Malaysia, Scotland, ZeroCovid and (in the end) @IndependentSage (and very little about China): The origin of ZeroCovid in Western policy making can be traced to a paper by @devisridhar and junior doctor Adriel Chen which appeared in theBMJ (@bmj_latest) on 6 July 2020. @IndependentSage @devisridhar @bmj_latest Widely shared on social media, this is the first time we see the use of 'zero Covid' as a description of a policy ...bmj.com/content/370/bm…

George presented himself — and was presented by those media outlets that have platformed him —as an expert commentator (on climate change and now on COVID). George is more scientifically trained than most journalists — he has a 2:1 in Zoology —….

https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1749692870947189011

… but his scientific journalism is driven more by pseudo-religious appeals to ‘science’ than evidence itself. Thus he has fashioned himself into a latter day prophet speaking God’s (or rather nature’s) truth to power.

I understand why many people believed in nonsense like masking and lockdowns—governments told them to. But why did experts who had been working in the field for years and knew the dangers endorsed thing that had not been recommended previously? Experts, even, who wrote against them, supported these things? Three pointers: first, science doesn’t have to be, but I think in reality it is, more interested in trying new things than in understanding social context. The plans themselves highlighted the need for flexibility in a crisis, and in 2020 that was taken to the extreme

Can we stop with the Boris Johnson should have been at COBRA. There were several relevant committees - but the one you are thinking of was COBR-M (chaired by Michael Gove as the minister for the Cabinet Office) which had overarching responsibility for civil contingencies. The irony is Gove, with the reigns of power, was probably as much as a lockdown monger as it is possible to be. We generally think a good government is one that delegates properly, and Johnson did this. Unlike some of his colleagues, Johnson asked questions….

From the 2011 strategy: A pandemic is most likely to be caused by a new subtype of the Influenza A virus but the plans could be adapted and deployed for scenarios such as an outbreak of another infectious disease, eg Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in health care settings, with an altogether different pattern of infectivity assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c4767… This is a bit of a jumble: I suspect this sentence been copied from the NHS plans, and the proofreader has not spotted a botched copy and paste. But the sense is clearly that panflu planning is more widely applicable

Looking at Tory policy towards AIDS in the 1980s which is really hard to understand on current historiographical consensus, which I think is important to understanding later responses to COVID 1/…

https://twitter.com/michael_riordan/status/1706960625300082863

The standard view was given by the historian Virgina Berridge in 1996, based on interviews carried out for her PhD research among activists and government insiders. In 2005, Norman Fowler used Berridge’s work and his own diaries to recount his own involvement. Much more recently, in 2019, John Agar examined the archival evidence for his ‘Science Policy under Thatcher’

On 22 March 2020, SPI-B submitted to SAGE ‘Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures’, which concluded that ‘the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging’… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Where did this idea come from? In 2009, the predecessor to SPI-B, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Behaviour and Communication has been tasked with advising the Brown government on its response to swine flu. Between August 2009 and February 2010, SPI B&C submitted 9… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

On 22 March 2020 — the last meeting it had before lockdown — SAGE considered one rather extraordinary item—an “Open letter to the scientific community” written by hundreds of “Italian” “doctors” (the scare quotes are important here, because quite a few of them were not Italian doctors IN Italy), many of them were not actually doctors, and at least one signs her self off as a “high school student”. The round robin was originally written by actual doctors sometime

On the 23 March 2020, Boris Johnson announced a national lockdown to begin 3 days later on the 26th. Many people (including the Labour opposition) have claimed that Johnson should have ‘followed the science’ and locked down weeks earlier. One of the greatest proponents of this claim was Sir Jeremy Farrar, now chief scientist at @WHO, and at the time the CEO of the Wellcome Institute. In Spike!, his bestselling account of the government’s pandemic failures, Farrar suggested his own organization had been working from home in January….

https://twitter.com/michael_riordan/status/1613318833657331712

You know there is no scientific evidence to support this and the intervention has led to suffering for many disabled people and yet you resort to classic right wing arguments about ‘common sense’. That’s pretty shocking for someone who *claims* to represent disabled people.

https://twitter.com/drfrancesryan/status/1653343451298115584

Prior to 2020, no public health authority recommended masking. Successive evidence reviews at multiple levels of government had consistently shown masks not to be effective against respiratory viruses like Covid, in either controlled or community conditions

