science

A very worrying and telling truth to power article which explains a number of the systems failures underpinning the current impacts on particularly vulnerable people living in rural areas.  It tells us:

“Individually, they’re great people,” he says. “I’m not criticising individuals, but the system was a catastrophic failure.” As editor of the Lancet, he’s particularly aggrieved that the series of five academic papers the journal published in late January first describing the novel coronavirus in disturbing detail went unheeded. 

 “In several of the papers they talked about the importance of personal protective equipment,” he reminds me. “And the importance of testing, the importance of avoiding mass gatherings, the importance of considering school closure, the importance of lockdowns. All of the things that have happened in the last three months here, they’re all in those five papers.”

He still can’t understand why the government’s scientific advisers didn’t consult their counterparts in China. The world of medicine is a small one, he says, and everyone knows the people responsible for coordinating the Chinese government’s response. “These are people they could have literally sent an email to, or picked the phone up to, and said, ‘Hey, we read your paper in the Lancet, can it really be as bad as that? What is going on in Wuhan?’ And if they’d done that they would have found out that this was indeed as bad as described.”

He doesn’t know if such conversations took place, but he can’t see why, if they did, the response was so sluggish that the UK is second in the world, trailing only the much larger nation of the US, in the league of Covid-19 deaths. What he does know, from the published reports of Sage meetings, is that scientists were “trying to be as sensitive to economic issues as they were to health issues”. That, he says, “is a dangerous place to be” because it compromises the ability of the advisory group to protect health.

While the arena of public health is no stranger to heated disputes, it’s common for the antagonists to maintain a diplomatic front in public. Horton, who appeared on Question Time back in March and declared the government’s delay in locking down a “national scandal”, has never been shy about speaking out, but even by his own forthright standards, he seems to have abandoned all instincts for restraint.