One official commented: “You’ll be in a ministerial meeting and they’ll sort of talk in Latin but they’re sort of making what you’ll realise later is a joke about Brussels that everyone sort of understands.”

Ironically, the modern civil service was created to take on an elite which was popularly perceived as self-serving and corrupt. Victorian reformers wanted to do away with the “Old Corruption” that was prevalent in the higher echelons of the nascent British state of the 18^th and early 19^th century, when a culture of backroom deals, epic bribe-taking and aristocratic entitlement effectively meant that the privileges of public office were bartered like goods in the marketplace.

We owe our nickname for top officials, mandarins, to the way reform-minded politicians looked to the Chinese imperial civil service as a model of good governance and attributed its enduring success to the principle of open competition. For centuries, entry into the Chinese imperial civil service had depended on rigorous examinations known as the keju. Core subjects included philosophy and calligraphy. The Earl of Granville, speaking in the Lords in 1853, said that the system “enabled persons of the lowest origin to obtain the highest appointments”.

But this was far from the truth of it. According to Eleanor Olcott, writing for Engelsberg Ideas: “Only the sons of the wealthy, aristocratic, or literati classes could afford the classical training required to pass the test. Regional inequality was also a prohibitive factor: students in prosperous cities such as Beijing and Nanjing, where academic traditions were formed, had access to the latest study guides and trends in calligraphy that would score highly with the proctors.” Initially, the British civil service developed in a similar direction. It quickly became dominated by graduates of the public schools who had studied Classics at the elite universities.

But meritocracy wasn’t all myth. Rule by clever poshos has to be better than rule by idiotic poshos. In the 20^th century, changing social realities gave new impetus to the idea of meritocracy. After the war, clever grammar school boys had a lot of success in rising to the top. What the SMC report tells us is that the culture of the civil service reflects not so much that old class debate, but the factor which drives some of our most intense antagonisms: regional disparity, especially the broad gap between London and the rest of England.

First off, how could a Yorkshireman be confused by a cricket reference? The spirit of English cricket is as infused with Yorkshire mist and Lancastrian skies as it is with the Home Counties village green or the burbling of the MCC at Lord’s. Sir Len Hutton, the first professional captain of England, said: “In an England cricket eleven, the flesh may be of the South, but the bone is of the North. And the backbone is Yorkshire.” There are more regional accents in the English cricket team than in the Cabinet – the team’s changing room must be filled with the variety of our dialects. You can find the Lancashire burr, dulcet Yorkshiremen, a couple of Geordies, posh Surrey, even a shade of West Country in the corner.

The idea that posh people use Latin as a code can be quickly disposed of. Many of our legal terms are carried over from Latin: mutatis mutandis, etc. Hence, perhaps, the joke about Brussels. Britain has an extraordinary tradition of working-class didacticism in the classics. Our great industrial cities bear the mark to this day of ordinary people’s fascination with the history and literature of the ancient world – Thessaly Street in Battersea, Juvenal and Great Homer Street in North Liverpool.

I remember my late grandmother, brought up on a small tenant farm in the north-east of Scotland, absolutely loving classical quotations. She would enjoy recalling them. But the point wasn’t to demonstrate superior knowledge. They seemed to function for her like Bible sayings, a common phrase book including pearls of wisdom treasured and handed down from the generations before and instantly recognisable to all and sundry. It is counter-intuitive, but within living memory, fairly typical members of the working class might well have been just as likely to use classical references or quotations in off-hand jokes as their public school peers.

But back to Sir Humphrey: this really is a story of the new professional classes, overwhelmingly metropolitan in mindset and tastes, “calling out” an older style of officialdom which was once quite accessible to individuals of all classes who were inspired by the massive variety of our national culture to believe that they all had a place serving the administration of their country. Until fairly recently, it was taken as read that the Civil Service would continue to embody the spirit of the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan report, recruiting and promoting based on merit rather than “preferment, patronage or purchase”.

To genuinely break down the “secret code” of officialdom, we need a new wave of energy and inspiration to sweep into our institutions from outside the capital. Only then will we have the chance to prevent meritocracy from once more becoming myth.

The Ancients hotly debated Homer’s aversion to fish. In The Republic, Plato writes that Homer “does not feast them on fish, nor on boiled meat, but only on roast, which is what soldiers could most easily procure”. In the markets of 5^th century Athens, fish was a luxury product and cost big money. By contrast, the Alexandrian grammarian Aristarchus (c. 220 – c. 143 BC) believed that Homer viewed fish as a wretched food, not suitable for heroic, exalted bellies.

Now we know that Plato liked fish and Aristarchus didn’t. But what did Homer think? Anthropology can only get us so far. The Iliad and The Odyssey are poems – dramatic works that show us the world not as it is but as it should be. Achilles is the son of a Goddess, after all. The world of the epics is a mythical world – people do things differently there.

If the hero doesn’t eat fish, then we can be sure that the average 7^th century Joe certainly did, and plenty of it. Archaic dependency on fish as a basic foodstuff would have shadowed growing trade across the Aegean, piracy, and the ever-present perils of the sea. For the novelist Herman Melville, the quaint “docile earth” could never quite compete with the “subtleness of the sea”, encompassing “the horrors of the half-known life”. Homer is desperate for that “docile earth” to yield a kind of heroic self-sufficiency, while the sea remains a domain of great jeopardy, mass drownings, disaster and delay.

In the modern era, our dependency on the sea feels less threatening. Container ships might occasionally get stuck in canals, but they mostly plough stolidly on through the waves. Cruise liners bring the world of leisure to seafaring – why should we have to go “round the horn” without quoits, light entertainment and buffet suppers? And yet the sea retains the aura of the untamed and the catastrophic: our greed for fossil fuels will be paid for in rising sea levels, we believe – for each metre higher, some new, as yet unlooked for devastation is wrought on the peoples of the developing world.

In this country, the men who still depend on the seas for their livelihood, the dwindling numbers of fishermen, are viewed with mordant fascination. In the noughties, the BBC programme Trawlermen proved an unlikely hit running for several seasons. The cameras followed the various life stories of fishermen based in Peterhead, one of the biggest fishing docks in the UK. I remember being fascinated by these lonely, gruff characters, risking injury and storms and penury in pursuit of dwindling, silver-scaled riches. Or they’re romanticised – nautical wear is highly fashionable on the streets of Hackney.

And yet, the scenes that played out in Jersey this week remind us that fishermen will upset our tidy expectations of them. A new dispensation for French boats mediated by the Brexit deal and sustainable fishing provisions was greeted with rage across the Channel. There is a perception on the French side, shared too by some disgruntled Jerseyites, that London and Brussels should stop interfering and let the fishermen work it out for themselves.

As Walter Ellis of this parish noted this week, the relationship between the fishing communities of the islands and the mainland have been shaped more by the expediencies of place and local peculiarity than by national loyalty or maritime power politics: “Breton and Norman fishermen have worked the fishing grounds of what they call Les Iles Anglo-Normandes for at least 2,000 years. The 12 nautical mile-limit that accords states control of their offshore waters was not confirmed, as part of the Convention of the Law of the Sea, until 1982.”

And perhaps the fishermen should be allowed to sort it out for themselves. The peoples of Cornwall, Brittany and Normandy are united by more than history and geography. Not only do their coastlines resemble each other, but they bear the mark of centuries of shared labour, language and waters. In the last century, the boatmen even united in a common cause – the fight against fascism. 128 inhabitants, many of them under the age of 20, of the tiny island of Sein (just over 1,000 strong) off the west coast of Brittany sailed to Newlyn in Cornwall in five boats after they heard General de Gaulle’s radio broadcast heralding the fight for a Free France. “We will never forget the warmth of the welcome,” one of the islanders remarked later.

On meeting the Free French fighters in London, who numbered about 500, General de Gaulle said: “So the Ile de Sein is a quarter of France.” Throughout the rest of the war, Free French and British special operations exploited the links across the Channel, using the boatmen to mount ambitious escapades (although they were not always successful). One Free French officer wrote afterwards: “In effect there reigned at Newlyn an odour of secrecy and espionage. I met, without always identifying them, many of the actors in this silent war.”

With all the posturing over Brexit on both sides of the Channel (the tone set by our very own Boris “John Bull” Johnson and Napoléon redux Macron), it is worth remembering that those who make their living on the briny seas, traversing the deeps, are something of a breed apart. Homer had a point – maybe the landlubbers should stick to what they know, and they that do business in great waters should manage their own affairs.

I dimly recalled that it’s a relatively uncontroversial claim that portions of Roth’s novels bear the rather sticky pawprint of the sex-obsessed, in the same way that DH Lawrence’s violence towards women very obviously shapes his dark vision of the warring sexes in a perpetual fight to the death. Many of the great novels which defy simple judgements and interpretation via biography are produced by novelists who, at other points in their career, create work that merely reflects and indulges their unexamined prejudices and inherited traits. The very best novelists are capable of moving beyond their conditioning.  

It is some irony then that Blake Bailey, author of Philip Roth: The Biography, has himself been accused of multiple sexual assaults and harassment. Copies of the book are set to be pulped. Was this a case of the universe delivering a kind of rough poetic justice? It’s a nice parable for the dangers of making the “definitive” judgement about another’s life: let the biographer who is without sin cast the first stone…

To get a hold on these scenarios, we tend to fall back on tired debates: can you separate the art from the artist? We all have a stock answer ready to hand. A common contemporary assumption is that great novels are similar to the idea of a public school education, i.e. you might not enjoy bits of it, and it might be extremely unpleasant, but you will definitely leave a more “well-rounded” human being.

And yet the history of the novel tends to elude cliché – attempting to inhabit fiction’s “larger than life” protagonists can prove a risky business. In the early 19th century, Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers was banned in Leipzig after scores of youths were found to be committing suicide in imitation of its protagonist Young Werther, who comes to grief over a love affair. They even dressed the same as Werther, complete with an identikit pistol and yellow stockings.

If you can reduce art to its didactic qualities, you can just as easily go off in the other direction and fret about its perils, principally its capacity to contaminate the mind with its vivid impressions. After seeing Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, a paean to world-rejecting eroticism and love, Nietzsche said that he would be afraid to touch the score without gloves on.

There are further complications in the debate about whether bad people can make great art: a little historical distance tends to absolve artists from the very worst of sins. Does anyone think that choirs should stop recording Carlo Gesualdo’s music on the basis that he was a murderer? If anything, the notoriety of his life fascinates modern audiences just as keenly as his highly unusual and innovative music-making. In attempting to tease out what makes Gesualdo such a beguiling figure, the New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross had to conclude rather blandly that “if Gesualdo had not committed such shocking acts, we might not pay such close attention to his music. But if he had not written such shocking music we would not care so much about his deeds.” The painter Caravaggio’s antics (also a murderer) lend a certain “true crime” glamour to his paintings.

Genre matters too. Why do writers of books for children tend to be quite extraordinarily unpleasant? Arthur Ransome, author of tranquil boating novels, was a Stalinist shill. Roald Dahl was irredeemably anti-Semitic, long after it had ceased to be a fashionable attitude for men of his class. In the 80s, he wrote in the New Statesman: “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them [the Jews] for no reason.” Enid Blyton was loved by children all over the world for her novels and yet as a mother she was pitied and despised by her own neglected offspring. Philip Pullman routinely shows himself up as a complete prig on social media. Every adult recognises the uncanniness of children: they are both like us and unlike us. Perhaps it takes a special kind of big person to write convincingly for little people.

The modern debates over cancel culture should remind us that the history of the novel is a short chapter in a far richer and deeper story of ideological struggle and religious intolerance in the West. Pulping, burning, exile – all have played their role in our bitter relationship with the written word and its practitioners. The novel emerged in the 18th century, an era of vast transformation and renewal, when new ideologies took root and old religious certainties were shaken off for good. In the process, old views about representation and its worth – inherited from an era of bitter struggle over the Word and its truth value – subsisted alongside innovations that promoted personal, literary and stylistic freedom.

