Vallance turns on Number 10 as Boris lays pathway to “normality”

Sir Patrick Vallance gave remarkably candid answers to the Science and Technology Select Committee yesterday. He effectively criticised the government’s efforts to get people back to work, and suggested that Downing Street did not adequately follow the scientific advice. But dipping into politics inevitably meant that some of the Chief Scientific Adviser’s statements were not entirely supported by the facts.

Vallance claimed that on either the 16th or 18th of March, a week before Boris Johnson announced a mandatory lockdown, “the advice that SAGE issued was that the remainder of [lockdown] measures should be introduced as soon as possible”.

The published minutes from SAGE meetings, however, tell a different story. On March 16, the stated advice was merely to implement “additional social distancing measures”.

On March 18, SAGE advised that “available evidence now supports implementing school closures on a national level”, but there was no call for the sort of full lockdown Vallance described.

Indeed, the committee said that “measures already announced should have a significant impact”. By then, of course, the government had already announced a voluntary lockdown, advising people to avoid going to work if possible.

In another apparent error, Vallance claimed that between the 16th and 18th of March, the government’s scientific advisers realised “we were further ahead in the epidemic than had been thought” and advised the government that the virus was doubling every 2-3 days.

Again, SAGE minutes from the March 16 tell a different story: “UK cases may be doubling in number every 5-6 days.” On March 18, SAGE reaffirmed that estimation: “Assuming a doubling time of around 5-7 days appears to be reasonable”.

Either Sir Patrick Vallance was wrong, or the independent scientific advice of SAGE – of which he is a member – was wrong.

In any case, Vallance’s tone shifted yesterday. Gone was the defence of the government’s general stance, replaced by a defence only of the scientific advice that he and his colleagues provided. In some instances, he implicitly suggested that such advice was wrongly interpreted by political actors.

One wonders whether this could have something to do with Johnson’s acknowledgement on Wednesday that there will be an independent inquiry into the handling of Covid-19? The advice of Vallance as well as that of the Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, and Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jenny Harris, will surely come under scrutiny.

The inquiry may take issue with Vallance’s argument in early March that Britain should seek to attain some level of herd immunity. It may ask Whitty why he defended mass-gatherings – which we now suspect risked acting as super-spreader events. It may also seek to understand why Harris told the Prime Minister, on tape, that wearing a mask would make it more likely to contract the virus.

Public Health England, too, will come under scrutiny. As Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine revealed yesterday, PHE’s definition of a coronavirus death means that no-one in England is ever counted as having recovered from the diseas. PHE, an independent body, counts the deaths of everyone who once had Covid-19 as a coronavirus death – even if they had subsequently died of another cause.

Still, Johnson’s government continues to be bound by the advice of a small set of scientific advisers. Newsnight reported yesterday that Vallance’s intervention had “changed government calculations” on the issue of encouraging people back to work, even though he had clearly muddled his most newsworthy lines.

Today’s press conference by the Prime Minister, which was briefed as a big shift in the government’s messaging, was instead confused on home working.

At one point Johnson said the revised advice “could mean continuing to work from home, which is one way of working safely, and which has worked for many employers and employees”.

Johnson also announced an extra £3 billion to keep the Nightingale hospitals open until March next year, just in case there is a second wave, even though the hospitals remained empty throughout the peak of the epidemic in April.

Downing Street has its own back to cover in the coming inquiry, and seems to have concluded that continuing to follow the advice of scientists is preferable to taking the lead – even if that advice is wrong. This may ultimately prove catastrophic not just for the economy, but also for faith in science.

At the beginning of the crisis people naturally assumed that “independent scientific advice” was synonymous with good public policy. As Vallance’s defensive posture illustrated yesterday, the coming inquiry may just shatter that perspective.