their concerns alleviated by his announcement.

Chris Whitty did back July lifting but that didn’t help with the scientists are horrified narrative

We had the WHO declaring ‘U.K. experiment’ at that time plus the 1200 (iirc) scientist letters which people latched on to

Then again SAGE and the circuit breaker with omicron , without which many said lockdown would occur

The track record isn’t that robust in terms of getting it right

@BigWoollyJumpers

AS others have pointed out science evolves, and changes. There are all sorts of science, modelling, statistical, medical. Our vaccination and treatment regimes for Covid, have been fast and effective. The modelling based on imperfect inputs has often been flawed. The governments use and manipulation of the statistics, has been used, arguably very effectively, to nudge population response. Project Fear is real, and still evident.

The ONS now reports fewer deaths from Covid than Flu. All deaths are now below annual averages, few people are now on ventilation, but still many, many MN's are against the removal of the final restrictions, due to fear of the unknown, and mistrust in data and science, due to the mishandling of the same over the last couple of years.

If the government followed scientific advice for pandemics, for example, we would have had an up-to-date supply of PPE ready, just one example. This is another badly reported issue. Up to date PPE has to be bought every year. Hence the recent outcry over excess supply being dumped due to use by dates. You either have it, or you don't, but like snow ploughs, do we really need to spend billions on things we may never use.

I agree with this

It’s good that deaths aren’t on a worrying upward trend and that the NHS is “coping”, however that’s defined. But infection levels are high and booster immunity is waning (I’m five months past mine now). To remove the easiest and least inconveniencing mitigation, mask wearing in crowded indoor spaces, and the most sensible - isolating after a positive test - seem strange and premature actions right now.
It’s interesting that according to the media, people aren’t “ill” with Covid, just isolating. Yet many people are unwell, some very unwell.

One of the reasons the first mask regulations were introduced was to give people the confidence to go out again.

Only time will tell, but if people think everyone else is throwing caution to the winds, that may have a negative impact on discretionary spending in industries like hospitality and entertainment.

Hospitals have always been stricter than other organisations about people coming into work when they have an infection. I wonder how not testing/not isolating will affect them?

I suppose the only way to try to answer that question is to wait and see, or use modelling…

While the world was facing a rapidly progressing COVID-19 second wave, a policy paradox emerged. On the one side, much more was known by Autumn 2020 about the mechanisms underpinning the spread and lethality of Sars-CoV-2. On the other side, how such knowledge should be translated by policymakers into containment measures appeared to be much more controversial and debated than during the first wave in Spring. Value-laden, conflicting views in the scientific community emerged about both problem definition and subsequent solutions surrounding the epidemiological emergency, which underlined that the COVID-19 global crisis had evolved towards a full-fledged policy “wicked problem”. With the aim to make sense of the seemingly paradoxical scientific disagreement around COVID-19 public health policies, we offer an ethical analysis of the scientific views encapsulated in the Great Barrington Declaration and of the John Snow Memorandum, two scientific petitions that appeared in October 2020. We show that how evidence is interpreted and translated into polar opposite advice with respect to COVID-19 containment policies depends on a different ethical compass that leads to different prioritization decisions of ethical values and societal goals

From a paper in Nature
www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00839-1

Go on to read a fascinating piece on how Social Media (twitter) shares, resulted in a greater influence of the John Snow response, rather than Barrington, leading to louder and more prolific demands for full lockdown v. targeted response:
bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/2/e052891

All good stuff. And very relevant to how opinions vary, are manipulated, and in the modern world, how they become the required group think.

Listening to scaling back list

Quite something after two years

Starmer gngngng

@MarshaBradyo

Listening to scaling back list

Quite something after two years

I think a good balance has been reached. Ending isolation and general testing this week, but keeping option for free testing open until April, along with boosters for CEV, and keeping ONS surveillance going.

I do too BigWoolly

Hopefully now there will be evaluation and cost counting, and where necessary holding leaders to account.