In our fashionable expectation that novelists should not only pursue the truth in their creative activities but also manifest a model of right conduct in their personal life, we are reproducing that inheritance in all its light and shade. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we like to think that writing well and living well are one and the same thing. We look to novelists to lend beauty and glory to our redemption song, only to find that they’ve joined in the wrong key, come in at the wrong time, and to cap it all elope with the choirmaster’s wife.

Stage two of the lockdown roadmap feels less conditional than the first – only being able to meet in parks left me with the faint notion that contact with others was still very much “at Her Majesty’s pleasure”. If “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”, as Kierkegaard once wrote, then the state is subjecting us mostly to anxiety, with dizziness and freedom as mere afterthoughts. The state has given us a roadmap, and its course may be diverted or even reversed at any time. If not now, then. If not then, then at some point.

“Enjoy summer safely” is the government’s mission statement – not so much an advertisement for Merrie England as for Boris’s toytown society, life at Boris’s Pleasure. Gone is the youthful libertarian columnist of the mid-2000s who promised, if asked to produce an identity card, to “masticate [it]… to the point of illegibility”.

In the first phase of the crisis, many members of Britain’s older generations ended up benefiting, in personal terms, from restrictions on their own freedoms. Although the risk of death or serious after-effects from the disease were many times higher for older people, the unexpected social and economic “wins” of Covid-19 have overwhelmingly accrued to the affluent elderly: the WFH economy works well for those with nice homes and leafy gardens.

Young people have been acquiescent in this process, partly because they feel an obligation to their elders, partly because they have been the generation to benefit most concretely from the furlough scheme.

But they expected that, once the vulnerable had been protected, a full resumption of normality would follow. And yet, in Boris’s toytown – in which society is remodelled on bio-secure terms – younger people will continue to feel that their lives are fundamentally constricted. The vaccinated over-50s will be insulated from the rougher edges of the checkpoint society – constant testing and travel effectively banned.

The more intelligent advocates for this nascent techno-authoritarianism appeal to the examples of Singapore or South Korea. If they can make it work, why not us? But this is a naïve view. Our fundamental attributes are not those of the thrusting new Asian democracies; Britain is instead far more comparable to a country like Japan. We are blessed with the twin attributes of an ageing society and a younger generation embracing a culture of withdrawal. The characteristics of the Japanese hikikomori generation (literally “pulling inward”) are replicated here – fewer young people have sex and more and more live with their parents.

It is not surprising that British Millennials are the most nostalgic generation – strange as it might seem, but young people are still marooned in the “Landfill indie” era of the mid-2000s. The most successful cultural product of Millennial culture is Sally Rooney’s Normal People, a paean to teenage angst, the world of the school disco and the school playing field, the university library and university parties. The future doesn’t look much better – if the Atom Bomb represented a potent source of anxiety for the post-war generation, it was a drama played out alongside multiplying socio-economic opportunities. It was also felt that its outcome was in the gift of our leaders. Now, to many, the climate crisis appears to be an emergency without realistic endpoint or political remedy.

We need a fundamental re-statement of what it means to live in a free society. At present, neither Millennials nor Boomers are willing to make that argument. The free society is not implied by the absence of constraint, any more than secular beliefs depend on the bald statement of the absence of God. It is constructed by people who, for a variety of reasons, maintain a shared interest in the state of being free.

In this country, the post-war period of rationing and control only eventually gave way because people demanded its conclusion – through legal challenge, democratic agitation, and an optimistic outlook. West Germany’s economic success story followed the quick relaxation of price controls and wartime measures. The terrible experience of the Occupation in France was followed by an awesome flowering of culture, new fashions, cinema, and philosophy. A newly confident working class in the UK produced not only Look Back in Anger and The Beatles, but Prime Ministers for the next few decades.

We need to remind ourselves that no roadmap can determine the terms on which we build the future. At present, it feels like stagnation is winning the day. Both young and old cannot allow that to continue.

But just five minutes away, in the model neighbourhood, peace reigns. The traffic is a mere thrum emanating from beyond the horizon. Where the side streets meet the High Street, little bollards, flower pots and seating areas box them off. Neighbours stop to chat in the middle of the road, kids cycle up and down. But move along a couple of blocks and one side street looks rather different. Cars jammed up, mounting pavements to make way for trucks. Air thickened with fumes, children nowhere to be seen. Its inhabitants look harried as they leave their houses – unlike their compatriots around the block.

The modern model neighbourhood is a “Low Traffic Neighbourhood” and it is the future of our cities. Endorsed by the government as a route to greening our urban centres and greeted with fervour by the new middle class, who like living in the city only in so far as it allows them to access good coffee and artisanal cheese, but resent its grit, its grime, its inherent dynamism and the proximity of the ‘precariat’ classes, who are now cast, post-pandemic, in the role of “disease reservoirs”.

Go almost anywhere in London and you will encounter the same phenomenon. Tranquil suburban-style roads fenced off by bollards, hedged off by main streets that have become either rat runs or gridlocked, depending on how much traffic is flowing along them. The old system of neighbourhoods, which grew up naturally –  with high streets, side streets and closes flowing into each other in the continual thrum of city life – has been hollowed out.

Instead, we have new structures that aspire to the grandest designs of Le Corbusier and the post-war planners. For the Le Corbusier vision of the “Radiant City”, a city of parks dotted with high towers, we have skyscrapers built around transport hubs leading directly into the city’s financial centre, most visibly in Lewisham, Vauxhall and Stratford. 

In the model neighbourhood, Tom and Barbara finally get to live their dream of The Good Life, this time within the city. Life is suddenly pre-lapsarian in quality, innocent – the Industrial Revolution might never have taken place.

Look more closely and all is not well nearby. There are high towers that don’t look quite so swish any more – viewed by many as ‘problem estates’, dominated by social pathologies. But tread softly here, because you tread on the dreams of long-dead men and women.

Indeed, LTNs are the latest chapter in a century of attacks by the planners on the very concept of city life. In her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the American city theorist Jane Jacobs identified planners as opponents of the “bad old city” (“The great city [to them] was Megalopolis, Tyrannopolis, Nekropolis: a monstrosity, a tyranny, a living death. It must go”). 

In (understandable) reaction to the great Victorian slums, where people once lived cheek by jowl, many post-war planners saw nothing more than a chaos, a great heaving morass of disease, poverty and sin. The slum inhabitants were to be resettled – and so they were: into large boxes of flats, set amid little patches of parkland. The aim was laudable, but its execution also destroyed much that was good in the life of the old city, even as it (still) failed to eliminate poverty.   

The wealthier inhabitants of the model modern neighbourhood do not seem to think much about their older, poorer neighbours – for they no longer seem to think of themselves as city-dwellers at all. They live in a radius demarcated by little journeys, at the most around fifteen minutes long. Their car lies disused; the whole family cycles now. But this new model modern neighbourhood is deprived of the very features that make cities worth living in: as Jacobs artfully put it, the “overlapping and interweaving” of life.

This greatest asset of cities, Jacobs argued, is that, as living organisms left to their own devices, urban centres facilitate the conditions for a constant flow of life, of ideas, of many meetings, the foundation of its security, its wellbeing, and its prosperity. Want to bring down street crime? Have a busy high street with thriving shops manned by concerned proprietors.

LTNs do indeed operate partly on that assumption. Is a constant flow of traffic really good for the high street? But the planned neighbourhood is not a living organism – it responds only as a marionette to the wishes, however well-intentioned, of the puppeteer: skewed by a broad class bias that asserts its right to security and cultural and political segregation above all else. 

LTNs are also presented, by their proponents, as a route to meeting our “climate objectives”, according to the literature from Ealing Council. In the long term, the climate crisis can only be combatted properly by drawing on all the qualities and reserves of the human character: city-dwellers and suburbanites, townspeople and villagers, farmers and fishermen. “Climate objectives”, when motivated simply in the pursuit of marginalising one of those historical forms of life at the expense of another are no longer fit to be called high ideals, but are in character almost sectarian, a sign of the hardening of men’s hearts. 

Suburbia writ large will not save the planet. And the implementation of divisive schemes like LTNs may well serve to diminish the reserves of solidarity we will all have to draw on in the coming fight over the climate, and the political concessions we may all have to make in the face of its increasing volatility.

But what freedoms matter to Britons, and under what conditions? Most are looking forward to seeing their friends and family again, going to pubs, restaurants and concerts, and having the right to travel restored.

A majority of the British public also favours making the freedom to go to the pub or to travel conditional upon a vaccine passport. Far fewer of us would put the right to protest high up on a “shopping list” of what we are allowed to do post-lockdown – a majority supports a ban on all political protest for the duration of the Covid restrictions.

The politics of protest have had a profound effect on British history, most notably in the way they crystallised the vast social changes of the 19^th and early 20^th century. But in England especially, there is less of a sense that the streets are the ultimate political authority than there is in, for example, France. Violent struggle didn’t just mark the year 1789 but happened repeatedly throughout the 19^th century, occasionally forcing regime change. The drama and imagery of the barricades, and violent protests rolling through the streets of Paris are a strong feature of the French imagination.

That may also explain why England’s radical tradition has focused far more on winning parliamentary representation than on spontaneous revolutionary actions. It is remarkable that during the past year, the liberal-left has been silent on both counts, both on the stymieing of the institution of Parliament and on the banning of the freedom of assembly and association for long periods.

Without an effective opposition, the government has had it all its own way in reshaping our perception of personal security, public space, and civil liberties to secure consent for its Covid-19 policies – compliance generated by fear and arbitrary enforcement.

In place of an opposition drawing on its rich dissenting tradition, we have had a Labour party that sticks only to meaningless bromides.

If only, the left’s argument goes, the government could perfect just the right amount of economic support, the right level of sick pay, the right amount of computer software to facilitate home learning, then lockdowns might be effected according to socially just principles. The fundamental political questions at stake are effectively parked off stage.

But if the events that unfolded on Clapham Common over the weekend – which highlighted the appalling state of our civil liberties, state overreach and abuse of power which have flourished under these bad laws – do not force the Labour leadership into a change of emphasis, then what is the point of their party?

Alastair Benn: A large proportion of the Covid debate focuses on the compliance to the rules and the emotional commitment that creates compliance – what’s missing?

Mike Hulme: The first place to start is to think about what is meant by an emergency. I’ve written about this in the context of climate change, which is my own field. What do people mean when they call for governments to declare a climate emergency? What sort of politics goes on in an emergency state?

History suggests that in an emergency state, it is not politics as usual. The state is empowered to appropriate more powers to itself, to take greater executive authority and to short-circuit or to sideline democratic institutions and processes. In the name of an emergency, a state can smuggle in a whole variety of measures that can be claimed, in a more enlightened state, to be justified in terms of a higher good.

The danger of that is that it perpetuates those emergency measures once the emergency is de-escalated. We should be wary when nation-states declare emergencies. During an emergency, there requires to be even greater scrutiny by the people of what a state does, simply because so many routine measures and procedures are short-circuited and bypassed.

Now, at the point when you are beginning to see the mass roll-out of vaccinations, this is another moment of danger. Certain measures may be relaxed, the emergency might be de-escalated. But who is deciding the exit strategy? Who is deciding which measures should be released, by when, and under what conditions? What are the residual emergency powers that states might retain for themselves?

In casual conversation, a lot of people will say, “once the vaccine has been rolled out, things will go back to normal again.” I don’t think that is going to be the case. What different citizens may deem to be normal will have to be fought for in order to restore some of these powers the state has arrogated to itself to the routine, democratic institutions. The end result of the discussion may be that we do want to live under quasi-emergency conditions.

AB: Is there a sense that with Covid-19 – or even with something like seasonal flu – that we make an adjustment that says “this is not something a civilised society tolerates”?

MH: The second entry point into this debate is through this notion of risk. How does any polity and the people within it see particular risks? This is heavily conditioned by history, culture and by politics. We know how diverse people’s risk perceptions are about a whole variety of things. Some are very risk tolerant. Some are very risk averse.

In a healthy society, you want to cultivate a diversity of risk-related behaviours. You wouldn’t want to eliminate risk takers nor would you would you want the entire population to be taking extreme risks all the time.

What sort of risk are we happy to live with as a collective? In Western societies, the last time we lived through a non-standard respiratory virus, a non-standard influenza, was in the late 1960s. It was nicknamed Hong Kong Flu. It killed about 30,000 people, more than a bad influenza winter. It certainly put strains on the medical professions at the time. Society did not lock down at all.

