Government Response to Covid-19 — [Sir Charles Walker in the Chair]

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 3:06 pm on 3 November 2020.

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Photo of Bob Seely Bob Seely Conservative, Isle of Wight 3:06, 3 November 2020

I thank my hon. Friend Richard Drax for securing the debate. It is a pleasure to follow Jim Shannon, and I am sorry for his recent loss.

I do not want to be negative, but I am going to be quite negative, so I apologise up front. There is a lot that the Government—especially Treasury—have done that is extremely good, and I know that all Ministers are working as hard as they can, but I am concerned that people are losing faith in their use of data and science. Because the debate is such an important one, I want to focus on that and to park a lot of the good stuff, although I am not ignoring it.

First, scientists are becoming increasingly sceptical about the use of lockdowns. Edinburgh’s Professor Woolhouse says that lockdowns are a strategy that is “visibly failing”. Oxford’s Carl Heneghan—thank God for him—says that lockdowns push peaks into the future, just requiring more lockdowns. Anyone who thinks we are all coming out of lockdown on 2 December is living in a parallel universe. One can dream about it, but frankly the reality is slight. Sunetra Gupta has said:

“Lockdown is a blunt...policy that forces the poorest and most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of…coronavirus.”

Everyone making decisions about coronavirus is in a well-paid job with a cushy pension. There are many people who are suffering about whom one cannot say that. The WHO says that lockdowns are a last resort.

So disturbed are Heneghan and Tom Jefferson by the use of Government stats—the predictions, projections and illustrations—that they have said that the Government’s use of them is “abysmal”. I would love to know from the Minister why she thinks that senior independent scientists are being quite so caustic about the Government’s use of facts.

One reason, as far as I can see, is Professor Ferguson and Imperial College. I shall be careful what I say, because they are professionals and worthy of respect, but Professor Ferguson has for 20 years had a history of predicting mass death from almost every public health emergency. I am not a scientist, so I will not quote myself; instead, I will quote a bunch of other people, because it is strongly in the public interest that the Government, as a matter of urgency, conduct a peer review of the evidence that they have been receiving.

Johan Giesecke, Sweden’s former chief epidemiologist, said Ferguson’s model was “not very good”. In academia that is fighting talk. The Washington Post quoted him as saying that the forecasts were almost hysterical. Lund University applied Ferguson’s models and found a massive difference between his predictions and what happened. Professor Angus Dalgleish said that there had been “lurid predictions”. Viscount Ridley has criticised Ferguson’s modellings. Professor Michael Thrusfield of the University of Edinburgh said that Ferguson’s modelling on foot and mouth was “severely flawed”. John Ioannidis of Stanford University said that

“major assumptions and estimates that are built in the calculations…seem to be substantially inflated”,

although he did say that the Imperial team seemed to be professional.

Other experts whom I have spoken to say that Imperial’s work is almost always an extreme outlier to normal forecasts. Yet it seems that the Government, because of their risk-averse nature—which I understand—have taken outliers as the norm, which they categorically are not. Let us look at Ferguson’s predictions: 150,000 deaths from foot and mouth disease, when the figure was between 50 and 50,000; 150 million worldwide from bird flu, when 282 died; and 65,000 British deaths from swine flu, when 457 died. I know that mitigations take place afterwards, but the Government need to look into some of the advice they are getting, because I think it is highly dangerous. Members of SAGE yesterday were arguing for a total shutdown, including schools, and I really wonder whether the Government are losing the plot over this. We are obsessive about the risks of covid.