Bad Science

The UK government – and possibly others, I don’t know – are fond of saying that public policy is guided by “the science”, as if there were a monolithic, objective body of knowledge and information, interpreted by sound logic and reason, on which all the “scientists” agree, and which provides a reliable guide to public policy decisions, such as the lockdown response to the epidemic.

Needless to say, this is self-serving tosh. While everyone from Boris “Killer” Johnson through to journalists and commentators, has become an instant expert on such concepts as the transmission number R (spoiling the effect by describing it as a “rate” when it has no time denominator), their claim to be following “the science” is only made to provide cover for bad decisions. The science of Coronavirus is, at the moment, a great sprawling mess. I have been reading (and, occasionally, writing) original scientific papers all my adult life (mostly in physics), and in the last two months, I’ve seen more papers that have been published without peer review than in the last 40 years put together. Many of them are very weak in terms of data, method, analysis and logic; for example, medical studies reporting uncontrolled trials of very small samples. The most important was the paper by Ferguson et al of Imperial College describing modelling work and making the infamous projection that without any non-pharmaceutical interventions (ie. lockdown), up to half a million could die in the UK. It has taken far too long for the source code of this model to be made available for examination by others, and it turns out to be very unreliable, yet it determined government policy.

One benefit of the epidemic is that many lay people have, for the first time, actually read a scientific paper and started to learn how to criticise such things. Scientists are no longer always regarded as unquestionable demigods the moment they don a white lab coat. The very word “scientist” needs to be qualified; a virologist may know a lot about viruses, but their opinions as to the implications of locking down the economy, for example, are no better than anyone else’s. I think most people appreciate the limits of expertise and are not easily dazzled by titles and qualifications. A skeptical approach is part of the scientific method; we should never accept an argument simply because an authority figure proposes it. The Royal Society motto “nullius in verba” (roughly, take nobody’s word for it), emphasises this principle. We must not allow science itself to become a matter of choosing the scientist most closely aligned with your own predetermined view. The essence of science is the open publication of data and independent review of experimental protocols. Press releases don’t count.

Many important decisions have been made, and will be made in future, based on the characteristic numbers of the epidemic. R is one of them, but is a lagging indicator which cannot be measured directly; it can only be calculated from other data which are themselves inherently backward-looking and subject to wide error margins. The overall proportion of the population infected by Coronavirus and the rate of change of this figure, is potentially an important number to know, but short of frequently testing a very large number of people, we have no reliable measure of it. It will, in any event, probably vary regionally, and according to things like population density. Similarly the proportion of infected people who are asymptomatic; the infection fatality rate; how long a person remains infectious; the degree of acquired immunity among those who have recovered; and the infection doubling rate, are also of interest, but difficult to measure with any accuracy, and several of these parameters can only be determined some time after the fact (once all cases can be resolved into “recovered” or “died” categories). Early estimates of mortality rates of a few percent now look like they were on the high side, leading to the shroud-waving model by Ferguson which suggested up to half a million UK deaths. It is only with substantial hindsight that we will have robust figures for the excess death rate (how many people died in April, for example, compared to previous Aprils), and thereby understand whether the current death figures are over- or under-counting the impact of the disease. Initial estimates are subject to significant biases caused by the selective use of testing, for example, and different rates of diagnosis between countries. Are we counting those who died of Covid, or those who died with Covid? How do we distinguish between the two? There is enough work in this to keep statisticians busy for many years.

Going from science to public policy is therefore not so much a process of going from A to B by cast-iron logic, but of dealing with immense levels of uncertainty. Talk of “the science” implies a level of mathematical certainty which just isn’t there. Into this uncertainty we must inject equally uncertain estimates of the harms (up to and including deaths) caused by policy responses. The economic damage already caused will lead to widespread unemployment and poverty which carries with it increased death rates from secondary effects such as poor nutrition, addictions, crime, domestic violence, suicide, alcoholism and so on.

