Government adviser delivers damning verdict on scientists’ pandemic response, adding they ‘weren’t looking at the bigger picture’
www.telegraph.co.uk
Scientists abandoned their objectivity,
misled with alarming models and failed to appreciate the damage lockdown would cause, a government adviser has claimed in a damning indictment of Britain’s pandemic response.
In his memoir, The Year The World Went Mad, Prof Woolhouse claimed that
lockdowns “had surprisingly little effect” and just “deferred the problem to another day, at great cost”.
Imperial College London published an analysis the following June, claiming that lockdown had saved nearly half a million lives in Britain.
However,
Sweden managed to bring its epidemic under control without lockdown, leaving Imperial College to conclude that it was Sweden’s ban on mass gatherings that played the decisive role – even while arguing it had not been enough in other countries.
“The conclusion
wasn’t remotely plausible,” wrote Prof Woolhouse. “Analyses by other researchers came up with quite different conclusions that the UK epidemic was already in decline before lockdown took effect.
Prof Woolhouse also
accused the BBC of over-egging the risks from Covid and that said scientists had abandoned their objectivity by wading into policy.
“It became routine during the pandemic for scientific advisers and commentators to push for one policy or another,” he wrote.
“As citizens, they have every right to do that. But when there is a constant stream of government scientific advisers in the media calling for a lockdown, as there was during the second wave in Oct 2020, then we have crossed a line.”
Prof Woolhouse also said it was an “awkward” truth that the people who benefited most from suppression of the virus, such as the elderly and vulnerable, were not the group that suffered most from the impact of lockdown: young people and low-income workers.
“Even before the UK first went into lockdown in Mar 2020, we knew that novel coronavirus was far more dangerous to the elderly, the frail and the infirm than to healthy young adults and children,” he added.
“That should have shaped our response.
Instead, the UK administrations continued to act as though everyone was equally at risk. They even actively promoted this misinterpretation to try to bolster acceptance to a lockdown strategy.”
No surprise to some of us, fake news/not important to the rest.