Fifty years on, we live in a very different cultural context. Partly, it has been conditioned by things like terrorism. We have very different information conduits. A risk, like a pandemic, which is not familiar can very rapidly be amplified into a terrorism-like dread. We know from psychology that risks that have that dread element, like the atomic bomb, like terrorism, that dread factor amplifies the perception of the risk. It can do so in very dramatic ways, especially through the media. We are in a position now where, broadly speaking, we have got our sense of risk out of proportion.

Particularly once you recognise that a vaccine eliminates the high-end impacts of the virus, i.e., case fatality rates and hospitalisations. What the vaccine does is claw us back to a particularly nasty annualised influenza-type outbreak. There will be infections, some illnesses and some deaths but it doesn’t warrant the type of dread narrative that seems to have become lodged in our society at large.

AB: Scientific progress is just one part of the picture.

MH: Unless you’ve got the perfect vaccine, the perfect roll-out and the perfect uptake, and you somehow eliminate coronavirus within a matter of months, it won’t produce those conditions. It doesn’t produce an automatic escape route. Those discussions still need to be had – what level of risk are we prepared to tolerate? Through a long process of social, medical and cultural evolution in the UK, we tolerate that between 5,000 and 20,000 people will die of influenza every year.

We tacitly agree that in the order of a couple of thousand people die on our roads and another 50,000 people have severe injuries in road accidents is an acceptable and tolerable risk. That creates a public health burden. This is exactly the conversation we need to have. Is it an extra 5,000 deaths? Is it an extra 20,000 people who are diagnosed with long Covid? What we choose suggests a model for relaxation. If you go for Zero Covid, that has a different set of consequences.

That is not a decision that a prime minister or a Cabinet or a medical elite should impose on 65 million citizens, at least not in the sort of democracy that I believe most British people still value. That is something that explicitly needs to be discussed and debated.

I frame this in terms of political struggle because there is a perception that people like me and Robert Dingwall [sociologist and member of NERVTAG] are coming at this from a libertarian-right view. It’s exactly the opposite. I am a long-term Labour voter and could never imagine myself voting for a Conservative candidate at any election. I believe that the basic issues at stake, about how we deal with risk and how we distribute the burden of risk across society, are social justice issues.

I believe social justice to be at the core of the Labour Party’s existence. The way the burden of the pandemic, for example, has been put onto children and young adults by shredding their education. Those of a left and liberal political instinct should be shouting about this. The only interventions by Labour and the Lib Dems have been to say that whenever the government does anything they should simply do in a more aggressive manner. They have not tried to lay out a political and ethical strategy about how you deal with the distribution of risk that comes from a pandemic.

AB: The public health measures designed to stop the spread of disease have had an uneven effect. The middle classes have avoided the worst effects – older working-class people and children have paid a big price.

MH: My field is environmentalism and climate change. There are those who see the precautionary principle as a way of attempting to eliminate risk altogether. It does tend to have a certain middle-class association. The whole environmentalist movement itself is a very white and middle-class movement. Recent criticisms of Extinction Rebellion have fallen along those lines. That can transfer across into a pandemic.

My generation, the middle-class baby-boomers have come out of this best – just as we came out of the recession in 2008 best and the various housing crises. The way we have dealt with this pandemic has put a huge burden on young people and young children, particularly young children who come from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. The cost to a child’s education when there is a challenging home environment is enormous. This comes back to my point about the distribution of risk in a pandemic. Who is actually bearing this burden? On the one hand, you could say, it is those people who have died. But you also have to look at all those constituencies in society who are carrying the costs of this particular form of lockdown.

AB: Re-socialising for someone like me is relatively easy – catching up with colleagues, organising a big pub trip with friends. How do we “re-socialise” children?

MH: Children are at an age when they are having to learn to socialise. This is why school is so critical. There’s no doubt that children who grow up just in a home environment have less rich social encounters. For young children, from four to seven, what school provides is experiences that show them how to socialise – how to give, to take and to share with others. If you lose a year of that socialisation, it’s going to take a long time to catch up. The children who fall further behind are those whose parents have other challenges in their lives.

To put this back together requires a political discussion. An epidemiologist with a model is very good within a narrow professional remit. But that certainly doesn’t give an epidemiologist or a public health official automatic authority over how and when policy measures should or should not be relaxed. That should be in the public realm.

If elected politicians cannot make those arguments, it must come from the grassroots. Citizens have to organise. This is the story of 300 hundred years of struggle in Western liberal democracies to get rights, the right of public association, lobbying and protest. I just fear that unless there is a much less aggressive environment in which we have the political debate about opening up again, it will be left to the medics, civil servants and Boris Johnson and his Cabinet to make these judgements. They will be heavily influenced by a medical philosophy rather than all the other considerations that people should be putting out there.

AB: Is there a case for repealing all the Covid legislation and having a Year Zero moment?

MH: In an emergency, states can find ways around venues of argumentation and deliberation like Parliament as long as emergency powers are called upon. Then it becomes harder for democrats to make that particular case. As the vaccine programme reaches a certain degree of penetration into society, it would be appropriate to suspend the emergency infrastructure that has been put in place. Parliament should be back in person with a proper schedule of debates and proposals. Government should be held properly to account by MPs representing their constituents.

We have been tutored in fear and in the idea that every possible sacrifice is justified to defeat the disease. How often have the war metaphors been motivated? There is this sense that this is a total war. We have to mobilise all levels of society in the process. People like myself are treated with some suspicion for raising these questions. You’re not one of us. You’re a fifth columnist working for the enemy.

AB: There’s been a lot of chatter about vaccine passports and freedom passes. Is this a question of whether we can get back to doing things safely or a fundamental change in our politics?

MH: That plays into another trope, a scientistic mode of thinking that says: “the perfect vaccine will come along, the perfect lateral flow test will come along in the future, we will lean upon science to lead a normal life.” Science will never provide that degree of certainty. There will always be ragged edges, surprises and new discoveries just round the corner. We should rest our re-socialisation on a common, shared conviction about what it means to be a free citizen in a liberal society.

AB: That’s an unfashionable view.

MH: It is very unfashionable. It is remarkable to me in eleven months how much our society has changed. Among my academic colleagues, I struggle to find people who would give me the time of day to voice these concerns. There are a few people around but even within the academy, which is notably left-leaning, there are very few people who will speak up in favour of this political vision.

Professor Robert Dingwall, who sits on the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, told Reaction:

“The 30 per cent more lethal claim about the virus rests on a very fragile and uncertain base of evidence. NERVTAG has expressed limited confidence in this figure, which should not be the basis for public alarm.”

He continued: “It is right not to hide possibly bad news but it is also quite wrong to exploit it to increase public fear and to try to shut down debates about the exit strategy from the current restrictions.”

“If, as seems likely, the vaccines are as effective against the Kent variant as the previous one, then any increase in risk, which is not proven, is only a temporary problem that will disappear as the vaccine programme rolls onward.”

Dingwall stressed that he is speaking in a personal capacity and not on behalf of NERVTAG. But his comments shed light on the debates within NERVTAG and SAGE over when to begin reducing restrictions, with some scientists wanting to maintain controls for as long as possible.

At a press conference in Downing Street on Friday, Boris Johnson said that the new Kent strain of the virus may be more lethal. He said: “We’ve been informed today in addition to spreading more quickly, it appears there is some evidence the new variant may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.”

He suggested that the virus could be as much as 30 per cent deadlier than the previous strain.

The Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and the government’s chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance, stressed that the data, which feeds into the government’s decision was uncertain, speaking at the same conference.

The story initially emerged on Twitter after ITV’s Robert Peston reported: “The government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (or Nervtag) has concluded that the new Covid-19 strain may be a bit more lethal than the existing strain.”

He was briefed about the story by the infectious disease modeller Neil Ferguson, who told Peston: “It is a realistic possibility that the new UK variant increases the risk of death… So for 60-year-olds, 13 in 1000 might die compared with 10 in 1000 for old strains.”

Given the uncertainty of the data, it is unclear why Ferguson, a controversial figure, thought it necessary to brief Peston before the relevant information had been properly disclosed. Critics may say that in a public health crisis, transparency and predictability in government decision-making is absolutely vital both to preserve public trust and to ensure proper accountability.

O’Brien has emerged as a prominent Twitter personality – as a trusted voice and crusader against the lies of lockdown sceptics. Along with the economist Sam Bowman he has founded a website chronicling mistakes made. And yet, is there not something unfair in the characterisation O’Brien makes of the debate as a fight between deniers and truth-seekers? If we are going to audit the comments of scientists over the whole course of the pandemic, the list of Covid “guilty men” might fruitfully be extended to Boris Johnson, Jenny Harries, Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance, Rishi Sunak, and Michael Gove all of whom have “got it wrong” on key issues (masks and travel restrictions being the most prominent).

In his Guardian piece, O’Brien calls out “motivated reasoning”. He argues that lockdown sceptics were misplaced in praising Sweden’s light-touch Covid strategy in the summer: “Libertarian Sweden was all the rage. Never mind that its death rate was 10 times that of its neighbours.”

But Sweden is not that similar to its neighbours – there is a reason why the sole country in Scandinavia to have made a really significant contribution to European geopolitics is Sweden, partly because of its relative size and its interconnectedness with the continent. Sweden is far more comparable to a country like Scotland – a couple of pretty densely populated cities with deep inequalities within urban areas. Death rates in the two countries are pretty similar and have tracked each other closely throughout the pandemic.

And yet, Scotland and the UK have been under severe restrictions for much of 2020. Sweden’s most hardcore gesture throughout much of the  pandemic has been to limit public gatherings to eight people. The UK government criminalises picnics. Claiming to furnish the debate with a factual basis is nothing more than a rhetorical ploy if nuance and context are left out of the picture.

Indeed, I can understand why it might be easier to dwell on comfortable bromides and blame “powerful Covid-sceptics” for the seemingly intractable nature of the crisis. Dunking on Toby Young is debating on easy mode – I would far rather our MPs engaged with the substantive issues at stake here. For how a society chooses to handle disease is a question that touches on deeply felt moral and political principles.

If we are to make accommodations to disease, and I am of the camp that says we should make accommodations, we must also instruct ourselves in the business of thinking very carefully about what accommodations are justified in light of the harms they cause. Is public health best served in the medium and long term by measures which appear to do little more than cultivate compliance by stoking fear?

O’Brien’s recent comments that “the countries that have done best during the crisis (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand) have tough health controls at the border” are of a piece with a new orthodoxy on Covid – that disease is dealt with best by hard, fast and brutal interventions structured around national priorities. Some form of enforcement at the borders may play a role in managing the pandemics of the future – but again, context is all. Japan is experiencing severe pressures on its hospitals. Taiwan is a city-state with far fewer border points than our own and Korea’s success is rooted in its remarkable ability to contain new outbreaks, not stop them altogether.

Do we really wish to mimic “Fortress Australia”? Swift action to contain an outbreak in Melbourne, which involved the quarantining of people in municipal tower blocks without food or medicine was ruled to be a human rights violation by a state investigator.

Neil O’Brien claims that his interventions qualitatively elevate the debate – but the practice of calling out media shock jocks is hardly very edifying. He might be better served in making the argument for lockdowns with a measure of coherency.

He might tell us, for example, what principles he can draw on to justify the extraordinary and unprecedented measures this government has taken. Why is it right to do these things? Why is it right for schools to be shut for extended periods? Why is it right for changes in the law to be forced via government diktat? We know that lockdowns shield the affluent from the threat of disease while the working class have to take greater risks – why is that right?

These are real political conflicts. And the debate cannot be conducted usefully if it is had in this argot of disinformation, fake news and rival shock jockery.

She lent us her bashed up Volkswagen to get around and the run of the place. The nights were spent merrily playing Neapolitan card games, listening to music and drinking – the dark curve of the bay silhouetted by a golden band of light, the bustling port of Salerno and its street lamps.