There is no guarantee that a vaccine will be found which effectively prevents Covid-19. After all, we have no vaccine for HIV, and that’s been around for decades. Respiratory viruses are hard to block because they have direct access to the cells they attack. We may have more progress with treatments for the disease, which might do nothing for the spread of infection, but which reduce the infection fatality rate to a level which would be publicly acceptable. And, yes the public do understand that everybody dies sometime and it’s not up to Governments to stop that. People will always die, all we can do is make small changes around the edges of how and when they die. What we can expect governments to do, is not to make things worse, as our government has done. Sensible precautions could have prevented the disease spreading to the UK; indeed, at a global level, quicker introduction of travel restrictions might have kept the disease from leaving the Far East at all. Our government, like that in the USA, has effectively thrown care homes under the bus, as well as letting down the NHS through lack of spare capacity and PPE. Imposing a full lockdown was an admission of these failures; using a sledgehammer when a scalpel was needed. They are failing yet again by not using the time, bought at such vast expense, to prepare a test/trace/isolate regime for when restrictions are lifted. The worst outcome is that we destroy half our economy and get nothing in return; the disease just comes right back as soon as we relax the lockdown and we return to where we started, but with five million unemployed, the banks failing, and a no-deal Brexit just around the corner.

The threat to the UK posed by Coronavirus was obvious in January, when I started posting comments on it (such as, what would it take to lock down a city like London). That is, it was obvious to those paying attention, but apparently not to anyone in government. By the end of February, they had still got no further than advising us to sing while washing our hands. On 2^nd March, Johnson stated that the UK was “very, very well prepared”, while still shaking hands with dozens of people during a hospital visit. Head completely in the sand. 50,000 people attended the Cheltenham festival, and on 11^th March, 54,000 watched a football match at Anfield. People were still entering the UK from countries with high infection levels. Only on 23^rd March did the government make the big U-turn and take action; far too late. It was already known, weeks earlier, that Covid-19 was a threat mainly to the old and those with other illnesses; the death rate among young people in good shape is hardly different to background levels. The scalpel approach, which was still viable until around the time Italy went into lockdown on 9^th March, would have involved international travel restrictions; mass testing with tracing and isolation for those infected; simple distancing and mask wearing for the young and healthy; and the protective isolation of care homes. Instead, our government did the very opposite, keeping borders and airports wide open; giving up on testing; introducing “stay at home” restrictions on the young and healthy; and using care homes as a dumping ground for those pushed out of hospitals, taking their infections with them. The right approach had already been shown to work in Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan, which never imposed blanket lockdowns; Hong Kong has had only four deaths from Covid.

After nine weeks of this, many people are deciding for themselves to relax a little, led by Dominic Cummings, who drove a truck through the restrictions by going to stay with his elderly parents when he and his wife both had symptoms of Covid. He and Johnson have the brass neck to say this was OK; we have to ask, what part of “stay at home” don’t they understand? As for the “eyesight test” story about the trip to Barnard Castle, the pathetic feebleness of the excuse reminds me of Prince Andrew’s story about being unable to sweat. They obviously take us for dummies. Others, who respected the restrictions, had to allow loved ones to die alone, and were unable to visit sick relatives or go to funerals. Cummings, the “anti-elitist”, has clearly shown his contempt for the rules and his firm belief that he, as an important person, a member of the ruling caste, is exempt from them. The sacrifices and hardship the lockdown rules entailed for many – imagine a single mother in a high rise flat with toddlers climbing the walls, a parent dying in a care home, and no money coming in – was endured for the greater good. Now Johnson/Cummings have demonstrated that this sacrifice was just a sign of the credulous unimportance of little people. Their sense of impunity is the most offensive characteristic of the elite against which Cummings and Johnson have both sought to define themselves. That charade is over now, as is any hope that lockdown restrictions can be enforced.

So, when you hear “Killer” Johnson claiming to be guided by “the science”, remind yourself that the science of climate change is far better understood than that of Coronavirus, but public policy is doing almost nothing about it. It seems that the government does, indeed, pick and choose the science by which its decisions are guided.

What will survive the time of Covid?

As we start to feel our way out of lockdown, it’s worth asking, what will come back and what will be gone for good? Few people now expect that we can return to how things were before Covid-19 emerged. As I’ve said before, it has popped a bubble that was ready to burst, and the long term consequences will all be about that bursting, not the direct impact of the disease itself.

The lockdown was conceived as pressing the pause button on the economy, but this is a false analogy. An economy has no pause button; there is no mothball mode. The economy is being strangled. Businesses, starved of revenue, do not pause, they die, as surely as we die if deprived of air. Subsidies, loan guarantees and so on, are not simple drop-in replacements for revenue. Many businesses have now closed for good; their lost output is not stored as pent-up demand, but is a permanent loss. Those which survive will, in many cases, be saddled with a huge burden of debt.

