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.Originally Posted by Muddy Retriever
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."
