Jeremy Daines' 5th November 2020 Response to Jeremy Hunt's Email

From: Jeremy Daines 

Sent: 05 November 2020 14:16

To: Jeremy HUNT

Subject: RE: Letter from your constituent Jeremy Daines on 2 Nov 2020 Regarding Lockdown... Hoodwinked by SAGE again!

Dear Mr Hunt,

Thank you for providing an explanation.

It was fascinating watching the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) & Chief Medical Officer (CMO) defend themselves at the committee meeting (Science Committee-COVID) on Tuesday 3rd November (and then clarify things in writing afterwards).

In my line of business (technical consultancy), if you cannot present clearly and of course substantiate your material to your clients, you have failed at the first hurdle.

I am afraid you have been hoodwinked regarding the impossibility of protecting the vulnerable.

SAGE ignored protecting the vulnerable back in March. Imperial College’s Report-9 didn’t even make the blindingly obvious conclusion about death rate and increasing age, perhaps because they were focussed on modelling, or micro-metering a brick (in  blunt terms).

Below is my review of SAGE’s October summary of their position on what they call Segmentation, which isn’t the same as Protecting the Vulnerable. This is a crucial point.

You will see, (as with my review of Report-9), SAGE’s Segmentation summary report is rather poor.

It dives off into micro areas and, like in the spring, fails to see the bigger picture.  I suspect the over-bearing emphasis of modelling is largely to blame.

SAGE’s premise that it is impossible to protect the vulnerable is correct; it always was & will be; however, us sensible folk see that with a small investment the vast majority of people at risk of death could be helped to reduce the risk of them getting infected.  The Protect the Vulnerable approach understands risk and doesn’t attempt to reduce risk to Zero, whereas SAGE have used the zero risk element as their criteria.  Bad science yet again.

From my research, SAGE did not appear to present the obvious, first principle science on Covid, which was actually part of Imperial College’s Report-9 in February/March.  I can summarise it for you:

• For people younger than 60, 99% of those infected won’t die.

• For people in the age range 60 to 69, approximately 98% of those infected won’t die.

• For people in the age range 70-79, approximately 95% of those infected won’t die.

• And for people older than 80, approximately 91% of those infected also, won’t die.

Source: Imperial College, 16 March 2020 (Imperial College Report-9 Sep2020)

The government’s policy from March used fear when the science demonstrates there is no need for fear at all. This was a huge mistake, one repeated by many other countries except one.  You know which one, don’t you?

The government is not responsible for preventing people from coming into contact with Covid; that’s our personal decision.

We’d like our government to provide adequate medical & social care facilities to cope with the situation whilst we & businesses carry on living & working with the absolute minimum of extra burden; not lockdowns.

The government doesn’t seem to understand this, or if it does, then clearly it cannot govern competently.

If I were the government’s science advisor when the original flawed policies were enacted, I would have to resign because clearly my advice had not been:

a) presented correctly and/or

b) misunderstood and/or

c) ignored

I hold the scientists equally responsible for the hugely damaging policies since the spring. And now the government is repeating the same mistake.

It’s simply not possible to justify spending £300+ Billion suspending the economy in order to protect the NHS. And then do it a second time.

I suspect the prospect of the first vaccination programme, starting in the next month or two, will be considered a useful diversion to help people forget about the woeful science and policies?

Lastly, at the Science Committee meeting, this week, the CSO and CMO should have presented the exact same material & advice they had provided to the PM a few days prior.

Then, all MPs plus the public, would have known the exact basis prior to the Lockdown debate, which may have had a very different result at the vote.  That’s a true, proper democracy.

Below are conclusions/recommendations, which SAGE should have presented to the government back in March; followed by my quite critical review of SAGE’s Segmentation Summary paper (which can be downloaded here: SAGE's Paper on Segmentation 15Oct20.

Extract from Jeremy's letter to Professor Ferguson at Imperial College on 11th May 2020:

Jeremy's review of SAGE's Summary Advice on Segmentation published on 15th October 2020

 

I’d very much like to know who actually wrote this SAGE summary report; who reviewed it and signed-it off?

Regards,

Jeremy Daines

March 2021: Here's an interesting read on behind the scenes in the UK government during 2020: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56361599