A thread on bad journalism. I did not vote Tory and don't like Boris. But yesterday's Sunday Times piece slating the UK government's COVID-19 strategy was appalling and here's why.👇 thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/…
2./ The first thing to note is how critics are framed to appear unchallengeable. @devisridhar is a respected expert but she no more predicted the pandemic than any other global health expert I've interviewed for decades. When I last interviewed Anthony Fauci he said the same.
3./ It's long been the assumption by scientists that a virus would make the jump (yet again) from animals to humans, and wreak havoc. Arnaud Fontanet from the Pasteur Institut ended my own film on Zika by saying that too. Feel free to watch here. 👇 primevideo.com/detail/World-W…
4./ As for other critics of the govt some have a track record that would make any official skeptical of their advice. Here's @richardhorton1 suggesting we bypass Parliament with Extinction Rebellion citizens' assemblies. Objective?! thelancet.com/journals/lance…
5./ The ST treats the Jan 24th Cobra meeting as an example of the unimportance given to the looming pandemic. But this was held just 3 days after WHO announced on Jan 21st for the first time that there was likely human-to-human transmission. 👇statnews.com/2020/01/21/who…
6./ Before that on Jan 14th a leading WHO scientist Dr Mary Van Kerkhove suggested possible human to human transmission. When this was picked up by Reuters WHO countered her warning tweeting there was no evidence to back such a claim. reuters.com/article/china-…
7./ I'm a big supporter of WHO, but it didn't cover itself with glory in January. As @LawDavF has pointed out in a thread in March the idea the UK govt wasn't seriously monitoring COVID-19 before then is ridiculous. NERVTAG met regularly from 13th Jan on.
8./ The article makes a great deal of departments not implementing their pandemic plans all the way through February. But pandemic plans are triggered by WHO announcing a pandemic. WHO did that on March 11th
days after the "38 days" which the ST claims the UK government wasted.
days after the "38 days" which the ST claims the UK government wasted.
9./ If you think that was a mistake speak to WHO's Chief, Tedros Ghebreyesus who said on Feb 26th: “Using the word pandemic carelessly has no tangible benefit,” The term also “does have significant risk. It can boost unjustified fears and stigma".
10./ The article suggests nothing useful came out of the Cobra meeting. Yet Whitty gave detailed briefings to the press and these appeared in weekend editions. He warned the virus would likely reach Britain the following week, and outlined new measures. 👇dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7…
11./ He said doctors were busily trying to track down 2000 people who had flown into the UK from Wuhan in the last week and that teams would check the health of everyone arriving from China. At that stage there were no recorded cases in Britain tho 4 cases in France.
12./ The ST makes great play of how pandemic preparedness had supposedly diminished. Perhaps. But it fails to point out that independent expert assessment of our readiness for a pandemic rated us no 2 out of 195 nations. That was in ...Oct 2019. 👇ghsindex.org
13./ This was quoted extensively by Der Spiegel at the end of Feb as they lambasted what they saw as the failure of the German govt to react quickly enough to COVID. They were unstinting in their praise of the way the NHS was adapting wholesale and fast. spiegel.de/international/…
14./ A flaw in the ST article is of simple logic. It points out our pandemic strategy had been built around flu and says that relies in part on the build-up of herd immunity. So logically even had we lavished resources on that plan we'd still be preparing for the wrong disease.
15./ We would still have had to pivot and change tack. So by all means criticise our long obsesssion with flu but this was not an innovation of Boris or the Tories. South Korea by contrast entirely rewrote their plan in 2014 after their third experience of a coronavirus outbreak.
16./ It's fair to criticise the running down of PPE stores but the article admits these go out of date. That's one reason no govt had stockpiles sufficient for this pandemic. Criticise by all means a reliance on China and global supply chains but this was not a UK problem alone.
17./ And far from being complacent the UK govt may have over-reacted (tho who wouldn't in the circumstances). We now have spare capacity on ventilators and there's growing concern among some clinicians about how they may do more harm than good for some COVID patients.
18./ Ironically, the UK govt is now being criticised for responding too quickly by buying antibody kits that turned out not to work. Spain also bought faulty virus kits from China and Ireland has been over-reliant on US companies causing delays. nytimes.com/2020/04/16/wor…
19./ And France? You could replace the names in this article for British ones and it would describe identical problems to ours. It turns out responding to a once in a century pandemic is kinda hard and full of challenges that stretch officials. No shit. france24.com/en/20200412-wi…
20./ Lewis Moonie a Labour junior minister has pointed out at all the many Cobra meetings he attended the PM was absent. Talking of absenteeism, Angela Merkel was blasted for being AWOL on COVID all through February. Bild denounced "Corona-Chaos" bild.de/politik/inland…
21./ Even when Merkel then made her heartfelt speech on 11th March she was criticised for suggesting 70% would be infected and hinting all Germany could hope to do was win time and slow the spread. She was soon pushed into a pivot by lockdown hardliners. Who'd be a politician?
22./ Don't expect to read any of this in our provincially obsessed & self-righteous media. By the end of February most of the British media had only just begun to give COVID-19 proper attention. But it was a low priority compared to Brexit, Huawei, and who could forget Meghan?
23./ Maybe those 38 days are better described as wasted by the media. They could now make up for that failure by boldly interrogating evidence, even perhaps taking an unpopular stance on what to do next. So much easier tho to shout gotcha during a national crisis.
24./ The govt's response was flawed. It was everywhere. They shouldn't have started from where they did. Surprise surprise. It's the easiest trick in the book to find someone to say "I told you so". In truth, this piece wasn't about holding power to account. It was a hatchet-job.