For years, I’ve described how we allowed our manufacturing industries and brick/mortar businesses to decline, offshoring that area of mass employment to China and other countries, where companies have the freedom to exploit their workers and trash the environment. Having made ourselves over-reliant on unreliable supply chains in return for short term gains for a minority, we have discovered that this was actually a form of hidden and delayed cost, and the bill just came in. We are now suffering the consequences, and of course, the costs will be shared by us all, unlike the gains. We focused on the financial economy, confusing wealth concentration with wealth creation, and dismissing ordinary workers as a drag (scroungers, idlers, people who should get on their bikes), as if they were a load to be carried by the “wealth creators” who sat above them – the risk-taking masters of the universe who moved the big money around. In doing this, we built our house on sand.

Today, those who were previously dismissed as unskilled are revealed to be the only truly vital workers in the economy, the ones who absolutely have to go on working no matter what. Those masters of the universe can stop for a while and sit at home while the NHS, the utilities, the emergency services, the bin men, and the grocers get on with the functions that we most need, but refused to recognise and value as such. As one outcome of the time of Covid-19, those vital functions should be uprated very substantially in esteem, and in pay and conditions. Will it happen? Well, since most of them are in the public sector, don’t hold your breath. As for the financialised economy, revealed as a weak structure, it is proving once again that it only works if backstopped by the state. It is not a free-market, private enterprise after all; it relies on crony government to bail it out every time it gets into trouble. It needs to be scaled back and properly regulated; we have to recognise that good regulation is not “red tape”, it is what makes trade happen, but this is a basic challenge to the belief system of a fanatical right wing government.

The controlled demolition of the economy has accelerated many changes which had already begun. The decline of the high street; the closure of thousands of pubs; the decline of traditional advertising-funded TV and newspapers. Now, all the shops and pubs are shut, and many will never re-open. It’s tough, but it was happening anyway. Don’t fight the tide, like Canute. What’s new is the closure of travel, tourism and entertainment. After Covid, these will come back, but at nothing like the scale they were before. Those places which had become totally reliant on tourism were like monoculture farming, hit by a total crop failure. They will suffer like the pit towns of south Wales 30 years ago.

Is there anything positive about all this? Possibly, if we look at it the right way. I would start with the hierarchy of needs. Before Covid, we had taken the bottom layers for granted and were focused too much on the top layers. These are self-actualisation, served by industries like travel and tourism, the desire for experiences, the consumer economy, fashion-following etc; and the desire for esteem and respect, and all the froth and frippery that goes with that – competition for status symbols, positional goods, prestige, inflated titles and so on. This trend went hand in hand with the financialisation of the economy, the disparagement of manual work (“we think, they sweat”) and the god-like status awarded to “entrepreneurs” however ephemeral the businesses they start. The impact of Covid will force our attention to the lower layers, which are the basic life-sustaining needs of food, water, and shelter; and security of the person and property, employment, and health. These are largely met, in this country, by public services and utilities – the very industries which had to be kept working through the lockdown. After Covid, it will take time for people to raise their focus once again to the upper layers. We have the chance to use this time to rebuild our public sector, to make it robust and secure, properly funded and staffed, and to see this as the absolute necessary foundation that it is, rather than something to be run down, minimised, privatised and sneered at. The war fought by central government against local government has to end, and its primary weapon, the financial tourniquet, released. Covid should, if there is any justice, make the NHS politically bulletproof, although I doubt this will stop the fanatics in the Cabinet from seeking to privatise it further and sell off chunks to the US.

There will be millions of people unemployed, many of them long term. We’ve been round this block before, courtesy of Thatcher, and need not repeat the mistakes again. Rising industries, led by the return of offshored manufacturing, could provide a lot of jobs, but this will need some mechanism to be put in place to value the resilience of local supply chains. The market, on its own, cannot do this; it needs public policy action. We also need to get rid of the stigma attached to unemployment. Sadly, once again, a right wing government which holds the profound belief that only markets can recognise value and that public policy is always wrong, cannot do what is required.

Advertising-funded newspapers and TV were already declining; Covid will finish many of them. I would expect one or two print newspapers to fold and, most likely, Channel 4. Many theatres and cinemas will not re-open; even once they are allowed to fill their seats, who will want to sit in a crowded space for 3 hours with a hundred other people? Even once a vaccine has been distributed, many will just stay away. New media will eat their lunch. Even last year, Facebook and Google were taking an increasing share of advertising spending; they both need to be split up, reined in, and properly taxed, but again, our government has neither the will nor the power to do so.

