It's Science, Jim, but not as we know it . . .
I dipped into a Twitter-spat the other day. I don’t know why I do this to myself. Twitter is an awful medium for engaging in productive debate. It’s a great place for the acerbic and witty one-liner, the meme, the outrage, . . . but if you really want to be informed and explore both sides of a complex issue it wouldn’t be my first recommendation. It’s more a political tool than a scientific tool.
The spat was between two people with technical backgrounds and centred around covid and responses to covid. Personally, I’m astonished that anyone who’s been keeping an eye on the worldwide data could still come away with the impression that lockdowns “work” in any meaningful sense as a method to control the outbreak of a respiratory virus. But it wasn’t that that caught my eye.
One of these modern-day jousters posted the following:
There is no doubt that early lockdowns would've saved lives.
It’s a statement I profoundly disagree with, but what’s fascinating is the certainty with which it is made. Of course, no justification for this assertion was given - but that’s twitter for you. It’s as if the twitterer wanted us, the twitteree, to think this statement ranks alongside things like “the Earth is heavy” or “water is wet” - although I suppose in these days of identity enlightenment we must concede the possibility that water could choose to be either dry or wet depending on how it’s feeling that particular day, and that the Earth is beautiful just as she is despite her weight.
As a political statement it’s OK. After all, politicians lie, exaggerate, and obfuscate - it’s what they’re good at, what they get paid for, and what we expect them to do. As a scientific statement it’s far from OK.
The dread hand of certainty has been with us right from the early days of this pandemic, and has only tightened its death-grip on public discourse ever since.
Consider the issue of lockdowns. In the UK, apart from a little bit of half-hearted posturing and pretence of uncertainty at the beginning from our Government, in a very short time scale something that had never been done before became the “thing” to do. It became FOLLOWING THE SCIENCE, and unquestionably, obviously, absolutely, unequivocally, the only sensible thing to do in the event of an outbreak of a respiratory disease.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Almost all governments across the world prepare detailed sets of procedures in readiness for some potential catastrophe. “What should we do if there is a serious train crash at a major station?” might be one such example. With many casualties there would need to be a co-ordinated response to such a tragedy involving many agencies and it makes sense to think all this out beforehand. God-willing, these detailed plans would never be needed.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that almost all governments had a set of “what to do in the event of a pandemic of a respiratory virus” plans already worked out. What should come as a surprise is that almost every government across the world simply ignored these plans for covid19 and did the exact opposite of what was recommended in those plans.
The UK’s own pandemic preparedness plan, for example, considered 2 main scenarios - one of which was the hypothetical outbreak of a more deadly coronavirus that was hypothesised to kill over 300,000 in five months - much worse than the actual covid19 pandemic. And what does this plan for a worse outbreak recommend? Well one thing it does recommend - it explicitly recommends against both lockdowns and masks.
So what changed? How did we go from thinking lockdown was a really dumb and counter-productive thing to do, to only a month or so later thinking “OMG this lockdown stuff is the best thing since slapping mouldy sliced bread on an open wound and will save squillions of lives”?
The “science” didn’t change in a month. Actually, it still hasn’t changed - there’s no good correlation worldwide between lockdown and mortality outcome. Surprise, surprise - pre-covid science got this right. So how did the dread hand of certainty manage to get such a stranglehold here? And make no mistake about it, it is very much a misplaced certainty with regard to lockdowns and their alleged efficacy.
The real issue here isn’t whether lockdowns work or not, the real issue is in the face of what was described as a “novel virus” and an “unprecedented” outbreak how did we manage to become so certain so quickly? How did we know within a week or so of the initial outbreak that we would need to “build back better”?
It’s almost as if the minds of our leaders were made up. That nothing short of a lockdown was necessary. But was the lockdown necessary to save us from this terrible, terrible, awful, massively deadly, terrifying virus that kills about 3 people, mostly very elderly, with prior health problems, out of every 1,000 people infected, or was lockdown essential to bring about a sufficient degree of economic and social collapse to actually necessitate building back better?
You see, unlike our government, I’m not certain. I don’t know whether we panicked and just had a grotesque over-reaction to a not-very-deadly virus, or whether there was some more sinister agenda at play. I’m more inclined to believe the latter here because our response to covid19 has been so disproportionate to the actual threat it poses. Not just a little bit disproportionate, but insanely disproportionate. As an example here consider vaccine passports. Given that the vaccines neither protect against infection or subsequent transmission to any great degree how do they make any sense from a medical point of view? If the vaccines do protect against infection then why on earth would restrictions based on passports be necessary? It’s just the latest in a very long line of absurd over-reactions.
As a scientist myself, what I’m really annoyed about is that for the last 20 months science has been strapped to a chair, tortured, waterboarded, had its cojones removed, and turned into a kind of double-agent for the state. Uncertainty is actually a closer description of the day-to-day state of scientists engaged in research. Science only proceeds through scepticism. Scepticism is the lifeblood of science.
The scientific method, for me, is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. In a nutshell it says that if your idea doesn’t match reality, your idea is wrong and needs changing. There is no such thing as “following the science” - only following the scientific method. It’s a method that pre-supposes continual scepticism and uncertainty. We’ve managed to forget this over the last 20 months.