We sped around in the bashed up Volkswagen (by the end of the trip our designated driver was gesticulating, honking, effing and blinding as enthusiastically as any of the locals), winding through the little villages dotted along the coast. There is preserved an old-fashioned atmosphere with quiet beaches, paths down to the sea and quiet restaurants. If party bling is your thing, you can find it at Positano, which has been rather ruined by tourism.

Our soundtrack was a local radio station and we soon found out that soaring Italian pop tunes offer an excellent background to driving.

Things to do:

Swimming

There is nothing more pleasurable than pushing back into the water, head back, and surveying the precipices, houses nestled in higher up valleys and the deep blue sky.

Ruins at Paestum

More beautiful than Pompeii and Herculaneum to the north, Paestum has extraordinarily well-preserved temples dedicated to Hera and Athena with all of their columns intact. Because they are less well-known and far away from other tourist spots, they are not very busy at all. So you can sort of feel like you’re a visitor from an older time, during the era of the Grand Tour or the 19^th century era of excavation, discovering the beauties of antiquity when they were fresh and new.

Food

Just about every restaurant is incredibly pleasant and relatively inexpensive. So if you fancy inhaling industrial quantities of pasta (like me), you have plenty of options.

Today’s announcement fires the starting gun on a mass vaccination programme throughout the UK. Indeed, the conclusion of the European epidemic, which has been one of the world’s most devastating, is predicated on the approval and speedy distribution of the Oxford vaccine. An array of Western states, and the EU, have made a huge bet on its efficacy. That gamble appears, so far, to be paying off.

Various arguments have played out over the dosage schedules and the structure of the trials – were the results comparable? What protection is delivered after a single shot? – and yet, the salient point is surely that no one was hospitalised with Covid-19 who received the vaccine. We can now look forward to a point when hospital capacity can be managed in such a way that those who most need it can get the best care. The epidemic will then become a second or third order issue. It will fade away.

In political terms, if all goes well with the distribution phase, we might again believe in that innovative spirit of the mid-20th century when several devastating infectious diseases were eradicated. We might again believe in the value of what JFK, in his inaugural address, articulated as the “struggle against the common enemies of man.” And in time we may sincerely invoke “the wonders of science instead of its terrors.” For the pandemic has exposed its terrors too – especially in the form of an astonishing and virtually unprecedented collision of political authoritarianism with the speculations of leading mathematical modellers.

Camus, in his novel The Plague, voiced scepticism, towards the end of the fictionalised epidemic, that “plague can come and go without changing anything in men’s hearts.” The town of Oran “locks down” to keep the plague in and to prevent it spreading elsewhere. We locked down to try and keep it out. And we did so for many months on a national scale, preserving unprecedented restrictions on the nation’s activities even when cases dropped to virtually nil over the summer. In doing so, we hammered the life chances of the working poor in this country.

The harms of applying extreme restrictions designed to prevent a single disease are felt particularly acutely in Africa. Malaria deaths are set to increase for the first time in decades, according to the WHO, because of disruption in access to antimalarial treatments. Children under the age of five account for the majority of deaths from malaria.

We should herald the beginning of a new phase in the pandemic and applaud the British contribution, but we should also think very carefully and clearly over the next few months and years about what disease does to “men’s hearts,” and what changes we have wrought on our own societies. These are questions the biomedical sciences cannot give us a good answer to – but at least, they can afford us the time and the capacity to reflect, to celebrate and, eventually, to move on.

Libertarians, Aaronovitch argued, should recognise that the rules are malleable in practice; not really even a proper “lockdown”. He was right – up to a point. But the argument obscures the social dimension at stake and the deeper logic of lockdowns. The cultural and physical self-segregation of the professional class, or roughly approximated here as those who “live near big parks”, has been an ongoing phenomenon for most of my lifetime.

Let me direct you towards the films of Richard Curtis, a major contribution to the self-conception of the “new bourgeoisie”. In Love Actually, there are two types of people: the professional class, and the “help”. The professional class lives in a self-segregated world, of cynical love games, fancy kitchens and basically interchangeable forms of labour, whether the characters work in media, advertising or politics. Their preferences dominate both the public and the private sphere: They all send their children to the same lovely state school – elaborate Christmas nativity concert included.

The “help” only exists in the drama insofar as it accepts that the rules of the game are set by the professional class – the mute Portuguese servant wooed by Colin Firth’s character, the simpleton PA to the Prime Minister (Hugh Grant as a facsimile for Tony Blair). They are essentially invisible and indeed can only make their presence felt when they are recognised by the suave middle-class men of the piece, either because they find them sexually desirable or because they take pleasure in gently patronising their “unsubtle” sensibilities.

In the same way, lockdowns operate on the assumption that there are those in whose interests the rules are set, and who can creatively manage their lives so as to avoid the most extreme consequences of those rules. On the other hand, there are those invisible people, for whom the “rules” are not like that at all.

I recall the New York Times journalist Peter Goodman writing about his encounters with people outside of the professional class: “I was horrified to encounter a delivery man wheeling in a load of supplies without wearing a face mask.” He continues: “I asked the proprietor of our local… market why, despite regulations mandating masks, he was allowing unlimited numbers of people to enter his narrow premises… he gruffly waved me away.”

This is the paradox at the heart the new bourgeoisie’s attitude towards the new working class. It tells itself that its self-segregation is practised in a spirit of nobility, in a spirit of care, and yet it does not interrogate the extent to which it holds certain livelihoods to be dispensable, even loathsome.

This is the context for the revelation that Kay Burley broke rules on social distancing to have a get-together for her 60th birthday. She had friends travel across the country. She was photographed hugging a colleague. Her punishment is that she has been taken off air for six months. Pretty extreme you might think.

And yet, she may find that sympathy is in short supply. For it comes back to the social dimension. There are those for whom the new society works extremely well – and they are also those for whom the rules are mere misfortune, their consequences easily negotiated around. The invisible class has no such choice. In this respect Richard Curtis is a prophet for the world post-coronavirus. He saw quite accurately that the styles and status of the old aristocracies had a waning currency in the globalised, new millennium. The future belonged to the professionals. Woe betide you, if you, like the shopkeeper attempt to wave them gruffly away.

On the Great Barrington Declaration (that recommended an alternative approach to the blanket lockdowns and restrictions), Michael Gove had this to say: “How, practically, could we ensure that every older citizen, every diabetic, everyone with an underlying condition or impaired immune system was perfectly insulated from all contact with others for months to come?… No visits by carers or medical staff, no mixing of generations, the eviction of older citizens from the homes they share with younger?”

We have absolutely been in the business of quarantining whole swathes of the population for months – not perfectly, but as near as makes no odds. We have protected almost the whole professional class – or at least that class of people for whom virtual working approximates to white collar, office work. The comfortably well-off need not venture out much if at all, because working class people working as delivery drivers supply their every need.

Indeed, our economic life has been reshaped quite rapidly to suit the well-off. But a WFH economy is not an economy in which risk is evenly spread – it is an economy in which risk is overwhelmingly shouldered by the already vulnerable and by the poor.

The luxuries afforded by rapid supply chains, well-stocked supermarkets, and “Covid-secure” hospitality are paid for in the lives of the working classes, who are – as Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, told me – also those who have been made responsible for “building up the herd immunity that will eventually protect all of us”.

The virus is not like a rising tide, or “like a tap filling a bath” as Gove has it; rather, it is a cluster-driven disease which spreads in certain environments extremely rapidly.

A failure to account for the specific needs of the most vulnerable is not remedied by the vague aspiration that to protect the whole population, however imperfectly, is a more noble and more effective goal. The practical outcome of failing to think properly about the character of the virus and its aggressive effect on certain demographics has brought us the worst of all worlds – a world in which the vulnerable have been imperfectly protected along with the rest. And yet the risk posed by imperfect protections to those groups most in danger of severe disease and death is of a qualitatively different order of magnitude. They have in fact been asked to risk everything – even dying alone – in the name of protecting everyone to an imperfect degree and preventing contagion at any cost.

It is unfair to accuse the government’s critics of advocating outcomes that would be “indefensible” in a civilised society, when several of those outcomes have already come about on this administration’s watch.

A failure to preserve NHS capacity, Gove says, “would mean Covid-19 patients who could be saved would die; cancer patients who could be cured would be lost … the economy would grind to a halt, as a population we could not protect sought to save their loved ones; and the world would hang an indelible quarantine sign over our nation’s name.” All that might conceivably be true in a worst case scenario. And yet the historical record points in the other direction: that the harms inflicted by a public health strategy that accounts only for one disease over a long term period, but also bets the house on its general and absolute defeat, are “indefensible” by any reasonable standard.

We can plot the graphs that tell us “what might have been” – but these are acts of augury, not an analysis of what is really happening. Hedging the argument for lockdowns against a cavernous “What if?” is an artful loading of the dice in favour of the most robust action, the strongest, the most brutal measures.

For all manner of terrible things are justified and permitted in the reflected aura of that great “What if?”. Gove reminds us that “those costs are not ones we choose; they are ones we must endure.” But who gets to choose? And in whose interest?

Parliament has been effectively sidelined and denuded of its historic role – national policy has been made and remade on the hoof and announced via personal addresses to the nation by the PM. No amount of polling that shows any single course of action to be popular with the public can replace the processes that have long provided the context in which government makes its policies and justifies them. In 1940, the Norway debate in Parliament brought about a change in the course of the war – in 2020, the way the coronavirus legislation was structured effectively meant that such a turning of the tide could not happen.

The argument that tells itself “things could not have been otherwise”, that the “costs are not ones we choose” is a comfortable delusion. In Sweden, children were allowed to go to school; in Germany, they were allowed to sit their exams. In the UK, university students were sent back to campuses across the country, massively boosting case numbers in several cities that have experienced tough autumn epidemics. Things could have been otherwise.

We might like to fool ourselves that we are the most humane generation there has ever been, and we are taking these extraordinary decisions in light of a perfected sensibility that prides life and its preservation above all else. For what is more important than life? The reality is that what the government has done with its blunderbuss approach is merely to re-articulate, in the pathos of its grand solutions, an old rule of history: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Alastair Benn: What did SAGE get wrong early on in our pandemic response?

David Matthews: Take the issue of whether or not we should have screened people from flying from Wuhan into the UK early on. The standard answer was: “It’s pointless because if you catch the virus just before you get on the plane, we won’t be able to detect it with our methods for four or five days.” Well, that’s a debatable point. Half of the people who have the virus don’t show any symptoms. So you pick them up. And if it’s so completely pointless to screen people at airports, why did we do it for the Ebola outbreak? At the time, people coming back from West Africa were all screened. Public Health England put a lot of effort into it.

AB: What other mistakes were made in the first stages?

DM: There are large aspects of our response that I did not understand. It only really made sense in the context of a flu pandemic playbook which has been around for years. The impression I got was that they picked it up and started reading from page one and followed the instructions. First of all, this isn’t flu. Secondly, even if you accept that it is like flu, there are still things that I find baffling.

The government kept saying in the beginning that risk to the UK was low or medium. If the reproduction number is 3, then the risk to the UK is certain. It’s not low, or medium or maybe or probable or even very high. It is 100% certain that the virus is coming. In 2009, we had the Swine flu pandemic that went round the globe pretty much as the models would tell you it would go round the globe. I thought it was set in stone that any respiratory virus with an R0 of three would infect somewhere between a quarter and a third of the globe in about a year.

AB: What would a coronavirus playbook look like?

DM: Countries like China and Hong Kong, which experienced SARS full on, learnt that you need to stockpile PPE because you’re going to need a lot of it in order to deal with patients. The flu playbook is informed by cultural underlying assumptions we have about a flu pandemic. There are bunch of things we know about flu that we don’t know about coronaviruses.

With flu, you know there will be a vaccine in four to six months because we have vaccines for flu. We have manufacturing facilities for flu vaccines and we distribute them at large scale every year. We know that the cavalry is on its way as soon as the pandemic starts. In the meantime, we have drugs against flu, drugs that actually work. The list goes on. We know how to test for flu at scale. We have lots of different types of tests for flu. We have tests that show if people have been exposed to flu. We know how flu immunity works. We know how long that immunity will last. We even know what aspects of the genetic makeup of a particular strain of flu might make it more or less dangerous to humans.

