Experts shouldn't be telling us how to run society – we need to use them more wisely

Let’s get one thing clear, I’m not an expert, thank God! That isn’t to say I’m particularly pleased not to be what traditionally passed for an expert – someone considered to be among the most knowledgeable on a subject.   I’m glad not to be a modern-day expert, namely someone who can apparently pronounce on new, evolving and unpredictable situations with such apparent precision that they can be deferred to as prophets of our times.

That’s exactly what the supposedly expert merchants of Covid doom do.

SAGE may be the name for the government’s advisory committee, but a less fitting adjective would be hard to imagine. Its members can make the most astonishingly wild claims without serious scrutiny, for instance the absurd suggestion that 25,000 deaths could have been avoided by locking the UK down just a week earlier, as claimed by the infamous Professor Neil Ferguson.

Or take its chair, Professor Graham Medley, who in keeping with the intense dislike that lockdown enthusiasts have for the Great British boozer, has suggested closing pubs to allow schools to reopen.

This is to say nothing of Independent SAGE, a shadowy group chaired by the former chief scientific advisor Sir David King, who advocate such a fanatical focus on Covid elimination that even the tentative steps Britain has taken so far to emerge from lockdown are considered to have been too dangerous.

In actual fact, this committee is packed with extreme left-wingers including a longstanding member of the Communist party.

Sir David himself was the man in charge during the Foot and Mouth crisis, which was to be the first of numerous occasions when the modelling of Neil Ferguson and his clunky computer would get things so spectacularly wrong and lead to hugely disproportionate overreactions.

SAGE members are now treated like gods, paraded on the media and uncritically reported upon. They yank the chains of hapless ministers who are dealing with a crisis far bigger than they are able to handle, or ever wanted to, led, of course, by the biggest plank of them all, Boris Johnson.

His most charitable critics suggest that Johnson’s own severe case of Covid-19 has left him particularly cautious. His less charitable ones challenge the myth of Boris the visionary just waiting for his Churchill moment, and see a man being carried by his experts because he lacks the intellect or depth of character to grasp a problem of such vast complexity.

If things were not so, Johnson, Matt Hancock and the rest of the hopeless cabinet might have asked some probing questions of the experts. Perhaps that would have demanded of the experts work that is somewhat more taxing than another media opportunity to tout second wave terror or pronounce on which section of society they think should be destroyed next.

Ministers could start by asking what the supporting evidence for the second wave is. Much of it seems to be based around the behaviour of influenza viruses, which do tend to come in a number of waves. Indeed much of the pandemic planning undertaken by the UK government assumed, not unreasonably, that the next major emergency would come from an influenza virus.

The last epidemic caused by a coronavirus was the SARS outbreak of 2003. It lasted a short while before vanishing. It’s a bit of a mystery as to why.

Part of the explanation may be it’s significantly greater lethality, combined with the greater severity of the illness it produced. Both of these would have limited its capacity to spread. There is also a suggestion that it mutated in the wrong direction, becoming more lethal as a result.

This time around, the retired NHS pathologist Dr John Lee was among the earliest critical voices to raise the subject of mutations. He argued that by aggressively trying to control the spread of the virus, we may be unwittingly aiding nastier variants of it.

Since nastier variants make people sicker and kill more of them, they thrive much less effectively than milder viruses. A virus does not want its host to die, but to continue to spread to new hosts. This, he suggests, may in part explain some of the devastating scenes in Italy, along with other factors that need considering such as the older average age of the population and an initial level of ventilator use in the early days that was later thought not to be necessary.

Yet now, the situation is mercifully very different from the bad days of March and April, when in the UK alone nearly 1000 people were dying each day.

Yet there continues to be spikes in cases, both in the UK and abroad. Despite this, both deaths and hospital admissions are dramatically down on what they were. In fact they are almost non-existent and do not correspondingly rise with increased cases.

Is this entirely explained by more testing? If so, does this mean that the highest estimates of asymptomatic infection in the early days turned out to be the correct ones? Is the virus itself weakening? Has it somehow changed? Do infected people pick up less virus and why?

Are these spikes simply the cases we were originally told were unavoidable but needed to be pushed into the future to give the NHS time to catch up? And since no spike has ever taken the numbers remotely close to what they were during a country's initial peak, why should we assume that a spike will come that is going to be so very much larger?

Next, they should be asked to be candid about the validity of the R number – the number of people an infected person will go on to infect. This number, far from being a reliable piece of data, is a complicated mathematical model generated from a combination of data and assumptions, among which is that everyone is equally susceptible.

Yet at the height of the epidemic, we were not testing, and it is still not possible to identify who has had Covid and recovered. So our data is awful! Combine that with the fact that the test to diagnose the virus only picks up fragments of virus and there is a decent chance of false positives.

What’s more, it is not as though everyone is going to make the same behaviour choices. Those without symptoms, for example, are more likely to have interactions during the period at which they are infectious. But by being asymptomatic, are they also less infectious?

The idea that we can pinpoint exactly what is happening with a sub-microscopic virus seems to be more symptomatic of a vast overestimation of our power to control things and fetishization of clever number crunching.

Indeed, whilst I have read critical perspectives in validating my cynicism, I was led to question this magic number almost as soon as it entered public consciousness, chiefly by the wide variability in the estimated range put out by SAGE – 0.5-0.9 at the point where lockdown restrictions began to be lifted.

I tried to reconcile that with the claim that if the R number goes above 1, the epidemic grows exponentially. How could this be accurate if, at 0.5, things should be calming down fairly notably, but at 0.9 they would be on the brink of increasing?

The most recent report only confirmed the ridiculousness of this measure, and revising it so regularly.

On Friday, SAGE claimed it had risen to stand at between 0.9 and 1.1. Hang on a minute! At 0.9, it suggests that things are no worse than they potentially had been at the point that lockdown was lifted.

At 1.1, the problem should clearly be getting worse. In fact the 7-day rolling average is always down on the previous week. It isn’t squaring with what’s happening in terms of cases, and in any case if it’s not possible to identify which is the accurate R figure to begin with, why the hell are we using it to judge how free we should be to go about our daily lives?

If the R number is so imprecise, then I think R can only stand for one thing – rubbish!

Bottom line, I’m an idiot. I just try to be a useful idiot, because I know how to question those who aren’t. These are the kinds of things I would be asking the experts to tirelessly investigate. I wouldn’t rest until I was satisfactorily aware of what we knew and what we didn’t, and the predictive value (as opposed to utility in scenario planning) of anything that sought to extract wider truths in the place of hard data.

It just surprises me that so many experts don’t seem to have the same desire. There are some that do, notably the team at the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine at Oxford University, directed by Professor Carl Heneghan. Heneghan has opined on a number of occasions that we are not being led by data and what is actually happening. He’s right!

Instead, the coming of a second wave is gospel truth. The seductive authority of complex models continues to seduce. The R number continues to be treated like a magic formula, jubilantly proclaimed by whichever camp’s argument benefits from its latest iteration.

Perhaps the experts who follow the evidence aren’t quite as attractive to a media desperate to keep a golden story rolling. Nor are they as useful to politicians looking for a simplistic narrative to decide on solutions to the things that immediately preoccupy them and a public that thinks equally in the short term.

Yet we began 2020 clueless about Coronavirus. There is still a lot we don’t know, and there is even more that we seem too quick to assume. What is clear to me, though, is that experts shouldn’t be telling us how to run society – we need to use them more wisely.