"Has Patrick Vallance learnt from his Covid mistakes?”| David Paton
Short answer: NO.
I recall finding Patrick Vallance’s “doubling down on lockdown” policy silly at the time.
I wrote: “Valance and Whitty are guilty of malpractice” in September 2020. This was me taking these two (Chief Science and Chief Medical adviser) to task for wildly overestimating the number of potential deaths from the next wave of Covid. I turned out to the right and they turned out to be wrong. That was not me being smart-arsed or lucky. It was me going on the data that was publicly available while they were going on some form of political hallucination.
Me, a member of the “normies”, got it right and the Chief Science and Medical advisers got it wrong.
Why, and how?
Because I’m sitting here in Hong Kong, and can use my mind, and can see the data from around the world and can figure out what’s going on, and can think that it’s crazy to double down on lockdown, because the balance of economic damage vs health damage is not on the side of locking down more.
And because I’d already done some of my own crunching of figures: doing a correlation between the severity of lockdown measures in all countries, vs their death rates from Covid. And finding that there was no correlation. It didn’t matter if you were more or less stringent in your lockdown measures; the death rates were the same. And: in Africa the death rates were and remained low, despite no vaccines, no lockdowns.
And yet, that’s what Vallance did: he doubled down on the lockdown scenario.
As David Paton says, it’s worrying that Vallance will be a major voice in the climate debate. Because it’ll be “no measure is too tough, too extreme, to address this existential threat”. With no balance of the pain and suffering caused by the measures taken. Just like Covid:
Most worryingly, Vallance has now turned his focus to climate policy, which seems likely to form a major part of his new role. The parallels between climate and pandemic policy are striking: the proposed solution to an alleged crisis is to impose strict restrictions, taxes and bans that will cost unimaginable amounts of money. The potential danger with this approach is that rather than considering the costs and benefits of alternative approaches, and testing modellers’ predictions of a climate crisis against real-world data (such as that showing the number of climate-related deaths have tumbled over the past 50 years), he will simply decide that “the science” tells us we have no alternative to proceeding with policies that, just as with Covid lockdowns, risk bankrupting the country.
ADDED: from the comments:
Has Patrick Vallance learnt from his Covid mistakes?
Very much so – but the lesson he has learned is that toeing the political line over Covid generates patronage. I don’t expect him to help dismantling the Net Zero madness.
IOW: You learn what the incentive are. And you follow the incentives. You get more of what you incentivise. And if you, the government, incentivise “doing something”, like lockdown, because the public like it, then that’s what you advisers will advise.
