Rishi Sunak: "it was a mistake to empower scientists during covid" ..your thoughts?

[Mr Gus]

theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/24/sunak-says-it-was-a-mistake-to-empower-scientists-during-covid-pandemic

I really don't know what to make of the above statement, suffice to say that after years of taking precautions on patients behalf, (in our private lives to minimise risk of transmission when the wife went to work)..our family was of the mindset that schools should have closed earlier & if they had not see have pulled her out anyway as pupils & staff absences due to covid got worse. (Wed have concocted something & pushed via medical vulnerability route to avoid stupid fines rules or simply stuck the finger up & said it was causing distress & dithering was placing pupils at risk & dealt with the flak later.

So whilst truss is increasingly looking like Thatcherbot mk2, I don't think multi milionaire sunak who has remained relatively unscathed in the "race" for pm status, is endearing himself to society in that potentially be would (if possible) have exposed far more families to covid, & a desperate nhs to even more workload in round one of covid.


Incidentally, automatic testing of inbound patients to the nhs stops imminently, same time that figures are out (& up) for this summers covid related deaths than last summer, ..more problems likely compounding a very hard winter for many.

[Bugtownboy]

My view has always been that we were ill prepared, as a society, for the pandemic. A pandemic caused by a novel respiratory virus was always going to happen.

There was a major multi-service planning exercise in 2016 - Operation Cygnus. The results of this exercise, in terms of readiness/preparation were largely ignored.

In my mind, we (society) should have been prepared for the pandemic. We should have known the actions that would have been taken nationally and what would have been expected of us personally.

Reacting two weeks earlier may have prevented some of the disaster of transferring patients into care homes.

People WFH, semi-isolating and using their stock of FFP3 masks, may have limited the spread.

Avoiding the hasty, panic driven response would, in my view, slowed the spread, the initial impact on the NHS and, perhaps, the number of fatalities.

A properly thought through plan with adequate resources (PPE, staffing and additional bed contingency) and behaviour/actions would have allowed a much more controlled response.

A major failure, and perhaps the greatest example of Cronyism, was the Test, Track and Trace system. Ignoring local disease surveillance units in the early stages of the disease, not increasing capacity in NHS labs and not having an emergency response agreed was a monumental failure, never mind a massive waste of money - as was the hurried ‘procurement’ of adequate PPE when there should have been at least a months central stockpile.

Did Scientists have too much influence ? Probably, but only because the politicians had derogated their responsibility to prepare for the inevitable.

[Mr Gus]

Well put, especially the last line BTB.

Why would we trust those proven to sell us down the river for what became massive personal profit (potentially) ..Christ knows what they have planned for us next.

Solid science & forecasting versus "demographic opinion strangers & leeches" !? ..I'll stick with the scientists thanks

[Stinsy]

I think we'd have done lots differently in retrospect, it was a moving situation with lots of noisy data, misinformation, and fear.

A few points:

• There is little doubt that schools closed too early and for too long. The effect of this dramatically widened inequality as middle-class children with their big gardens and parents working from home, alternated between enjoying a super-long summer holiday and being shamelessly drilled in academic subjects. All for a disease that hardly affects children.

• Scientists should never set policy. The job of making the difficult decisions that balance: health, the economy, and personal liberties, falls firmly on those accountable to the electorate. Let us not forget it was "scientists" (behavioural scientists) who advised strongly against locking down in the early days of the pandemic. (see below)

• Testing turned out to be good for retrospectively analysing the progress of COVID, but not much good at preventing spread by empowering individual isolation. Anecdote: my MiL visited an elderly relative Xmas Eve and tested negative before she left the house, came round ours Xmas Day testing negative again before coming, and on Boxing Day tested positive before she was supposed to go somewhere else. She had given COVID to the person she visited on Xmas Eve and to our family despite testing negative. I know plenty of other people (including members on here) who similarly took testing seriously and were very careful/diligent but still caught and spread COVID.

Here is a long Twitter thread by Dominic Cummings. You might not like the man, and his writing style takes effort to understand, but he gives unique insight into decisionmaking in government in the earlydays of the pandemic.

