Thread by @t0nyyates

BBC don't have to get this wrong and help the government out. There are lots of people on here who can help them understand why this was a false choice, and why the govt retrospectively want to maintain that it was a real one.

https://twitter.com/Zubhaque/status/1373569300200558597

Fair enough to say 'the govt will try to paint this as the choice they had to make, that it was an agonizing one, but in fact most experts see this as a false choice, because locking down earlier would have saved lives and £...'

and to follow up with 'and they would argue that the govt is trying to cover up for a failure to see this by continuing to stress a trade-off that wasn't there'

capping the segment off with 'moreover others have pointed out that what was really going on was a political see-saw between those who appreciated there was no health-wealth trade-off, and the covid sceptics and libertarians, who either denied there was a problem...'

'...or resented any infringements on liberty no matter what the health and economic benefits'.

There, fixed that for you.

I hope people don't take this as casual amateur @BBCNews redrafting or politial correspondent bullying. There is a lot at stake here. About 85k people died since the 21 Sep SAGE instruction to lock down. How many of those actually needed to die?

At risk of surfacing my monomania on this topic, we have another example here of where an independent body that fused econ and epidemiology, producing regular assessments of the options and trade-offs for covid policy, could have made a difference.

The govt might have chosen to ignore its advice [surely inevitable that it would have agreed with SAGE on 21 Sep], but it would have struggled to argue that it did that to save the economy in the face of independent expert and partly economic advice to the contrary.

Starmer and Dodds - who have not got behind this proposal for an independent econ-epi body - could have used its advice as leverage and later used it as a stick to beat the govt with.

And this weekend we would be watching the broadcast political correspondents pointing to that advice to as evidence that the govt's briefed 'agonising' over health vs wealth was nothing of the sort.

For the benefit of new followers or those who don't follow, I wrote about this here theguardian.com/commentisfree/… and in more detail on my blog.

Note that this is not to say there are never £ and health trade-offs. As you get closer to the the best policy, and also closer to the end of this pandemic, trade-offs will emerge in the process of fine tuning our exit.

For instance - we could have locked down the entire economy for months and months and suppressed covid entirely, but we would have starved ourselves in the process. The best policy accepts more covid risk to avoid that.