We have tonnes and tonnes of information and infrastructure around flu. None of that exists for coronaviruses.

We know very little about the immunology of coronaviruses. We know relatively little about repeat reinfections. We have never had to test at scale for coronaviruses. We have never had to test at scale for coronavirus antibodies. There are no vaccines for coronaviruses and there are no drugs. Dexamethasone is not a drug against the virus – it is a drug against the immune response. All these things are missing.

We needed a playbook for a virus where you assume a standing start, where you have nothing. That may have been the problem. The flu pandemic playbook reflects in subtle ways deep underlying assumptions about how that kind of pandemic works. If you look at who dominates SAGE and NERVTAG in terms of the virus expertise, it is all flu people. A Corona-virologist was not brought in until April.

AB: What about the other coronaviruses? When did they come on the scene?

DM: The other coronaviruses have been around for a very long time. There’s a strain called OC43. A paper came out a few years ago that theorised that OC43 was a bovine coronavirus that jumped into humans around the 1880s and 90s. There was a global outbreak then of what was thought to be flu. The team who produced the paper did an analysis of the genetic makeup of OC43, wound back the evolutionary clock and came upon the explanation that OC43 jumped from cows to humans in the late 1800s. At that time there was an outbreak of bovine pneumonia which wiped out loads of herds of cattle that was closely followed by what was thought to be an outbreak of flu.

There’s no reason to suggest that that couldn’t be true. If you look for coronaviruses in cows you will find some. If you look for coronaviruses in humans you will find some. If you look in pretty much any mammal or in fact pretty much any vertebrate – snakes, frogs even –  you will find some. Every type of virus we know of in humans exists in other vertebrates. I’ve worked on adenovirus for most of my life. There are human adenoviruses. There are snake adenoviruses. There are frog adenoviruses.

AB: What’s the spark that sets the fire ablaze. How do viruses make the jump?

DM: Probably, these sorts of events are happening quite a lot. A virus that has successfully established itself in one species occasionally makes the jumps into others. If the virus can make a living in its new host, then it will do. If, in its business of replicating in its new host, say in jumping from cows to humans, that virus does enough damage and makes enough virus in your nose or in your mouth so that you can cough or sneeze the virus onto someone else, then that will sustain the infection.

The question is – what are the rules governing that? While humans and cows are both mammals, we do have a lot of differences. Because the virus infects individual cells in your body and it interacts with and uses all the machinery in your own cells, depending on how that virus replicates inside the cells, if the levers of power it needs are similar enough in humans, then the virus gets going and will become a success.

Viruses can mutate at quite a quick rate. If it turns out that when the virus replicates its own genetic instructions it will make some mistakes; if it turns out that some of those mistakes lead to progeny viruses that are better able to interact with proteins and levers of power inside your own cells, then that virus will get better at it.

That’s probably what happened when it jumped from cows to people. The cow would have been snotty, would have infected somebody. That virus would have infected somebody, then replicated in that individual, then maybe a small part of that virus would have emerged that would have been better able to infect humans, and that virus would have spread to someone else…

The second person would have been infected by hundreds and thousands of virus particles, some of which would have been genetically slightly different and better able to replicate in humans. They would start to dominate as they can replicate faster.

AB: What’s the best metaphor for the life of a virus?

DM: It’s a parasite, an extreme parasite. It carries very little information of its own, just enough to make copies of its own genetic instructions and form a protective particle around itself. Take foot and mouth disease, which ran through cattle a couple of decades ago in this country. It didn’t infect anybody. The proteins it finds in cows are presumably just too different in humans and so nothing happens. Your genetic makeup simply doesn’t interact with the virus so the virus replication doesn’t get off the ground.

AB: Do we have some protection from the novel coronavirus by virtue of exposure to the other coronaviruses?

DM: There is an argument that there are parts of the other coronaviruses that cause the common cold which look similar enough to this coronavirus that your immune response to the common cold coronaviruses might help you in a fight against this new coronavirus. That’s conceivable but it’s difficult to know how big a role that is playing.

AB: What do you expect will happen to SARS-CoV-2?

DM: Classically, what you would expect when a new virus establishes itself in a new population, that virus should become less dangerous. Less lethal versions of the virus spread further and faster in the population than lethal ones. The downside to that is that one way to become less lethal is to become worse at replicating, making it harder to spread. There’s a trade-off there.

The basis of that thinking comes from when we tried to control rabbits by using Myxomatosis in Australia. When they first introduced it, it was hugely lethal to rabbits. It had a 90 per cent fatality rate among rabbits. Over time that fatality rate fell quite dramatically. Rabbits became more resistant. They were genetically harder for the virus to make a living in. Those two things came together and now myxomatosis is endemic but it doesn’t have spectacular effects.

The difference here is that this virus is not 98% lethal: 98% of people survive it. It’s already not hugely lethal. There’s not really huge pressure on this virus to become less lethal. In people who die, they don’t catch the virus and die very quickly. They clearly are able to spread it around a fair bit before they become seriously ill.

What I expect to happen is several things – from a clinical management point of view, we will get better at handling patients. That’s happened already. That comes from experience. We have drugs that help us to manage the symptoms better. Vaccines will slow the spread and reduce your likelihood of needing hospitalisation. Once you’ve slowed the spread and you’ve reduced the need for hospitalisation, you ensure that those who are get the very best care. You’ve stacked the odds in their favour.

It’s almost impossible to say at this stage whether this is something we will have to live with. When we’ve dished out the vaccine to everybody and the virus is now in a world where most people have antibodies, we don’t know if the virus will change its appearance slightly so that the vaccines are not 100 per cent effective anymore. In order to do that, will the virus become less dangerous? Will we need to make new vaccines? Or will the ones we have be good enough to keep people out of intensive care?

AB: Why do children transmit it more poorly and seem less affected by it?

DM: It’s hard to think of a respiratory virus that, if it kills people, doesn’t kill children. That’s a real surprise. We have got to learn quickly about coronaviruses. We also have to learn quickly about viruses that we don’t have vaccines for and get some vaccines because there are other viruses out there that could make the jump. They could be incredibly dangerous. There’s a virus that we worked on in Australia called Hendra virus. It only infected a dozen people but it has a thirty per cent fatality rate. There’s a whole list of weird and wonderful viruses out there. That suggests that this may happen again and again and again.

AB: Are diseases of this kind the price of an interconnected world?

DM: The classic example for that is Measles. It could only have sustained itself in the human population in the last 10,000 years. Once you’ve had Measles and recovered you can’t catch it again. The immune system remembers it very well. Measles can only attack new borns. You have to have a certain population size to get a certain turnover rate of new borns in order to sustain Measles in a population. That’s been worked out at around 200,000.

It’s a classic anti-vaxxer argument that there were island communities without measles because they were immune, vaccines were introduced by Europeans, then they died. The reason why island communities didn’t have measles is because they didn’t have children fast enough to sustain it. The virus just died out.

Measles kills 1 in 4,000 people or so. If you remember the Ebola virus outbreak in 2014, that killed 11,000 people and caused a global freak-out. In that same year, measles killed 124,000 people despite a massive worldwide vaccination programme. It killed ten times as many people as Ebola in that year. No-one batted an eyelid. Why? Measles has a far low case fatality rate but it is ferociously spreadable. It has an R0 of 15.

AB: Will vaccines fundamentally change the terms of the debate?

DM: We are probably going to have to live with it still. Even though flu kills thousands of people every year and there is a flu vaccine, many people don’t take it. I imagine this virus is going to be added to the number of the reasons that mean you might end up in hospital with a serious, debilitating disease. It’s not a certainty but it’s a likely outcome of this. Herd immunity will come to us whether we come to it with a vaccine or not. At some point, the virus will have infected most people. We will get the vaccine, roll it out and it will reduce pressure on the healthcare system.

The question then is what the virus will do then. Maybe we will have to get a new generation of vaccines that target parts of the virus that don’t mutate easily. All viruses have bits that they can’t change. The question is working out where they are and how easy they are to target. What I would like is a big effort to study viruses in general. However, there was strong signalling early on from the government that they were only interested in vaccine work and work on drugs that might halt the virus rather than fundamental research into the virus and its virology.

AB: How do you read our failure to scale up testing?

DM: During the foot and mouth outbreak, a real issue was that we couldn’t test for the virus quickly enough. Testing and tracing contacts amongst cows was nearly impossible when you couldn’t test fast enough. The government built a facility that could large-scale test for foot and mouth disease. It was able to test 40 to 50,000 samples a week. To put that into context, the entire testing capacity of Public Health England was around 10,000 a week, maybe less. There was a facility near Weybridge that had five times the national testing capacity.

That was offered to the powers that be and nothing was done with it. That was a shocking ball drop. We could have switched on some lights and told people to come into work. That facility, the Animal and Plant Health Agency, were mandated to bring it up to speed once a year to show that it could operate. It was available at the very beginning of the outbreak. We could have massively raised our testing capacity. They had to abandon community testing. They weren’t interested in screening travellers. That facility was designed to receive clinical samples from all over the country and test them and give a rapid yes/no answer. This is exactly what we needed.

There was an arrogance in that. Why were they trying to reinvent the wheel?

AB: The government has now moved to an explicit mass testing strategy – what are your thoughts on that?

DM: That’s a good idea – test, test, test and test. The resistance to testing comes back to the fact that in the flu playbook testing is not considered key except at the very, very beginning when it is thought to be a good idea to test and isolate as many people as possible. Once you have no control over it, then basically you stop testing because you can’t keep up. Testing hard at the beginning buys you time. As soon as the pandemic starts you click go on the timer and watch it run to four to six months when the vaccine arrives. In that scenario, if you test at the beginning, that gives you time to suppress the virus for as long as you can.

Once it’s got out of hand, that’s when you give up. That’s the flu playbook. We have drugs that work for flu. You stockpile antibiotics because secondary bacterial infections normally kill you, not flu. It’s all well worked out for flu. But when you are faced with a virus where there are no vaccines and no drugs. There are no guarantees any of these vaccines could work. Indeed, there are viruses which have no vaccines even after decades and decades during which very bright immunologists have tried to find solutions, HIV, Hepatitis C, for example. Perhaps, faced with the situation they were in, reverting to the flu playbook felt safe and easy and comfortable.

AB: What role has modelling played in our failures?

DM: Our response has been very heavily led by modellers and modelling. It feels opaque. Nothing that the modellers have said so far has been any surprise given that it has followed pretty much what a virus which infects 3 people would be expected to do. In February, I predicted around 100,000 people. The Chief Medical Officer predicted 20,000. That would have been a miracle. There are aspects of the modelling where you could work it out on the back of a fag packet. You don’t need to spend millions of pounds on modelling to work that stuff out.

Dr David Matthews is a reader in Virology and Molecular Medicine Infection and Immunity at the University of Bristol. He has been a virologist for 30 years and has been working on dangerous human coronaviruses for the last 5 years. Dr Matthews is a founder member of the Bristol University COVID-19 Emergency Research (UNCOVER) Group which brings together a range of teams from all over the University including Biomedical Scientists, Clinicians, Epidemiologists and Social Scientists. 

These groups are working at both an international level as well as with regional PHE laboratories and Bristol City Council to overcome the disease and its impact locally and on the world.

A member of SAGE, Graham Medley, a professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, reflected on the way government scientists interpreted different models giving different results: “The whole point of SPI-M [pandemic modelling committee] is to generate a consensus view. We don’t rely on one model because a single model can easily be wrong. So what we try and do is to make sure we have at least three different independent groups saying this is our best guess, this is what we think is going to happen.”

Reasoning like this has played a huge role in shaping public appreciation of the crisis. We live in a world mapped out in curves and X and Y axes, representing demand for ICU beds, hospital surge capacity, numbers of infections, numbers of deaths. The past, present and even the future is staked out in these terms. What’s so revealing about Medley’s comments is that much of it is a kind of elegant delusion. How can you recognise simultaneously that a model can only ever produce a “best guess” and yet cleave to the notion that models, when taken together, generate “a consensus view”? In contrast, the historian, when confronted with two sources pointing towards different conclusions, would never simply conclude that the truth lies “somewhere in the middle”.

