Would be a great help but obviously only a limited supply of trained sniffer dogs. But I can already see and hear the moans about breaching human rights, picking on certain ethnicities, the dog bit me. Believe me, it will come.
Printable View
'Loose the hounds!" Really, there's no reason why we shouldn't have a bit of fun and sport at the same time...
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d4/61...f531074bbd.jpg
So are you saying that you believe the people who attacked Vallance for what he said were being reasonable and fair when they accused him of things such as scaremongering, and deliberately exaggerating the need for urgent action, and wilfully misrepresenting the facts, and grossly over-estimating case numbers, and using numbers that were implausible, and indulging in project fear, and committing a sackable offence? I certainly don't. I think those people were being silly.
Note that Vallance was talking at a press conference, with his audience being the general public. He wanted to make the general point that exponential processes can quickly get out of hand - things can look to be under control but can quickly deteriorate. He was not making a scientific presentation to a select audience. He specifically said "What I’d like to do is just remind you how quickly this can move. So the next slide is not a prediction, but it is a way of thinking about how quickly this can change." And he used words and phrases such as 'we think' and "roughly" and "if, and that's quite a big if" and "something like" and "would be expected to". And he also said "There’re already things in place which are expected to slow that [the doubling time]". All perfectly reasonable, it seems to me. And, it turns out, completely justified. So, 'scaremongering', 'project fear', 'wilful misrepresentation'? No, of course not. Just a guy trying to get a difficult, complex and disagreeable scientific message over to the public while being under pressure from his political masters.
If Vallance wanted wilfully to misrepresent the facts so as to scare people unnecessarily, surely saying something like 'the number of deaths by the middle of November could easily reach 500 per day' would serve his purpose better than using the number 200? Although it looks as though even 500 might not be much of an exaggeration. (The number of deaths per day recorded for the last two days is 367 and 310. Today's rolling 7-day average is given as 216. There are another 17 days before the middle of November. 17 days ago, on October 12th, the rolling 7-day average was 67.86. That's an increase by a factor of 3.19 over the last 17 days.)
I doubt Vallance has got much of a future as an official scaremonger if he was deliberately downplaying the number of deaths that could reasonably be expected in the event that no action was taken to limit the spread. "Look, Boris, we think the number of deaths per day by mid-November could be something like 500 or perhaps even higher. But I want to scare the public, so I'm going to tell them that we could see something like 200 deaths by then instead. Aren't I the clever one? A really nasty piece of work, me. 200 is a much scarier number than 500."
Do you know what the advice was that SAGE provided to Johnson? And do you know what Vallance personally thought of that advice? SAGE is made up of a number of individuals. Maybe Vallance was going along with a sense of collective responsibility, and thought it desirable for everyone to keep the message clear by not contradicting one another. But, anyway, even if Vallance did change his advice about herd immunity, you've provided one example of a change in objective that was made very, very early in the pandemic. In March things were obviously in flux. New insights and facts were becoming apparent by the day. To suggest that that change at that time constitutes yo-yo advice by Vallance isn't reasonable, at least not to my way of thinking.
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” John Maynard Keynes.
Hold on a minute, I'm not answerable for what other people said such as sackable offence etc. You selectively quoted me yesterday so I can only defend my own comments at that time, not anybody else's. Vallance had said that cases were doubling every seven days, which they weren't. So my opinion was that he was misleading people. I had no idea what the case numbers would be going forward but it didn't inspire confidence if he wasn't telling the truth about the current figures.
As for the death figures, as I said before, I never commented on them at the time. It does seem odd that he came up with such a low percentage of reported cases but he should surely have a better idea of it than me. One would hope our Chief Science Officer knows the difference between Case Fatality Rate and Infection Fatality Rate.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
― Noam Chomsky, How the World Works
He over-egged everything and under-egged nothing. That is to heighten the fear among the public and it causes the information to be widely discredited.
Honesty is the best policy.
Just prior to lockdown the Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) which is a sub group of SAGE set out the way forward.
"A substantial number of people still do not feel personally threatened."
"The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging."
"Use media to increase sense of personal threat."
They also suggested tools to create social approval and disapproval.
"Use and promote social approval for desired behaviours
Consider enacting legislation to compel required behaviours
Consider use of social disapproval for failure to comply"
and we went on to see the development of "local heroes" such as the clap for NHS staff. Lake district closed because "covidiots won't stay away".
The whole show has been quite appalling.