21 December - It’s all crackers; and sinister too
I am feeling lucky. Like many people I was devastated to hear Boris Johnson
wreck the Christmas arrangements for millions and a series of phone calls between my own
family and friends found nothing but criticism. A family of life-long
Conservatives probably isn’t any more but reading through all the rules and
regulations revealed that I am not seriously affected.
Readers must know by now that I live alone and as such I am entitled to have a
support bubble. Christmas bubbles have been cancelled but support bubbles carry
on regardless so my Christmas arrangements can go ahead almost unchanged.
Parties to my bubble have
been isolating for the past week. No shopping, no visitors.
I am neither a Covid denier nor anti-vaccine but I do firmly believe that the
Government has made an unholy mess of handling the pandemic and some of their
actions appear to be more sinister than helpful.
Matt Hancock the Health Secretary is beyond hopeless and should be brought down as soon as
possible. He and his boss are taken in by false statistics. The Polymerise Chain
Reaction Test has been widely discredited but our Government bases its
decisions on its results which are mainly false positives, death statistics which
are known to be flawed and senior Civil Servants with an eye on lining their own pockets.
But don’t take my word for it, read
The British Medical Journal. The following
is reproduced with permission.
When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die
Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the
public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and
treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at
unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the
greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying
behaviour is troubling.
Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has
unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public
health.
Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic
embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has
revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an
emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.
The UK’s pandemic response provides at least four examples of suppression of
science or scientists. First, the membership, research, and deliberations of
the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) were initially secret
until a press leak forced transparency.
The leak revealed inappropriate involvement of government advisers in SAGE,
while exposing under-representation from public health, clinical care,
women, and ethnic minorities. Indeed, the government was also recently
ordered to release a 2016 report on deficiencies in pandemic preparedness,
Operation Cygnus, following a verdict from the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Next, a Public Health England report on covid-19 and inequalities. The
report’s publication was delayed by England’s Department of Health; a
section on ethnic minorities was initially withheld and then, following a
public outcry, was published as part of a follow-up report.
Authors from Public Health England were instructed not to talk to the media.
Third, on 15 October, the editor of the Lancet complained that an author of
a research paper, a UK government scientist, was blocked by the government
from speaking to media because of a “difficult political landscape.”
Now, a new example concerns the controversy over point-of-care antibody
testing for covid-19. The prime minister’s Operation Moonshot depends on immediate and wide
availability of accurate rapid diagnostic tests. It also depends on the questionable logic of mass screening - currently being
trialled in Liverpool - with a suboptimal PCR test.
The incident relates to research published this week by The BMJ, which finds
that the government procured an antibody test that in real world tests falls
well short of performance claims made by its manufacturers.
Researchers from Public Health England and collaborating institutions
sensibly pushed to publish their study findings before the government
committed to buying a million of these tests but were blocked by the health
department and the prime minister’s office.
Why was it important to procure this product without due scrutiny? Prior
publication of research on a preprint server or a government website is
compatible with The BMJ’s publication policy. As if to prove a point, Public
Health England then unsuccessfully attempted to block The BMJ’s press
release about the research paper.
Politicians often claim to follow the science, but that is a misleading
oversimplification. Science is rarely absolute. It rarely applies to every
setting or every population. It doesn’t make sense to slavishly follow
science or evidence. A better approach is for politicians, the publicly
appointed decision makers, to be informed and guided by science when they
decide policy for their public. But even that approach retains public and
professional trust only if science is available for scrutiny and free of
political interference, and if the system is transparent and not compromised
by conflicts of interest.
Suppression of science and scientists is not new or a peculiarly British
phenomenon. In the US, President Trump’s government manipulated the Food and
Drug Administration to hastily approve unproved drugs such as
hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir. Globally, people, policies, and procurement are being corrupted by political
and commercial agendas.
The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other
government appointees with worrying competing interests, including
shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.
Government appointees are able to ignore or cherry pick science - another form
of misuse - and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own
products and those of friends and associates.
How might science be safeguarded in these exceptional times? The first step
is full disclosure of competing interests from government, politicians,
scientific advisers, and appointees, such as the heads of test and trace,
diagnostic test procurement, and vaccine delivery. The next step is full
transparency about decision making systems, processes, and knowing who is
accountable for what.
Once transparency and accountability are established as norms, individuals
employed by government should ideally only work in areas unrelated to their
competing interests. Expertise is possible without competing interests. If
such a strict rule becomes impractical, minimum good practice is that people
with competing interests must not be involved in decisions on products and
policies in which they have a financial interest.
Governments and industry must also stop announcing critical science policy
by press release. Such ill judged moves leave science, the media, and stock
markets vulnerable to manipulation. Clear, open, and advance publication of
the scientific basis for policy, procurements, and wonder drugs is a fundamental requirement.
The stakes are high for politicians, scientific advisers, and government
appointees. Their careers and bank balances may hinge on the decisions that
they make. But they have a higher responsibility and duty to the public.
Science is a public good. It doesn’t need to be followed blindly, but it
does need to be fairly considered. Importantly, suppressing science, whether
by delaying publication, cherry picking favourable research, or gagging
scientists, is a danger to public health, causing deaths by exposing people
to unsafe or ineffective interventions and preventing them from benefiting
from better ones. When entangled with commercial decisions it is also
maladministration of taxpayers’ money.
Politicisation of science was enthusiastically deployed by some of history’s
worst autocrats and dictators, and it is now regrettably commonplace in democracies.
The medical-political complex tends towards suppression of
science to aggrandise and enrich those in power. And, as the powerful become more
successful, richer, and further intoxicated with power, the inconvenient
truths of science are suppressed. When good science is suppressed, people die.