We’ve just about stopped flying, and cut down hugely on driving. These will both bounce back to some extent, but with luck the new patterns of work will prove sticky. We don’t need a third runway at Heathrow; this is blindingly obvious. HS2 is a white elephant; local trains that work really well are what we actually need. Less car use is a great thing. It would be tragic if we threw public money at trying to do CPR on dead industries whose demise was always necessary.

You may have noticed a theme here. The lockdown response to Covid has been immensely destructive; however, there are opportunities to build a better world, but only a government with a mind open to such a thing can even attempt to do so. Our government wasted most of February and March advising us to avoid going on a cruise and to sing Happy Birthday while washing your hands. No attempt was made to limit or stop people coming into the country, even from areas where the disease was running riot, and around 20,000 people did exactly that, seeding the infection beyond all hope of containment. Nothing was done about ventilators, PPE or testing. The scale of this failure is staggering. No government has been so negligent in my lifetime. There is still no mass testing, no mask wearing, and inadequate supplies of PPE. The carnage in care homes is appalling. A cabinet full of yes-men appointed for their loyalty to Johnson and their Brexit fanaticism, rather than their competence, has shown the stuff it is made of.

Do not be fooled because the government abandoned right-wing shibboleths such as austerity, the small state, obsession over deficits, and the belief that markets are the sole source of truth. They discovered the magic money tree whose existence they denied, and have shaken it hard. But, deep down, they still believe the nonsense that comprises the main body of neoliberal economic theory, including such canards as trickle-down, the efficient markets hypothesis, the quantity theory of money, and the Phillips curve. None of these things actually work in the real economy. The right wing ideologies of austerity, deregulation, climate denialism, the historic strategic error of Brexit, and building up the wealth-concentrating finance economy at the expense of the wealth-creating real economy, are far more dangerous than the wacky beliefs of anti-vaccination groups or those who blame 5G for Covid-19. Those far-out, flat-Earth kind of beliefs have no real traction here in Britain, so are no threat, but the ideologies which drive our government’s policies are just as crazed. The most immediate avoidable disaster is a crash-out Brexit in just seven months time. Finally the government have admitted what they denied so loudly, that there will be customs checks at Irish Sea ports, but there is no time to implement them. Just when our economy lies bleeding on the floor, they are about to shovel sand into the gearbox. We may survive Covid, but will we survive the wrecking actions of Boris “killer” Johnson’s government?

One more point is worth considering. Governments have taken authoritarian powers to confine us, close down businesses, and impose sweeping restrictions on basic rights. Only a major threat to life could justify such powers, and only public support enables them to be imposed. All the same, a precedent has been set for government to take dictatorial powers on the back of a crisis. This appears to be a bigger issue in the USA, where many constitutional rights have effectively been suspended, despite the constitution not having any provision for suspension because there’s a bug going round. One obvious question is, who gets to decide what is a big enough emergency? How many anticipated deaths justify drastic measures with such severe impact? The point also arises, not so much whether the current public health emergency justifies such measures, but more fundamentally, that the only rights and freedoms which are worth anything, are those which always apply, even in difficult times. Are there any? What will be the long term changes in the balance of power between state and people? The right normally claims to be in favour of a small state, minimal government and maximum liberty (albeit with a focus on the liberties of the rich). But when push comes to shove, they reveal their tendency towards autocratic government. Johnson is a case in point; he talks the talk of freedom (“every Briton’s right to go to the pub” etc) but his actions – proroguing Parliament, for example – show his true colours to be dictatorial.

Logic and evidence have been abandoned

In my last post, I argued that the most credible explanation for the emergence of the novel Coronavirus as a human pathogen, is one that involved a laboratory. Since then, I’ve seen an increasing number of press articles supporting the belief that the novel Coronavirus emerged entirely naturally and without human agency – although they never specify the most significant details of this hypothesis, let alone any evidence – and describing the possibility that it passed through a laboratory as a “conspiracy theory” which is not supported by evidence. Despite (usually) acknowledging, grudgingly, that the available evidence is inconclusive, the tone of these articles is one of certainty. Usually they rely on appeals to authority (understandable, given their difficulty with finding any evidence); some prominent person or organisation is quoted as saying that they “believe” that the virus emerged entirely naturally.