SAGE and its associated committees are practising a form of bureaucratised augury, based on the interpretation of omens. Although scepticism about the predictive value of prophecies is as old as the practice itself, that is not its primary value. The Roman philosopher Seneca wryly noted that “it makes no difference how many omens there might be [that allow us to make predictions]. Fate is single”. Prophecy is an art of consolation, a tribute to the gods, to their caprices and their shifting wills. The officials who worked in the great temples of the oracles dotted across the ancient world only allowed visitors to pose questions structured in such a way that the answers returned by the oracles could not be easily falsified.

Prophecy is not about telling the future – its proper function is to give us the ability to live productively in an uncertain world. It is the tribute the present pays to the future. That the scientific community has not the wit to articulate those basic truths to itself is testament to dreary, long-term trend in British public life – the valorisation of a narrowly defined technical expertise over practical knowledge.

In recent decades, we have found it easier to cede the public square to the kind of personality that Spanish writer Jose Ortega y Gasset classed as a “learned ignoramus”, master of “his own tiny corner of the universe” than to nurture a culture in which debate is encouraged and credentialism censured. How many “public health experts” have paraded merrily across our screens and across the broadsheets in the last year who patently have no real interest in either the public or its health?

Politics conducted via committees of eggheads never works. It didn’t work for America during the Vietnam War when Robert McNamara, a man whom James Reston adroitly observed in the NYT had “something… missing,” constructed his “monarchy” of the “best and brightest” to run the war effort. “Every quantitative measurement we have shows that we’re winning,” McNamara told the UPI reporter Neil Sheehan in 1962, on a visit to the country after a series of vicious Vietcong bombings which demonstrated beyond doubt the extent of the group’s resolve and its grip on the countryside.

Our current crop of experts indulge in, like McNamara, an incomplete picture of what counts as “winning” and an inability to reckon with phenomena and processes which do not give their truths up easily to “quantitative measurement.” That their view has been allowed to dominate is a political failure of quite extraordinary magnitude, the scope of which Boris Johnson and the Tory high command is nowhere near reckoning with.

In allowing the general course of social life to be governed by ridiculous diktat justified by a tendentious and crude science for an extended period of time, the Tory party has fostered qualities not far removed from those found in the countries scarred by the totalitarian experiments of the 20th century – rampant personal hypocrisy and equivocation, and a sense that the law’s sole purpose is to facilitate the wishes of politicians and serve the claims of power rather than to protect the individual. The stagnation will take decades to reverse.

Robert Dingwall has advised the British government on pandemic policy for nearly two decades. He is a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG), an expert committee which advises the government on the threat posed by new and emerging respiratory viruses.

He spoke to Reaction in a personal capacity.

Alastair Benn: Have we forgotten how to live with death?

Robert Dingwall: It is a characteristic of contemporary society that we have developed this conceit that we could live forever if only the technology were right or if only we might micro-manage our health correctly. In the process, we have lost sight of the fact that pretty much anything we do merely prolongs life, and that it often does so at the expense of the quality of life we live towards the end.

Brillat-Savarin, a French philosopher and early writer on cookery, recounted a conversation with his 90-year-old great grandmother who said: “When you get to my age, you get to realise that death is as necessary as life.” Death is a moment in living. It is our ultimate experience. The Stoic philosophers talk a lot about the importance of accepting death, of thinking about how to die well, rather than to struggle fruitlessly against it at great psychological cost.

AB: We see less death first hand.

RD: We see less of it in part because infant mortality is now very rare. The spacing out of generations means we don’t have to think through that experience. You might live 60 years before a parent dies in their 80s or 90s. In that time, you are not really forced to confront the reality of deaths among people who are close to you in ways that previous generations might have done.

AB: Why did the Spanish Flu, even with its huge mortality, leave less of an imprint on history than other events of the time?

RD: You have to remember that in 1918 you are on the cusp of a major social change. It’s really the point at which the average patient going into the average hospital being seen by the average doctor is going to see some benefit from it. It is one of the frequent anachronisms of historical novels or films about 19^th century history – the notion that the medicine has any effectiveness. That people go to a doctor and expect to be cured as opposed maybe having some alleviation of their symptoms or some psychological benefit to having a label attached to their condition. Up to the First World War, most medical interventions don’t achieve very much.

Things had been developing very rapidly in the leading centres from the 1890s onwards. What the First World War is to drive forward some fairly significant improvements and make those generally more available. The population in 1918 are drawing on a very different understanding of the relationship between medicine and illness and what it is possible to achieve than would be the case in 2020.

There is also an acceptance of death – not a cult of death, as the Victorians would have had it. What you saw was much more typical of responses to responses to infectious disease over the hundred years previously. When infectious diseases first arrive in a population, there is a great panic. If you go back to the 14^th century and read accounts of the Black Death, people are convinced that they are all doomed.

The Black Death does have a huge mortality. It keeps coming back. But the population is more resistant. The authorities have some way of managing it. Essentially, it is bureaucratised. It is regarded as one of the hazards of life. These things happen from time to time. They are not existential threats to humankind. We can live with them.

That’s been broadly true of influenza ever since. I was in my first year at university in ‘68 and I have no particular memory of the 1968 flu pandemic being disruptive to my time there. What we’ve had this year is a little more comparable to what happened with the early years of HIV in the eighties. It was a similar kind of social panic. In those years, we thought, well, perhaps, we are all going to die.

We then realised that the disease is entirely manageable through simple precautionary measures that are not disruptive to ordinary life. Within a few years, we got reasonably effective therapies. Forty years on, we still don’t have a vaccine but we have an effective preventive therapy. We learned to live with it. The question with Covid-19 is how long it takes to accept that this is not something we can eradicate.

This will rumble along at a low level in our societies for many years to come. A vaccine may play some part in control. But it will ultimately be our choice how far we tear up our society by the roots in the process. We may have to accept that most of us will get this once or twice, or three or four times in our lives. It may be the thing that accelerates our death at the point that we are already frail from our other causes.

AB: How do we repair the damage our preventative measures have made on social life?

RD: Part of the problem has been this reluctance to recognise that when you have a novel disease, which is new to medicine, all you can do is try to slow the transmission enough to allow the biomedical sciences to catch up. We saw that early on with HIV. It was such a radically new kind of virus. Nobody really had a great understanding of this strange phenomenon of retroviruses. It was quite clear that any sort of vaccine would be years off. The only thing we could do was persuade people to take more precautions in their sexual relations.

The condom is a well-established technology and was useful. We also tightened up PPE in a few environments. Dentistry became concerned with transmission risk, for example. Dentists started wearing gloves, masks or visors. There were new technologies to reduce aerosol sprays. All these things happened in a short period with a very clear specification of what the risk was and what the action might be.

During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2013 there was not enough attention to social behaviour in the early management of the outbreak. You had people from organisations like MSF, very medically dominated, who were driving up to remote villages in white land-cruisers, grabbing bodies, putting them in body bags and carting them off, and wondering why villagers were throwing stones at them and hiding the corpses.

It took a while for the people managing the outbreak to recognise that they had to talk to anthropologists who could illuminate the significance of the dead body in the traditions of the people in those villages. Once that was better understood there were ways of accommodating the response with that and improving it. This actually brought the outbreak significantly under control.

We have failed to learn these lessons with Covid-19. The leadership has fallen to a particular group of medical and biomedical scientists. Many of them are brilliant people. But they have a particular way of understanding the world. They have a rather narrow conception of what kinds of knowledge are relevant in the development of those kinds of interventions.

AB: What kinds of assumptions drive that worldview?

RD: There is an issue about the moral nature of medicine. Biology is morally neutral. Biologists look at relationships between organisms. Some of those relationships are supportive. Some of them involve one organism flourishing at the expense of another. There is no moral agenda there. But when you turn to the biomedical scientists, you have this rather different notion – you have words like “infection” or “disease” which are simultaneously scientific terms and moral terms.

An infection is something to be corrected. The biomedical scientist doesn’t just watch nature happening. The objective is to correct nature and improve on nature. If there is an outcome that can be defined as socially or morally harmful, the thinking goes, then something must be done about it. You have an instant lock-in. Covid-19 is an infection. Something must be done and the thing that must be done must be led by the biomedical world.

AB: It’s a worldview then that does not allow itself to be limited by the insights of other fields of knowledge.

RD: What we’ve got is essentially a techno-scientific approach which rarely stops to ask itself the question – what is the point? What are we trying to achieve here? What is achievable? We have had this distortion of priorities. Many other causes of death are now considered to be less important than Covid deaths. We have the evidence of exceptionally high rates of death from cancer and heart conditions and so on. Somehow these don’t count in the balance in the same way.

We are not looking at managing all deaths and thinking about the place of Covid deaths within them. What we are thinking is – we must address the Covid problem. The attempts to question whether this is an appropriate priority tend to be dismissed as immoral simply because they tend to challenge the implicit and unexamined moral agenda of a particular section of the biomedical world.

AB: The debate also includes things that are far outside the biomedical viewpoint – there is a sense that the disease is conceived of as a disease of city dwellers. I’ve felt that travelling out of London to rural areas.

RD: That is provoked by a fashion for the pastoral, the fashion to argue that the city should be constructed around the 10 minute, 15 minute or 20 minute neighbourhood. This idea that our lives should be lived within walking radius. These are things which early sociologists very much wrote against. These were the visions of a particular kind of conservative at the end of the 19^th century. The idea that the problems of urban life would be resolved by a return to the countryside, that the disruptive working class should be encouraged to be jolly peasants, live in thatched cottages and keep a couple of pigs out back. Particularly a German sociologist called Georg Simmel was very suspicious of this.

Simmel writes about the dynamism of cities. Cities are precisely the place where innovation happens, where people get mixed up, where you get diverse communities. In that diversity, new ideas, new technologies and new social orders emerge. That’s something that has a big influence on American sociology in the 1920s. Look at a city like Chicago which had many problems, illness, poverty and environmental degradation. But at the heart of it there is this great energy and dynamism that comes from mixing, the encounters of people of different values and talents.

All of that energy crystallises in this sense that the city is a place where the future happens. The 15-minute neighbourhood? What does that say? It says that we will only live in a neighbourhood composed of people like us. It is instantly a recipe for social and ethnic separation. Those places still need to be joined up. So what do we have? We have an underclass of people, the successors of the gig economy if you like, who transport all the things around between the 15-minute neighbourhoods. They are an invisible servant class. Nobody talks about them inside the 15-minute neighbourhood. This is the social exclusiveness that would emerge from this model of city life.

I would also say that we have yet to create a virtual environment that is capable of generating the random encounters of the city. The virtualisation of a lot of activities means we are burning through a legacy of social capital which we are not renewing. The relationships we would have formed with colleagues, the processes by which new people would join organisations and learn new things. The encounters we might have in the coffee shop or the pub. All of those things have been stripped away. The result will ultimately be a social, economic and intellectual impoverishment.

AB: A lot of the antagonism about the disease has fallen along generational lines – young people as spreaders, old people hoarding capital.

RD: Intergenerational tensions have been rummaging around for much of the last decade. The economic and political failures of the last 20 years have created tensions between people like myself, at the tag end of the baby-boomers, who, looking from a 2020 perspective have had an extraordinarily privileged life. It might not have felt like that at the time. Until 2008, we thought that we had worked all our lives, we were part of a buoyant society, we thought we were entirely justified in taking our inflation-proof pensions.

All of a sudden the world changes economically. People in their 20s, 30s, coming into their 40s even, are more likely to live in a more pressured environment. They are much poorer. That poverty will be greatly accentuated by lockdowns. We are going to be a much poorer country for a generation and the baby boomers have locked in their gains. That is inevitably a source of some tension.

We have this rather unhelpful bifurcation that you have described. I personally think that a zero-Covid strategy is chasing unicorns. This is not a disease we can eliminate. This a disease we are going to have to learn to live with at some level. Even if a vaccine comes along the thinking seems to be that that the vaccine would be part of a portfolio of interventions and we will need to have a discussion about the measures we should keep on alongside the vaccine. There will be people who desire for the vaccine just to be added to the current package. I’m hoping to push for a different view, a zero-based approach. Any continued restriction has to justify itself on the basis of evidence. If it cannot do so, we stop doing it.

One of the mistakes of the Great Barrington Declaration is to put everyone over 65 into the same category of risk. The risk is not evenly distributed among those at a given age. Most of the risk even for people in their 90s the risk is carried by a small number of people. Some should be allowed to shield and supported in that endeavour. For others, it is much better to give people information about the additional risks that they carry and inviting them to make their own choices. It comes back to this rather patrician stance, adopted by elements of the biomedical world, that we should be able to micromanage the everyday lives of other people to achieve a vision of health that they have decreed but which other people might not necessarily share.

AB: I was sceptical early on about the wartime rhetoric that emerged early on, clearly motivated by a search for the spirit of ‘45. The Second World War created a very different, new social order, a new consensus across the West among policymakers about what had to be done. But disease tends to amplify existing social antagonisms. The ancient poet Hesiod blames the emergence of disease on women via the myth of Pandora, for example.

RD: These are really unhelpful ways of trying to think about a disruption in the equilibrium between humanity and nature. It is generally accepted that infectious diseases are a phenomenon of the emergence of human settlements about 15,000 years ago. Prior to that they couldn’t transmit with sufficient freedom for the organism to become established in human society. The Covid-19 pandemic is layered onto existing social tensions and inequalities. It has been a stress test for a lot of states and societies.

It is fundamentally different from warfare. It is not at all clear what would count as winning and losing. You can mobilise a population in warfare to a degree around the notion that one day we can hoist all the flags and declare that we won. It didn’t work like that for my generation with Vietnam, or more contemporary generations in Iraq. If people cannot see an endgame, it is very hard to sustain that solidarity. Nobody is prepared to talk about the endgame. When Keir Starmer demands a temporary circuit breaker it is just kicking the can down the road. There is no vision of “how do we bring this pain to an end.”

In that context, it is not surprising that people become more and more mutinous, more and more grumbling. It is quite hard to imagine a real popular mobilisation when you have the full forces of the state weighed against that. But the idea of what I would describe as compliance without commitment. People will put on a face covering to go into a supermarket without any belief in it but simply to just avoid trouble and conflict. This doesn’t feel like a very good way for people to go about living their lives.

He had fascinating insights into the specific dynamics of the novel Coronavirus – its transmission is “overdispersed”, he argues, rather than homogeneous. It also depends on superspreaders.

The government’s thinking on “second waves” is based on flu modelling and is a poor way to understand the virus, he told me.

Alastair Benn: What are the special characteristics of SARS-CoV-2?

Hugh Pennington: It’s one of the characteristics of this virus that it causes big outbreaks in certain areas. Meatpacking plants, for example, in Europe and the US, or student halls, where people are in close quarters in large numbers. It’s a slightly curious phenomenon with this virus. We don’t see that to anywhere near the same degree with Influenza. We do have institutional outbreaks but it’s much more schools than universities. Children are very good amplifiers of Influenza but they’re not, fortunately, good amplifiers of this virus.

They don’t spread it easily to each other. They can catch it and transmit but they’re much poorer at transmitting the virus. They are also much less likely to have serious illness than with flu. A very small number have serious complications but this isn’t likely to be a direct effect of the virus – this is a delayed complication. It is very rare.

The one outstanding property of this virus which makes it unique among viruses and bacteria is the very strong relationship between age and having a hard time. The graph is a straight line – the older you are, the more likely you are to die of this. In most viruses and many bacteria, elderly people do have a harder time. That’s been the case for flu and we’ve known that for many years. Every so often flu gets into a care home and there is very high mortality. But flu is different because it has quite serious effects for young people. It affects children too.

Other respiratory viruses behave like that too. Pneumococcal pneumonia, for example. There is a vaccine against it. It protects but it doesn’t get rid of the bug. It is a tricky vaccine to make. That is a killer of old people. The 19^th century doctor William Ogle called it “the old man’s friend” because it carries you off quite quickly when you’re elderly. But most of the nasty infections are found in infants. That pattern is much more characteristic of these respiratory viruses and bacteria.

It’s easy to explain why the elderly are more likely to have a severe illness. They have other things wrong with them. Their immune systems are fragile. However, there is no simple explanation to why children are seemingly resistant to having any particular serious illness. It may be something to do with the distribution of the receptors to which the virus binds.

AB: Is it comparable to other coronaviruses that circulate in the human population?

HP: We know quite a lot about its basic virology because it is a coronavirus and we know quite a lot about coronaviruses in general. It has certain similarities with SARS which also appeared in China.

Like SARS, Covid-19 shows what it is called overdispersion. If you look at the transmission of the virus, most cases do not transmit to other people. A minority of cases transmit. We reckon that 10% of people infected account for 80% of secondary cases. It was the same in SARS. There were some people who were superspreaders and infected an enormous number of people. Most people who had SARS didn’t infect anybody at all. In a sense, this is good news – if you can control that aspect of the virus’s behaviour you can deal with it much more effectively than if it spread in an even sort of way, if every case was equally infectious.

This phenomenon of overdispersion was also true of Smallpox. How did we eradicate Smallpox? It wasn’t just a vaccine which didn’t always work. In the UK, we managed to eradicate Smallpox when we didn’t have the required level of herd immunity. It was contact tracing that played an equally important role in getting rid of smallpox. Finding cases and quarantining them and their contacts led to outbreaks fizzling out.

AB: What hopes do you have for a Coronavirus vaccine?

There will be a vaccine and probably more than one. There are so many in development. Some of them do seem to be stimulating an immune response that is satisfactory. Having said that, the likeliest sort of outcome will be a vaccine like we have for flu. It is far better than nothing but it only protects some of the people for some of the time. For many people who get the flu vaccine, it won’t stop them getting it but it will reduce the severity of the illness and perhaps save their lives.

Although we have an active flu vaccination programme every year we still have people dying of flu in care homes. It protects some of the people some of the time but it doesn’t get rid of the virus. It will continue to circulate.

A very optimistic outcome would be a vaccine that offers protection like the MMR vaccine. This gives good strong immunity for many years. Even then, remember that there was a virus circulating in universities just before we went into lockdown. It was being driven by students. This was mumps which is covered by the MMR vaccine. Their immunity had waned. Be careful when you say “the vaccine will solve all our problems” – this is very unlikely.

AB: Covid-related deaths went up very fast in March and April. Are we likely to see a peak like that again?

HP: It will be different. What happened in late February, early March, we had a lot of importations of the virus into the UK. We made the mistake of thinking that the virus would come from Wuhan – but hardly any of it came from Wuhan. It came from Italy, Spain and France. We know from doing RNA sequencing of the virus that we had at least 1,300 separate importations into the UK at that time. Some of these died out because of the overdispersion phenomenon I talked about. But a lot of it was seeded throughout the country.

Workers often without symptoms took it into care homes where there was very high mortality. That pattern was replicated across Europe, including in Italy, Spain, France and Sweden. In other countries the mortality wasn’t nearly as bad. Perhaps, they have better protections in care homes or there are fewer elderly folk. It is unclear and international comparisons are difficult to make.

I don’t think that will be replicated. We are much better in controlling importations of the virus so we aren’t setting up local chains of transmission all the time. We know where the problems are at the moment – in the north of England, in the Central Belt in Scotland and in Belfast. The virus is now far more localised than it was in March and April.

AB: Are national measures too blunt an instrument?

HP: The way the policy is generally presented is through national figures. The national figures don’t take account of local variation. And there is an issue here about presentation to the public. The role of the press conferences has been to generate fear. It is always the bad figures that are presented. The virus doesn’t behave in the way presented in Vallance’s exponential graph. It doesn’t grow exponentially like that. It might do that in a lab if you put it into a bottle of tissue culture.

In bacteriology, you plant the growth and it grows exponentially until it runs out of food. Viruses don’t even behave like that. It comes back to that dispersion point I made – not every case is going to transmit to another case. You might well get local situations where you get exponential growth. You are not going to have it affecting the population as a whole.

In a care home, the R number is probably 10. For the whole population, the R number may be below one. It is such a crude average. It is pretty useless as a measure of what is happening except in local circumstances. It is used as a stick to hit us round the head with. It has the ring of science about it so people say “it must be true”. It’s useful in an epidemiology textbook. It is not useful in public health measures.

AB: “Wave” is a poor metaphor for Coronavirus transmission then.

HP: The mathematical modellers, Neil Ferguson for example, are experts in modelling flu. One thing they haven’t been able to explain in their modelling is that flu appears in waves. It happened in the Spanish Flu in 1918. It arrived in the summer, went away and returned in the winter and returned the following year. In the second wave, it killed young people. In the third wave, it killed old people.

Nobody has been able to explain why that was the case so it’s a very poor comparison. It’s also unclear what people were actually dying of. It may have been other bugs coming in once the lungs had been damaged by the flu. This is where the idea of a second wave being nastier than the first comes from. This was much talked about earlier this year. This is not flu. This virus behaves quite differently.

A second wave in flu would be helped by schools. In the summer, it would circulate quite quietly. It would be harder to find serious cases. But then schools open and away it goes. That’s what happened with the Asian flu in the seventies. But in this case children are not amplifiers of the virus. Using flu as a model is a very poor model. The virus, in most of its properties, is very different. It affects different people. It affects different age groups.

AB: So the science was going in the wrong direction early on.

HP: I think many of the scientists who advised the government early on were very much wedded to the flu model because that’s the one we have in the ring binders as it were.

I’m a second wave sceptic because we are actually still in the first wave. We suppressed it through lockdown measures. We have released them and it is spreading more freely now. As far as we can tell it hasn’t mutated significantly. Again, unlike flu which has a much higher mutation rate.  Where are the virologists? There are hardly any of us left. It’s rather sad. Who is on SAGE? There were four virologists on SAGE out of more than fifty members. Three of them were flu experts.

We need to talk about superspreaders and the overdispersion factor, for example, which are characteristic properties of this virus. If you look at interviews of experts on Covid-19, hardly any are virologists. They are epidemiologists or public health experts. Virology has lost out. Perhaps, we were too successful for our own good. As a field, we had many triumphs in the 20^th century including the polio vaccine and treatment for HIV.

Pandemics are a virus speciality. There will be more pandemics. I don’t know what will cause it or when it will happen. All you can see is that there will be one. We have got to be ready for it.

Lockdowns result in too much collateral damage, he argues, and impose unreasonable costs on the working class and the young in particular. He also has some fascinating comments on the uses and misuses of “the science” in the debate over public health.

Alastair Benn: This week Boris Johnson urged the British public not to “throw in the sponge”, a boxing metaphor. How helpful is the language of conflict when we are trying to deal with a disease?

Martin Kulldorff: It is an enemy, in a sense, so we have to use the weaknesses of the virus against it. The key feature with Covid-19 is the huge difference in mortality between the old and the young. The older people among us have more than a thousand-fold risk of death compared to the youngest among us. We have to use that in order to deal with this virus. So that means we have to protect the elderly among us and other high-risk persons while we wait for herd immunity which will either come via a vaccine or natural infections or a combination of the two.

AB: The British government tends to stress that everybody is at a similar level of risk. So whenever there is a specific acknowledgement of the threat of Covid to the elderly, it is caveated with comments about how young people can get seriously ill too.

MK: This is very unhelpful. There is an enormous difference of risk. For older people this is much worse than the annual flu. For children the risks are much less than the annual flu. This is not a dangerous disease for children. We don’t close schools because of the annual flu. We don’t ban people from driving cars because there are people who die in car accidents. We let people live normal lives with standard precautions.

AB: How much mortality should we tolerate?

MK: It’s not a question of whether we choose to tolerate infectious diseases. They are a part of life and have been for thousands of years. We had pandemics in the past. We are going to have many more pandemics in the future. Instead of going into panic mode, what we have to do is look at the particular disease and respond with public health measures that minimise the deaths. We haven’t done that.

AB: Where have the costs fallen primarily?

MK: The burden is primarily being put on young children who have not been able to access education. Instead of protecting the elderly and letting young people live their lives, we are protecting professionals who can work from home while older working class people, who work out in society, are getting infected and some of them are dying, even though they are at higher risk. Basically, we are throwing the working class under the bus.

