Scientists abandoned their objectivity, "misled" with alarming models and failed to appreciate the damage lockdown would cause, a government adviser has claimed in a damning indictment of Britain’s pandemic response.
Prof Mark Woolhouse, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), said that the Government’s advisory system was dominated by clinicians and public health specialists who “weren’t looking at the bigger picture”.
In his memoir, The Year The World Went Mad, Prof Woolhouse claimed that lockdowns “had surprisingly little effect” and just “deferred the problem to another day, at great cost”.
He argued that Spi-M was set up to tackle the wrong disease, influenza, and that early models were based on flu dynamics, and so mistakenly thought schools were a major driver while underrepresenting the impact of shielding.
Prof Woolhouse says he was “extremely sceptical” about the Imperial College report from March 16 2020 that claimed more than 500,000 people could die without intervention, but The Telegraph revealed last week that, at the time, modellers were still “uncertain” of case numbers “due to data limitations”.
The figures, published a week before lockdown was announced, led to an about-turn from the Government.
“It was perfectly obvious that no one could predict the course of the epidemic over such a long timescale, so what was the point of publishing those outputs?” wrote Prof Woolhouse.
“The worst-case epidemic is one in which the virus is allowed to spread in the absence of any countermeasures at all. It’s useful to know how big that epidemic would be, but it would never happen in practice. It is inconceivable that we would carry on as normal while hundreds of thousands of people were dying.”
Imperial College London published an analysis the following June, claiming that lockdown had saved nearly half a million lives in Britain.
However, Sweden managed to bring its epidemic under control without lockdown, leaving Imperial College to conclude that it was Sweden’s ban on mass gatherings that played the decisive role – even while arguing it had not been enough in other countries.
“The conclusion wasn’t remotely plausible,” wrote Prof Woolhouse. “Analyses by other researchers came up with quite different conclusions that the UK epidemic was already in decline before lockdown took effect.
“I expect this debate will rumble on for years, but I doubt anyone would claim now that the Mar 23 lockdown saved anywhere near half a million lives. Anyone who supported lockdown on the basis of the half-million figure was misled.”
An inquiry into the pandemic response is due to begin this spring. However, research is increasingly suggesting that lockdown was not needed because the public naturally begins social distancing when they see cases rise, or friends and family becoming infected.
This week, modellers told the Commons science and technology select committee that many of the recent models were wrong because they had failed to factor in these behavioural shifts.
Prof Graham Medley, the chairman of Spi-M, told MPs: “Human behaviour is very difficult to predict. If you could do it, then you would make a fortune on the stock exchange. We haven’t included that, and maybe that’s an error. But on the other hand, we’ve seen dramatic behaviour changes which were completely unforeseen.”
Spi-M first met in Jan 2020, and modelling from the group was frequently cited by politicians to justify imposing new measures.
Yet in his memoir, Prof Woolhouse said that scientific advisers had given too much weight to preventing deaths from coronavirus, while dismissing the indirect harms of lockdown, such as damage to education, mental health, the economy and the rest of the NHS.
He said that Britain is likely to be paying for the mistakes of lockdown “for a generation or more”.
“The public health benefits were overestimated, skewing the argument in favour of that course, however damaging it was,” he added.
“Will the cure turn out to be worse than the disease? It is still early days for doing the reckoning but the moments are not good.”
Prof Woolhouse also accused the BBC of over-egging the risks from Covid and that said scientists had abandoned their objectivity by wading into policy.
“It became routine during the pandemic for scientific advisers and commentators to push for one policy or another,” he wrote.
“As citizens, they have every right to do that. But when there is a constant stream of government scientific advisers in the media calling for a lockdown, as there was during the second wave in Oct 2020, then we have crossed a line.”
Prof Woolhouse also said it was an “awkward” truth that the people who benefited most from suppression of the virus, such as the elderly and vulnerable, were not the group that suffered most from the impact of lockdown: young people and low-income workers.
“Even before the UK first went into lockdown in Mar 2020, we knew that novel coronavirus was far more dangerous to the elderly, the frail and the infirm than to healthy young adults and children,” he added.
“That should have shaped our response. Instead, the UK administrations continued to act as though everyone was equally at risk. They even actively promoted this misinterpretation to try to bolster acceptance to a lockdown strategy.”
The Year The World Went Mad is published by Sandstone Press