I think Today producers, editors and presenters have some serious questions to answer about why they have today invited a discredited scientist with a repeated track record of making falsely dismissive claims on COVID threat to offer her views to the nation this morning
We know things are as bad as they have ever been. We know that ensuring compliance with yet another lockdown will be incredibly hard. How is it "public service journalism" to put on national radio crackpots selling people pie in the sky about how the threat is exaggerated?
There are literally thousands of scientists who could talk to citizens about the current pandemic situation. It is not "balance" to pick one with a demonstrated recent track record of getting things completely wrong. It is irresponsible.
In May, she claimed the virus was on its way out. It wasn't.
In July she claimed we "may already have herd immunity". We didn't.
In October, she claimed that rates would be falling by Xmas if we got rid of lockdown. Well, they didn't, even with lockdown.
To be clear, this is not a call for a panel of ppl with identical views. Can have people on who research the educational and social costs of lockdown. *Their* case is not best represented either by someone who has repeatedly made dismissive claims which were soon proved wrong.
Just listening to it again (was half listening this morning while doing other things). She starts by refusing to discuss case *for* lockdown by saying she doesn't want to engage in areas outside her expertise. Which is fair enough if done consistently. But it isn't. 1/2
2/2 She then immediately dismissed the args concerning the new varient. But she is a theoretician, not an applied researcher working on COVID. This is not her area of expertise either. She dismisses claim of new variant as a "narrative" based on "large body of *theoretical* work
She is countering empirical work with theoretical models. Something she does not acknowledge and which non-academics won't understand. Then she invokes herd immunity, something she has repeatedly invoked in past articles which were proved quickly and catastrophically worng.
She then says we need to keep in focus costs of lockdown and says we need a debate on costs and benefits. Yes, fair enough. Then says that debate hasn't happened. But the opening Q asked her to engage in that debate (case for/against lockdown) and she refused!
She then moves on to shielding the vulnerable - a policy she has advocated repeatedly. Is it workable?
"You need creative solutions."
Then advocates protecting vulnerable until they're vaccinated - which is the arg *for* lockdown, but says lockdown has problems (unspecified).
She then says "protect the vulnerable. Release everyone else. Costs of lockdown so profound." So she ends by implicitly claiming that costs of lockdown make it on balance the wrong approach, but without specifying costs and having explicitly refused to critique the case for it.
So, in sum her contribution to debate was: 1. Dismiss empirical case for new variant based on theoretical possibility of other expls 2. Advocate for a debate on lockdown costs and benefits which she refused to engage in directly 3. Imply costs outweigh bens, without evidence
All 3 points - evidence base on new varient, debate over health costs of lockdown, examination of cost/ben balance - are worthy of discussion. I don't think she was a good advocate for any of them though, not in the interview in isolation, and particularly not given past comments
(final point re the interview - I think the interviewer Mishal Husein did a pretty decent job - the first Q she asked was the right way to frame things. Not her fault Gupta refused to engage. But she could have been briefed on Gupta's track record to date and pressed her on it)
E.g. a Q like this:
"In May, you said the virus was on its way out. In July, you claimed we may already have herd immunity. In October, you claimed rates wld be falling by Xmas without lockdown. You were wrong every time. Why should we listen to you now?"
Here she is in May opposing lockdown and playing down fatality rates because the pandemic is "already on its way out": unherd.com/2020/05/oxford…
"And she believes it is a “strong possibility” that if we return to full normal tomorrow — pubs, nightclubs, festivals — we would be fine". Hmm.
Here she is in July saying "we may already have herd immunity" and arguing (in case we don't presumably) that young people have a "duty" to go and get infected: reaction.life/we-may-already…
(to be fair she doesn't rule out a large second wave fully in this interview, though the interviewer encourages it to do so. Just says it is one of several possibilities)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The cost-benefit on "shutting things with a vaccine literally being rolled out" is not the same as the cost-benefit on "shutting things with no idea when a vaccine will come, if ever." Can we please stop pretending the policy debate now is the same as then?
In the early stages of COVID, there was a reasonable arg to make that cases averted at very high cost were just cases delayed. The benefits of delay were therefore uncertain, reflecting our uncertainty about how treatments would evolve. That is no longer true.
For every infection in a high risk group which we avert in the next month or so, there is a high probability that said infection is then averted *forever* because the high risk indiv gets vaccinated. Therefore, restrictions have both a clear & obvious benefit and end point.
One lesson, at least for British politics, of the cursed year we are about to wave goodbye to is that the political agenda can shift very rapidly in response to unexpected events. We have spent a year discussing things we didn't even have words for on NYE 2019.
COVID-19, social distancing, R numbers, tiers, furloughs, a whole lexicon spawned by a virus whose existence we were barely aware of a year ago. 2021 begins with a different puzzle: what happens when an issue which has dominated the agenda suddenly disappears?
While nothing is ever certain, the vaccine rollout and the completion of the UK-EU trade deal make it highly *likely* that the second half of 2021 will be the first extended period of time since perhaps 2014 (if not earlier) where politics is not dominated by Brexit or COVID.
If you see people citing the "one dose of the Pfizer vaccine is only 52% effective" claim, refer to this thread. The claim, like so many panicky claims this year, is based on poor understanding/ contextualisation of the statistical analysis it is plucked from.
A more accurate figure for efficacy, from the same trials, and based on examining only the period after a full immune response has developed, is 86%.
As high profile journalists have also, once again, been citing this statistic without doing the 10 minutes or so of reading needed to understand what is wrong with it, I will reiterate my plea for compulsory statistics training for journalists.
Kaufmann seems either not to know or not to care that throughout most of history, and in most of the world today, the thing academics fought for freedom *from* was government interference in their lives and thinking of exactly this kind.
Universities in autocracies commonly are obliged to recruit people based on their political beliefs, for example. This is not generally thought of by those involved as "protecting academic freedom" (though no doubt imaginative apparatchiks try to sell it as such)
This is an issue we discuss a lot in Brexitland with regards the British context too. One difficult feature of identity conflicts is that they are battles over values and social norms - and people find it hard to compromise with/engage those they perceive as norm violators.
This is perfectly understandable - values and (for example) anti-racism norms are central to many people's political identities and priorities. But it poses significant electoral probs if a party needs support from voters who do not share such norms in same form in order to win
In Britain, as in the US, "political correctness gone mad" is very much the battle cry on both sides of this argument. Used by identity conservatives to articulate what alienates them. Used dismissively, by identity liberals to denigrate what they regard as an imagined complaint
Kind of inevitable Farage would return. Be interesting to see whether he is once again able to mobilise distrust and discontent when his two winning issues - immigration and Europe - are no longer at the top of the agenda.
The problem for Farage is that opposing lockdown is a libertarian stance, while the kind of voters he ha traditionally appealed to are older authoritarian types who are generally very keen on lockdowns.
As for government reform that’s not an issue to send anyone to the barricades unless it can be married to populist or nationalist resentments. Still, the Scottish elections next year may soon give him a target for such resentments in England