Copy
Dodgy Dossier Redux
View this email in your browser

Friday, April 24th, 2020
Dear Mustafa,

Fringe, crank, anti-science, and anti-government are but a few epithets that are about to be hurled in our direction for questioning the UK government’s strategy of a hard lockdown, instead of the earlier soft mitigation approach. To my surprise this abrupt change was based on a ‘headline grabbing’ internal Imperial College paper that was neither peer reviewed or scientifically tested. This was calmly explained by Prof. Johan Gieseckeng, the adviser to the Swedish government, in this understated interview. This lack of scrutiny and fear-mongering brought back memories of another policy-changing paper.

Seventeen years ago Tony Blair’s head of communications, Alistair Campbell, issued the infamous paper ‘Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation’. This document was one of the mainstays used to justify the ensuing Iraq War. A few months later in Radio 4’s ‘Today Programme’, the journalist Andrew Gilligan admitted that parts of the document had been ‘over-egged’, ‘sexed up’ or generally falsified. Thus the moniker ‘The Dodgy Dossier’ was born and a stain spread across the Iraq War and the rest of Tony’s Blair’s life and legacy.

Today it seems we are now in the grip of a new ‘dodgy dossier’ this time with the catchy title of ‘Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand’. The Imperial College team, on March 16th, stated that there would 500,000 deaths in the UK if there was no hard ‘lockdown’. This became the basis for the ‘U Turn’ that has left us all in strict purdah. Therefore, seeing as this paper has had a significant impact on our current lives and our futures, it behoves us to ask a few questions about it. What do we find?

As previously stated, it is not peer reviewed, it is based on an old 2006 flu model, it assumes no increase in health system capacity, and, critically, it believes the population will just be starting to be infected. Essentially it is untested and has inflexible assumptions, but its key outcome was to generate lots of fear and hasten a hard lockdown. A competing team at Oxford University (where Imperial’s author previously worked) came out with an alternative paper; it was also not peer reviewed and the key difference was the assumption that a high percentage of the population was already infected. Their solution was a soft, Sweden-like strategy.

For some reason government and Dr. Chris Witty (with whom Imperial’s author wrote a paper on ebola in 2014) preferred the hard-lockdown route…and so here we are in the fourth week of isolation with no debate and no exit plan. With fear hovering over us, like the Iraq war decision, we have become hostage to it. Conspiracy theories aside it does feel that, for some obscure, academic, unknown reasons we have been ‘dossiered’ again. This time the consequences will be felt by all of us, not just our armed forces.

I await the vitriol and hope to see you soon. Chris.
Forward to Friend Forward to Friend
Tweet Tweet
Share Share
Share Share
Download PDF Version
Read Earlier Postcards from Clarmond
unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences