The truth is, there's some crap science out there

Looking back at the blog posts here in the week or so before the UK lockdown on 24th March, it is clear we all knew the likely risk of the Wuhan virus – roughly, a fatality rate of 1% and an R rate of around 2.3. That would give around 520,000 excess deaths if no action was taken. Those figures came as the median values from a large range of speculative figures from a host of scientists, and like a normal distribution curve there were some extreme outliers at either end of the bell curve. One of which, as the Speccie reports, is being touted by anti-government broadcaster Channel 4 – a silly forecast of over three times the median forecasts, with a potential 1.7m fatalities, from numpty scientists in a competing department at Imperial.

The posts also record, to be frank, in the days before lockdown, the scientific prediction that the measures would reduce the number of excess deaths to around 20,000. Well, they were way off with that one. We’ve already had 64,000 excess deaths.

In fact, as emerging evidence now suggests, everyone was already taking isolating measures a week before lockdown, again reported in the Speccie. We really aren’t just sheep, and given the right information, we can make decisions for ourselves.

The confused but anti-government media are already making much of the testimony given by the discredited scientist Neil Ferguson to the Commons science select committee. Testimony that is patently false given the probability that the disease had peaked a week before lockdown.

It seems that there is still a lot of crap science out there, and I have great sympathy for Boris and ministers who can’t tell in advance who is a crap scientist and who is pukka, and even some sympathy for journalists who dropped all science in the fourth form in favour of arts and media subjects, and can’t even add up a shopping bill let alone understand pandemic maths. The idiocy comes when, as Peston does, they then attempt to explain science they don’t themselves understand.

Add to this the downright mendacity, distortion, omission and misrepresentation by scientific and government bodies when faced with scientific evidence they don’t like, ably documented by both Dick Puddlecote and Christopher Snowdon. Some crap science is because they don’t know better, some is because they refuse to listen. We need to be aware of both.