AB: So we are almost through the looking glass in terms where the risks have been taken. Why has this been allowed to happen?

MK: That’s about sociology and psychology – and it is the professional class that controls the narrative in society through academics, journalists and other professionals.

What’s really missing here is proper public health thinking. A doctor has one patient in front of him or her. His or her responsibility is to this one patient. That is the doctor’s primary concern at that moment. For example, an oncologist will be concerned about a cancer that the cancer patient has. Even if you can prolong the life of a cancer patient by three to six months that is a very good outcome.

But public health is different. In public health you cannot only think of one disease like Covid-19. You have to look at public health overall. If we do a lockdown, that has consequences on other diseases and creates other public health issues. It creates collateral damage.

To postpone an epidemic outbreak by six months, that doesn’t really give you anything in public health as opposed to medicine. Some people who might die now might live for another six months. That’s good. On the other hand, we are all going to be a little older in six months from now. So we are all a little more at risk. Someone who would have survived for twenty years might die in six months if you postpone it like that. In personal medicine, with a single patient, we want to postpone death. In an epidemic, it is futile to do that unless we can postpone it until we have a vaccine or treatment. That might be a reason to do it but it is not a reason in and of itself to lockdown.

AB: I wonder whether there is a connection here with the way “the science” has often been invoked to mean suppressing the virus until there is a vaccine. Why do you think science has been used in this way?

MK: As a scientist I have worked with infectious disease outbreaks for a couple of decades. Then suddenly in the spring, I was hearing that we should “follow the science” by doing something that I think is contrary to science. That was absolutely stunning to me. I could not understand it. Maybe what happened was one or two epidemiologists would say something and then the media and politicians would fall on it and claim that that is “the science” and then one or two other scientists outside of the field of infectious disease epidemiology might agree to it.

Among my colleagues who I spoke with who are infectious disease epidemiologists, the majority are in favour of an age-targeted strategy. A minority are in favour of lockdowns and contact tracing. Those are the two different philosophies. There are many who are in favour of the age-targeted strategy like Sunetra Gupta at Oxford, Carl Heneghan at Oxford, and Francois Balloux at University College London, as well as many people in the US and other European countries.

AB: Worst-case scenarios extrapolated from the available data seem to have set the terms of the debate. The Imperial College Model in the UK, for example.

MK: In that model they used some input parameters. We didn’t know at that time what the correct values for those were, like the Infection Fatality Ratio (IFR). They made a guess, put that in the model, ran the simulations and something came out. But if the input parameters are a guess, then the output is also a guess. It is just sophisticated guesswork. Maybe journalists prefer to listen to scientists who are willing to make a wild guess rather than scientists who are honest about what they do not know.

AB: Whereas Sweden’s age-targeted response is rooted in its traditions of social democracy, in the UK and the US, that philosophy is viewed as an extreme libertarian position.

MK: I am a native of Sweden. In the Covid-19 debate in Sweden I am a raving socialist. In the US, where I live, I am a right-wing fanatic. But it is critical in a pandemic that we keep it apolitical. As a public health scientist I have to put my own political beliefs aside. I want to get out to as many as possible the right public health message that will minimalise mortality in the population as a whole. Some scientists have failed to do that. They have been mixing their public health message with their political beliefs. That is very damaging both for our pandemic response and general trust in scientists.

AB: The key thing seems to me to be a proportionate understanding of who is at risk and sustainable policy decisions. In the UK, the measures are adjusted by diktat every few weeks according to the latest fad. A lot of it doesn’t seem to be evidence-based.

MK: Correct. Lockdown is a new invention of 2020. Every European country had prepared pandemic plans. We knew one was going to come along. Except for Sweden, all the countries threw it out of the window when Covid-19 arrived. Of course, we don’t know the specific nature of the next pandemic so the plans have to be adjusted accordingly. But basic public health practice was ignored.

There is a difference between those who want to pursue an age-targeted approach and those who want to do a lockdown combined with testing and isolation. Testing and isolation is a very common way to deal with infectious disease outbreaks. When we had an Ebola outbreak in the US there were a few cases so we had to isolate them and then we had to check all their contacts and isolate other people. For many infectious diseases this is the right approach. But it doesn’t work for Influenza. It doesn’t work for Covid-19 or Measles before we had a vaccine. By definition, it doesn’t work in pandemics.

Maybe if you do very extreme measures and you keep lockdowns forever until there is a vaccine or a cure, then contact tracing can do a little bit on top of that. For example, that has happened in New Zealand. But that strategy does require a lockdown until we have a vaccine, which may never happen.

AB: The idea that we lockdown until a vaccine seems like just another Western myth – you smash the virus, this intrusion of the natural world on civilised society, and then scientific endeavour comes to the rescue as if by magic. But this is an illusion, a Faustian story. In the end, it is self-destructive.

MK: Quite – you have enormous collateral damage in the process if this goes on for more than a few weeks. Back in April I had a debate with an oncologist Stefan Einhorn in a Swedish newspaper. He argued that we should lockdown Sweden because in a few months we would have a cure. He mentioned that the drug Remdesivir was already in clinical trials. My counter to that was that we could not trust that. For other viruses, it has taken a long time to get treatments and vaccines. For some, we still don’t have them.

If there had been a quick cure it might have been worth hunkering down for a while. From the bottom of my heart, I wish that had been the case. But I was right and a cure has not come along in a few months.

There are many costs. In the US, childhood vaccination rates plummeted in the Spring. That might lead to outbreaks of preventable diseases some time in the future. Cardiovascular disease outcomes have been worsening. Cancer screenings are not happening. That will not increase mortality this year because if you get cancer this year, you won’t die this year. But someone who might have lived 15 or 20 years might now only live 3 years.

The measures also have a huge effect on mental health. Suicide is the most direct effect but there are longterm effects too. In the US we have evictions because people cannot afford the rent because they have lost their jobs. Evictions are not good for physical or mental health. Those of us like you and me who are in a privileged position – you are a journalist, I am an academic, we can work from home, our salaries are guaranteed. We are not affected very much compared to the working class. It is really the working class who are bearing the brunt of the burden of lockdowns and extending this pandemic over time. They are also suffering because they are the ones building up the herd immunity that will eventually protect all of us.

AB: I am reminded of an essay by Susan Sontag in which she comments on the way people see cancer as the illness that “does not knock before it enters”. That replays the cultural anxiety around TB in the 19^th century. It is an unspeakable illness. The fear of Covid-19 strikes me as a similar phenomenon.

MK: The reason for that is that cancer often hits people in their fifties and sixties. Cancers can hit anybody out of the blue when they are middle-aged. But in a way, Covid-19 is worse in this respect because we begin to fear each other. We cannot infect each other with cancer. This pandemic and the fear around it has made people fear each other. This is very tragic for children that they have to learn that they cannot be close to each other and that they might infect their parents and grandparents.

This is actually true to some extent of influenza but children are at higher risk of passing on influenza than Covid-19. For children now growing up, this is all they know. How will this experience effect them throughout their lives?

For those of us who are older, we can hopefully revert back to our old patterns of thinking. It is unclear how  it will impact on the psychology of our children.

That Furio, who is a native Italian on secondment from the Neapolitan mob, doesn’t think Columbus is all he is cracked up to be (“I never liked Columbus… he was from Genoa… I hate the north”) doesn’t perturb the crew, some of whom turn up to have some argy-bargy with the protesters.

But Silvio just cannot get over the idea that his culture has been insulted. On reflecting that he had missed joining in the scuffle, he burbles to himself: “I should have been there… I forgot this was a Monday… they discriminate against all Italians as a group when they disallow Columbus.”

Tony Soprano, incensed, tells Silvio to shut up about it: “Oh will you fucking stop. Group, group… Columbus was so long ago he might as well have been a fucking movie… Where the fuck is our self-esteem? That shit doesn’t come from Columbus or The Godfather or Chef-fucking-Boyardee.”

This scene is only one part of a rich commentary on diaspora culture and identity developed throughout The Sopranos. The Sopranos are a “family” and a “culture” in crisis. The family unit with Tony and Carmela as husband and wife and two children, one son and one daughter, in high school is riven with the conventionally suburban problems: Tony is a philanderer; Anthony Junior is moody; Meadow, ambitious and arsey. But The Sopranos are also a network of men engaged in traditional criminal activities (waste disposal, strip clubs, and protection rackets) that become less and less profitable and prove more and more dysfunctional in a nascent economy of information, services and retail consumption. Why would a coffee shop run by a multinational chain need to pay protection?

The Columbus Day episode is a case in point – estranged from their native “culture” by geography and a century of emigration, and on the wrong side of a new identity politics which looks with revulsion on America’s European past, Silvio and his pals understandably feel a bit lost. What do we get to be proud of? Tony’s answer is as blunt as it is instructive: just get over it. Your self-esteem, if you have it, depends, ultimately, on the things you do, the projects you pursue, the people you choose to love and invest in, not this or that statue or whether a parade goes ahead or not, or some invented tradition.

Much of our contemporary debate on the status of cultural heritage – how we relate to “the past” and the practices we should adopt in light of our traditions – falls along the lines of the first “political correctness” culture wars of the late 1990s, a debate reflected in the way The Sopranos engages with Italian-American culture in an era of globalisation.

Potent themes of victimhood and threat contour much of the way we talk about national heritage, a debate made more essentially absurd in Britain given the high status we have traditionally ascribed to radical ideas of tolerance and individual liberty. An interesting shift away from those traditions took place in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – a war of survival, which forged a remarkable consensus over what was said to constitute our national mission (followed by a rapid and pragmatic abandonment of our global role in the shape of the last dominions of Empire).

It left us with artefacts like the Last Night of the Proms, which really gained popularity after the Second World War in the form that we now know it.  In this form, it represents an interesting reshaping of the late 18^th century “John Bull” era of popular entertainment, when tunes like Rule Britannia – written by Thomas Arne as part a masque dedicated to the accession of George II – became commonplace. The subject of Arne’s masque was Alfred the Great, and it told the story of a newly confident British nation, victorious at sea and united across borders, with reference to the Anglo-Saxon king’s triumph over the Vikings.

In the post-War era of national mission, which was forged from an experience of genuine sacrifice and commitment, coupled with popular ironising about the legacy of Empire, the Last Night of the Proms was an innovative development matching the spirit of the times. Much has changed since the events of the mid-20^th century. We no longer have National Service and, in the main, the British have not fought in wars (bar the Falklands War against an aggressive Fascist junta) that have left us with a legacy as unifying as the Second World War.

In recent years, the Last Night of the Proms has felt out of step with a culture that, over the past few decades, has merely returned to historical form – Britain has, for some centuries, been an extensively commercial society with a highly individualistic attitude to personal freedom. Indeed, the BBC itself, an institution that had its glory days in the same post-War period, increasingly struggles to work out how to speak for “the nation” and is routinely lambasted for failing to deliver on the promises of a “common culture”.

So why not recapture the “original” spirit of the Proms instead? It has its own particular history and traditions which are nothing to with John Bull or King Alfred or the British Empire. It was a product of the creative genius of two men, the conductor Henry Wood (1869-1944) and the impresario Robert Newman (1858-1926). Newman wanted to make lots of money (he had worked in the City as a stockjobber), so he drew the punters in with cheap tickets and lots of concerts. He was also a music obsessive: “I’m going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music,” he told Wood.

Wood went on to conduct every one of the Prom performances that took place until 1941. Once Newman had “created a public”, Wood put on quite the show. He programmed oodles of new music – and put on premieres of Mahler, Schoenberg, and many of the other European giants of his time, and he also made the Proms a special place for new compositions. He called them his “novelties”. By the end of his career, Sir Henry had introduced more than 700 pieces to British audiences. It is no surprise then that the concerts were known – until quite recently – as the “Henry Wood Promenade concerts”.

It is fruitless to speculate, but I wonder what Wood the innovator would have thought about a programme for the Last Night that had undergone virtually no change over the course of half a century. The real message of the Proms is that important questions like “What constitutes my culture?” and “Who gets to sing along?” can only be dwelt on for so long – there are other things for us to discover, new music to hear, new peaks to climb.

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