@MarshaBradyo

Starmer gngngng

Surely not. More Boris’ style really.

I just can’t

Listening to him go in as he does re the virus

Listening to ‘the science’ can be interpreted in lots of ways. For example I definitely heard some epidemiologists say back in March/April 2020 that Zero Covid was a pipe dream and the key question for policymakers to consider was how to manage covid, and ensure the process of it becoming endemic was as harm free as possible. So bearing that in mind you could say that the Jacinda Arden’s of the world were at fault for not listening to ‘the science’.

Also (as a social science grad!) listening to the science for me involves listening to the social science voices. So balancing the voices of doctors, epidemiologists etc with the voices of psychologists, economists, educationalists etc.

When you expand science to also include the social sciences a lot of the questions and trade-offs with regards to lockdowns for example become a lot more complicated that simply ‘we must lockdown to keep covid numbers down’.

@Clytemnestra4 You are so right. There were indeed scientists in spring 2020 saying that covid would be with us forever and we had to live with it at some stage.

Also agree with you about listening to social scientists. When SAGE concentrated on death rates, where were the economists, psychologists, educators whose voices were needed?

So many perspectives should have been included. I have been frustrated by the blinkered viewpoints.

@Clytemnestra4

Listening to ‘the science’ can be interpreted in lots of ways. For example I definitely heard some epidemiologists say back in March/April 2020 that Zero Covid was a pipe dream and the key question for policymakers to consider was how to manage covid, and ensure the process of it becoming endemic was as harm free as possible. So bearing that in mind you could say that the Jacinda Arden’s of the world were at fault for not listening to ‘the science’.

Also (as a social science grad!) listening to the science for me involves listening to the social science voices. So balancing the voices of doctors, epidemiologists etc with the voices of psychologists, economists, educationalists etc.

When you expand science to also include the social sciences a lot of the questions and trade-offs with regards to lockdowns for example become a lot more complicated that simply ‘we must lockdown to keep covid numbers down’.

A good post

We haven’t communicated the other costs well or simply at all and many think they’re not there or important

@BigWoollyJumpers

Yes, I understand very well that PPE has an expiry date.

This is something that needs to be factored into responsible planning.

We spend money on a number of things that we might hope we don't need to use - like nuclear missiles, the armed forces and flood defences, for example.

We had very good plans for preparation for a pandemic - we just didn't follow tham very well and the overall cost was much higher as a result.

So bearing that in mind you could say that the Jacinda Arden’s of the world were at fault for not listening to ‘the science’.

Depends on the aim.

Deaths have been very low in NZ, and they will open up with the benefit of vaccines and more effective treatment options.

I don’t know whether on balance NZers will think the restrictions were worth it, but ‘the science’ can only provide information to make decisions, and different countries faced different scenarios.

When you expand science to also include the social sciences a lot of the questions and trade-offs with regards to lockdowns for example become a lot more complicated that simply ‘we must lockdown to keep covid numbers down

I think part of this (and I’m not sure how we would change this) is that many decisions were taken with short horizons. When schools first closed I think the public perception was that they would reopen after Easter.

Whitty talking about this is as steady not sudden is correct. He stressed this

It remains me of July when people thought it sudden but we’d been releasing for months already

Shorter timeframe but he’s right.

Lots of modeling has been wrong. I mean that should have been clear from the get-go, since different models produced different results.

A lot of public health is about behaviour, and that also means that "the science" can be very unclear. What people might do under perfect circumstances is never what people really do. (This is why there are several ways of measuring contraceptive efficacy, for example.) So maybe a study says that masks are helpful in lab conditions - in the real world it might be quite a different story, for example.

The early reports on the vaccines seemed to suggest they were more effective than it turned out, maybe even with earlier variants. Was their guess wrong? Maybe, or they were not entirely honest in how they presented the data.

Policy decisions are only partly about data, largely they are about goals, behaviour, balancing other factors. "Following the science" has largely been a way to take the pressure off governments so they can claim their decisions are not about these kinds of things.