The structure of my book is taking shape. One chapter will trace ‘networks of ZeroCovid transmission’ (with thanks @mugecevik & @sdbaral), This is interesting: many (though certainly not all) signatories to this Nov 2020 letter were in the ZC camp.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P… Much of this *sounds* fairly sensible, but actually premises a return to normality on implementing public health measures, including recommending masking for primary school kids…

Much of the behavioral advice the goverment received was about optics: here is SPI-B's submission to SAGE on 4 March, which warned about dangers "of public concern" if the goverment went alone. 1/2 This text is followed, in the report, by a poll, giving a visual reminder that going against what other countries were doing would be problematic for politicans' poll ratings. These polls were not intended for SAGE, but for politicans, like Hancock

The primary reason behaviour change is problematic is because it is anti-democratic: it assumes that what the goverment wants to do is worth doing, and then tries to get people to do this, not by persuading them, but by manipulating them: this is devasting for democracy, because citizens aren't making informed choices to change their behaviour based on argument, but because the goverment they should be freely voting for has manipulated them into changing their beliefs based on false information.

But Whitty was not referring to the minutes, he was referring to a peer reviewed evidence review by several SCI-B participants which was circulated to SAGE. Really do check your facts before writing this: it is a major claim by fans of lockdown Exhibit 1 / The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence, Lancelet, 26 Feb 2020. [At this stage lockdown is not common parlance: in the paper, the authors call Chinese lockdowns ‘city-wide quarantines’]

On 16 April, the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Emergencies (SAGE) advised against face-masks in community settings. The following day, 17 April, DELVE (Data Evaluation for Viral Epidemics) was convened by @royalsociety (the UK’s national academy of sciences) to support “a data-driven approach from learning from different approaches countries are taking to managing the pandemic” royalsociety.org/news/2020/04/r…

Currently writing about the decision to introduce facemasks in the UK. I have read SCI-B's 20 April 2020 return to SAGE many times, but it is more more extraordinary everytime I read it. Here's why....🧵 Prior to 20 April 2020, 4 key documents were ciruclated at the highest levels of the UK goverment.
WHO's interim guidance on the use of facemasks in the context of Covid-19. The WHO had in 2019 produced a review of the evidence around NPIs, which remains one

Now that so many public health experts are back to clamouring for masks, it might be worth reposting some actual details about what UK pandemic plans said.

This from UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, (November 2011).

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

https://twitter.com/michael_riordan/status/1511064203225927680

Here's the DoH's Health and Social Care Influenza
Pandemic Preparedness and
Response (2012)...

https://twitter.com/michael_riordan/status/1488947830882549761?s=20&t=xrd0Nxei25gxq7dmgaCoJw

A reminder that, prior to 2020, no Western country recommended masking in community settings for the control of respiratory infections, in either pandemic conditions, or otherwise. Cochrane reviews — the gold standard in evidence based medicine — ailed to find justification for them, as did the WHO. Further, pandemic planners in the UK and elsewhere specifically advised against research done in the heat of crisis, which was likely to be biased. If there is limited good quality evidence for effectiveness of masks

There’s an argument to say that the wrong sort of historical perspective led to some of the worst Covid failures: terrible, anachronistic history (like the University of Michigan’s Influenza Encyclopaedia) contributed rather a lot to the development of ideas like lockdown… 1/7 This CDC-funded project, led by J. Alex Navarro and Howard Markel (now a Cambridge fellow) was set up as a consequence of Bush administration’s pandemic planning. Whereas that planning had focused on vaccines and therapeutics, Markel and co. 2/7

What if @BorisJohnson had not called an election for 12/12/2019 to ‘get Brexit done’? What if he hadn’t appointed Dominic Cummings? What if we had not left EU on 1/1/2020?

Johnson’s saw vaccination (where he succeeded) as a test of Brexit; but he also decided to rely 1/10 too much on private contracts - we all remember PPE. For the Tories the pandemic was not just that; it was also a way to test Dominic Cummings’ thinking about the civil service; and to showcase effectiveness of Brexit….

But, that’s only half the story…. /2

Reading @LucyGoBag’s wonderful book #WhenTheDustSettles. It’s so good because Lucy connects narrative and analysis to show how broad policy lessons can emerge not through stats and data (I thought Lucy’s discussion of her dyspraxia was relevant here)…perspectivemag.co.uk/the-interview-… 1/8 but from very individual experiences, which she narrates through personal stories which will have resonances with most of her readers (I’m not with my copy now but it is full of underlinings, YESes and exclamation marks). 2/8