The sirens will tell the truth.
On July 6th, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the removal of all COVID-related restrictions on July 19. Optional masks in shops and on public transport; no more requirement to check into venues with the contact tracing app; an end to limiting how many people may meet indoors and out.
There is a broad scientific consensus about this: it’s disastrous. This morning, a group of scientists convened a livestreamed press conference to explain just how much. They represent 122 scientists who have signed the John Snow Declaration and published a letter in The Lancet to outline their concerns. For non-historians, Snow founded the field of epidemiology by solving London’s 1854 cholera epidemic.
With restrictions and widespread vaccination, the United Kingdom has the fourth-highest global rate of new daily cases. New infections are up 34.9 percent in the past week, hospitalizations 51.5 percent, and deaths 52.6 percent. Even banker-turned-health-secretary Sajit Javid admits ending restrictions will bring more deaths and estimates 100,000 new infections per day by August. He’s still for ending them. The reasoning appears to be “Yeah, but vaccinations …” so no one will get really sick. This government has never acknowledged the rising numbers of long covid patients.
Johnson’s insistence on “unlocking” (tabloids: “FREEDOM DAY”) has led him to shift from cautious and scientifically attested statements that vaccination has greatly weakened the link between infections and serious illness/death to exaggerating that the link has been severed. A third of adults are at best partially protected, and no vaccination is approved for those under age eighteen in Britain. There’s little rejection of evolution here, yet warnings about incubating new variants are failing to persuade him, as are cautions about the long-term health risk to young people. Johnson’s government’s advice remains stuck in 2020, failing to accept the risk to children, publicize additional observed symptoms, or update its Hands. Face. Space mantra. I want to scream, “Air!”
One of the extraordinary aspects of the pandemic in Britain has been the continuing public engagement of the nation’s best scientists in fields such as epidemiology, virology, public health, behavioral psychology, and mathematical biology. Many post long, carefully constructed threads on Twitter to explain the government’s data and translate complex medical papers. They keep at it despite nasty pushback (particularly aimed at the women) from those who see COVID-19 restrictions as theft of their civil liberties. I am so grateful.
Last April, when the government was keeping secret the details of both its advice and its advisors on the official Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), a group of equally qualified scientists convened Independent SAGE. All year, they have kept up the pressure, publishing papers and reports and, especially, conducting weekly public briefings analyzing the data, assessing the government response, studying gaps, and answering questions. All these advisors work in academia, not government, but there’s still a flavor of Deborah Birx versus Antony Fauci. At Tuesday’s press briefing, England’s chief medical advisor, Chris Whitty, and chief scientific advisor, Patrick Vallance, quietly outlined the medical difficulties. Even so, Lancet Editor Richard Horton said this morning that their presence flanking Johnson lent “apparent support.”
This is the conundrum. Britain has some of the best science in the world. It led on developing one of the most widely used vaccines; it leads in genome sequencing. Even dissenters generally follow government rules. And yet it also has one of the most resistant leaders.
Health psychologist Susan Michie calls Johnson’s plan a recipe for exacerbating the huge inequalities that the pandemic has repeatedly exposed and predicts it will “foment division” when collective effort is crucial. The narrative that equates freedom with wearing masks and social distancing is straight out of the United States’ hard-right playbook, accusing cautious scientists of wanting lockdowns and “the nanny state” even though the point of interventions is to avoid lockdowns. Most people understand that the “freedom” of dumping masks effectively imprisons millions of vulnerable people in their homes and forces essential workers in health, retail, education, transport, and entertainment to risk their lives.
The suspicion that Johnson is willing to gamble with the nation’s lives goes back to March 2020, when he said one theory was to let the virus rip through the population; he has denied favoring it. The mounting numbers threatening to crash the National Health Service forced him to order the first lockdown on March 29, 2020, and each subsequent lockdown has come only after weeks of warnings about the rising numbers. To many, therefore, his government’s failure to improve school ventilation and decision to remove masks as of May 17, two months before the end of the school year, seem deliberate. At the June 25 Independent SAGE briefing, professor of operational research Christina Pagel asked if herd-immunity-by-infection was the government’s intent and said, “If it was their intent, this is how I would do it.”
Johnson justifies his current plan with claiming the most vulnerable are vaccinated, it’s summer, and come September we’ll be forced back indoors and the weather will favor spread. “If not now, when?” Two months ago, he promised to follow data, not dates. Is he? The sirens passing my window will tell.