[Oldgreybeard]

The biggest single problem, bar none, were the massive cuts that were made to the pandemic planning provisions from 2010 onwards. I was peripherally involved in the process in the late 1990s through to the early 2000's and at that time there was a pretty good pandemic plan in place, with the start of a resourcing programme to ensure that we had enough kit, trained staff, emergency hospital beds, even respirators. The planning assumption back then was that there were two likely, and fairly closely related, candidate diseases, initially influenza and then SARS post-2003. The working assumption was that both influenza and SARS would need the same sort of response, as both impact health care services in much the same way.

Other countries were doing the same sort of planning, although some (mostly in Asia) placed a higher priority on another SARS outbreak, whilst we were still very much focussed on pandemic influenza. It's notable that the WHO has long considered the risk of pandemic influenza as being pretty high - that hasn't gone away because of Covid-19 (which is caused by a SARS virus). The bit I was involved with was the military assistance to the civil authorities element, specifically the way the resources available within the defence sector might play a part, under the long-standing MACA arrangements (the provisions that allow the military to help in a wide range of disaster scenarios).

Following the austerity measures under Cameron the whole pandemic planning programme was effectively shut down. No replacement PPE or medical supplies were procured, the teams working on refining and updating the pandemic response were disbanded to save money and what had been put together over the previous couple of decades was mothballed. By the time I retired there wasn't even a residual top level pandemic team, the job had fallen to a few volunteers in academia, who mostly just did work trying to keep up with what the most likely threat disease might be and how its effects might be modelled.

The fact that we made some major errors in the way the pandemic was tackled came as no surprise. What we saw was initial denial that it would be a major problem, then a stack of knee-jerk responses, some of which were of limited effectiveness, followed by measures that were often intended to make people feel they were doing something rather than measures that were effective. Add in that many of the government's cronies saw it as a golden opportunity to cash in, and the outcome was pretty inevitable. In many respects it was like rushing out to buy smoke alarms after a house has burned down.

[dan_b]

Sunak is losing badly in his campagin to plastic-Thatcher-Truss, and is now engaged in a bottom-scraping exercise to throw as much red meat to the extreme of the party membership as he possibly can. Everything he says now should be ignored. But he is a very stupid, very privileged, very short man, who like all of the current crop of Tory MPs feels completely empowered by the sense that lying is equal to truth.

[AE-NMidlands]

What I can't understand is that they are all MPs, elected on the same manifesto pledges, yet here we are with a pretty drastic set of changes being promised and not a peep anywhere about how parliamentary democracy is supposed to work, or any question about how such a massive change of direction is legitimate.
A

[Oldgreybeard]

What I can't understand is that they are all MPs, elected on the same manifesto pledges, yet here we are with a pretty drastic set of changes being promised and not a peep anywhere about how parliamentary democracy is supposed to work, or any question about how such a massive change of direction is legitimate.
A

How significant are manifesto pledges, though? They are mostly ignored or broken, I think the only one I can recall that was adhered to was Johnson and his "get Brexit done" pledge, and that was going to happen anyway as there had been a referendum long before he grabbed power. All politicians lie, and they also set the stage for their successors. Johnson is very proud of his tactic of lying to everyone as it suits him, he bragged about it on a TV interview so it's no secret. He was proven to lie about anything and everything so all those that have worked with him will have learned that lying is a workable tactic.

[Tinbum]

As someone who lost my mother to it and is still suffering from Long Covid some 2 1/2 years on from infection, with a life that is now totally ruined compared to my normal one, all this politics really annoys me. They are all pretty useless and can't even see the obvious. Common sense, in this modern world, has gone out of the window.

We were ill prepared , acted too late (I'd already pulled my kids from school before the announcement of schools closing) and now we are acting as if it's all over.

Government figures, other than the ONS, are of no use whatsoever. The Zoe Covid App was and still is the best source of what is actually going on at present time. The government pulled funding from that months ago despite it being one of the cheapest way of collecting data. Yes the current version does effect most people very mildly but a new version could change that very easily and we need to be prepared. The Government is still going on about the 4 classic symptoms of covid, (cough, fever, taste etc) but they haven't been valid for years. The taste one had been noticed and reported months before to the government before they recognised it as a symptom.

[Oldgreybeard]

Whenever I hear of politicians stating that experts should be ignored I'm reminded of George Orwell and this line from 1984:

"The Party told you to deny the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final and most essential command."