The common logical error that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, is repeated: these articles always say that there is no evidence for the laboratory hypothesis (despite this being untrue) as if that disproved it. One possible laboratory hypothesis is this: over several years, agents for the WIV/CDC collected bats in the wild as experimental animals and brought them to Wuhan; the viruses were experimented on in the labs, possibly using gain-of-function techniques; and the novel virus, in either a half-adapted or fully-adapted form for human hosts, was then accidentally and negligently released from the lab (an incident which the Chinese themselves may or may not be aware of). Each step in this sequence is fully evidence-backed.

We know that the Wuhan labs collected and experimented on bats and bat viruses, because for a long time, they have published details of this sort of work in scientific journals. Indeed, they received American funding for exactly this kind of work. This explains both the geographical part of the journey (from the bat caves of rural China to the centre of a major city) and the timing (wild bats hibernate, so the move into the city probably happened some time before the disease outbreak in December). We also know they used Gain of Function experimental techniques, from those same publications; we also know from the published work that they looked specifically for the ability to bind to the human ACE2 receptor. We know that biosecurity is poor in these labs because several previous incidents of negligent releases from Chinese labs have been recorded, including releases of the SARS virus; and in 2018, US diplomats warned of poor standards specifically at the WIV, stating there was a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians. This doesn’t guarantee the escape of any particular bug from the lab, but the presence of holes in a bucket does make the escape of water from that bucket rather likely.

This hypothesis therefore involves nothing which has not happened before and been documented; nothing in this explanation is speculative or invented. There is plenty of high quality evidence for each step. Compare that to the official Act of God hypothesis, with no intermediate host species identified, no genetic trial-and-error incidents, and a pattern of infection showing that the virus was immediately highly virulent in humans, which is unusual for natural zoonotic events. The presence of an intermediate host animal (necessary to explain the geographical journey, as there were no bats in Wuhan outside the labs; and usually necessary for natural zoonotic transfer) has to be postulated without evidence; this is the great missing link in the Act of God explanation. Without the intermediate host, this narrative really doesn’t get off the ground. It would not be too hard to find; there are only a limited number of candidate species and a limited number of routes by which they come into central Wuhan. Only one infected specimen is required to fill this gap in the narrative (although, if you can find one, you can find any number, once you know where to look). Not only would finding this animal answer the big question, it would also enable public health action to prevent another outbreak, so if there isn’t a significant effort going on to find such an animal, one has to ask, why not? We might go as far as to say that unless the postulated intermediate host species can be positively identified soon, the Act of God hypothesis will be holed below the waterline.

In the Act of God narrative, the zoonotic jump, in particular the development of the ability to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, has been postulated to occur spontaneously and without detailed explanation (did that change happen in animals? Humans? When? How? leaving what traces?). Any attempt to explain the emergence of the novel Coronavirus has to address this specific point. Without such details, it is at most half a story which, although possible, doesn’t fit well to the few facts we have, and for which the most obvious kind of supporting evidence (an identified intermediate host) is rather glaringly absent. Science has a principle known as Occam’s razor, that the simplest explanation should be preferred over ones which require the presumption of additional steps, hidden entities, or complications. The lab hypothesis is the simplest because nothing has to be made up or speculated into existence; nothing is involved which has not happened before and been properly documented.

Supporters of the Act of God hypothesis claim that it has happened before (in the cases of SARS and MERS). However, in those cases, the natural processes left evidence of the early stages of the zoonotic jump and in particular, there were easily identified intermediate host animals. In the current case, an intermediate host is speculated on – Pangolins, maybe, or something else. Until such a host can be positively identified, there is “no evidence” for the Act of God narrative, while the lab hypothesis remains fully documented. I know which I prefer – until there is some new evidence. Anyone who “believes” (and this isn’t religion, it’s science – belief has no place) the Act of God story is ignoring the few known facts and clinging to an irrational idea for whatever reasons – politics or whatever – not following objective scientific logic.

The fact that Donald Trump has taken up the laboratory hypothesis as a way to attack China, has politicised the whole question. The Chinese themselves actively promote the wet market narrative (which is unable to explain the fact that the first known human patient had no connection with the market) as it makes them relatively innocent. Trump’s political critics and opponents – and I am one – have a motive to criticise whatever Trump comes out with. The virology profession, even outside China, has some incentive to avoid being blamed for doing dangerous experiments and negligently allowing bugs to escape. So, everyone has an agenda, a bias, and a reason to commit, prematurely, to a particular story of the origin of this disease. Which is a pity; the truth is less likely to come out if we all focus on politics rather than evidence and logic, and there will be a price to pay in lives.