At yesterday’s press conference on the
virus pandemic, both the Medical Officer for England and the Government’s
Scientific Advisor looked and sounded like people we could and should trust. Although with a bumbler of a PM, who looks totally out
of his depth when faced with a crisis about which he can’t simply crack a few
jokes, standing between them, some might argue that the bar was set quite low to
start with. Nevertheless, the other two gave every impression of knowing what they were talking about – and also admitting
what they don’t know, something which seems to be a cardinal sin for a
politician. And neither immediately struck
me as people who would be prepared to bend their scientific advice to fit
political convenience. Alternative
experts are, of course, available; some
of them with a much gloomier tale to tell, although it’s always possible that
they don’t have the same access to the latest data as the two brave men who
agreed to flank Boris Johnson.
And yet…
There’s inevitably still a nagging doubt in many minds when we see other
governments taking more drastic action and taking it sooner, with the WHO also
being critical of countries which leave the implementation of measures until
too late. I doubt that other political
leaders are being given radically different advice than that being given to the
UK Government. Even if the nationalistic
prejudice of Johnson to assume that ‘our’ scientists are better than everybody
else’s were based in fact, the ‘best’ scientific knowledge would never stay
only in one country; that simply isn’t the way that modern science works. It’s therefore reasonable to assume that all
governments are getting the same or similar scientific advice, and if they’re reaching
different conclusions, it’s reasonable to assume that they are weighting the
arguments rather differently.
The assertion
that “the […] two crucial goals – reducing the mortality rate and economic
impact – are incompatible” is an entirely reasonable one to make, and although
they didn’t put it quite as starkly as that, the two wise men and their
not-so-wise host basically admitted as much in the press conference yesterday: it is clear that different governments are placing different emphases on those
two goals. In essence, the more a
government prioritises the economy, the more premature deaths it is explicitly accepting. In this article
in the New York Times following the budget, its authors argued that the UK had,
effectively, decided to protect businesses rather than people – a decision
which means more deaths due to the virus than would otherwise be the case.
The PM himself has argued that one option
for responding to the virus is to simply “take it on the chin”, although he did
(as this
fact check makes clear) also say that it would be better to take some steps
to reduce the burden on the NHS. His
comments did, though, leave many wondering whether that he hadn’t been expressing
his basic instinct, even if he didn’t go as far as one journalist in the Telegraph
who suggested
that. “…COVID-19 might even prove
mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly
dependents”. For those who see just
about everything in economic terms, allowing the virus to do its worst whilst
mitigating the pressures on the NHS to the best extent possible is an entirely
rational response; it just isn’t one that most of us share. But it does seem that, in balancing the two
objectives of saving the economy and saving people, the UK Government has erred
more in the direction of the economy than most other governments. (Trump is, of course, another exception, although his motivation seems to be about neither people nor the economy, but about protecting his own business interests and ensuring his own re-election.) The Scottish Government has moved a bit
further in the other direction (earning the First Minister an entirely unworthy
barb from the PM about the alleged lower resilience of Scottish public services),
although the Welsh Government has disappointed to date.
The problem with a government which lies
instinctively and unhesitatingly is that people won’t trust it when it is
telling the truth. Even during this crisis,
we’ve had ministers making things up as they go along, such as the health
minister talking about contacts with the large supermarkets which simply hadn’t
happened. I want to be able to trust the
experts, and I have an instinctive faith in science, but I can’t help feeling
that being out of step with other major European countries is not a comfortable
place to be, particularly given the suspicion that the reason for being an
outlier is the PM’s desire to prioritise business over people.
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