Policy As Painting By Numbers?

 

Some of my colleagues have complained that many of my cited links are from a single newspaper. There have been occasional variations but, like everyone else, I operate in a 'bubble'. I do not, however,  regard any single source as being a repository of wisdom and this is especially true of complex and rapidly-developing areas. I have, however, been resistant thus far to further publicising, what I regard as the 'wilder reaches of dialogue'. I will make an exception in the case of an article from the Foundation for Economic Education concerning the 'myths' of the Covid-19 pandemic which was forwarded to me by a friend (https://fee.org/articles/npr-mounting-evidence-suggests-covid-not-as-deadly-as-thought-did-the-experts-fail-again/?fbclid=IwAR0xuicpU5Z6S_0QRjdiIGSlEszOieFJ9KUEfB-8ig7g2Q47q087hEiFiEk). This article seems to include many of the 'tricks of the trade' to achieve arriving at a desired conclusion. The first thing it does is to draw a direct parallel between the responses of world governments to the Covid-19 pandemic and the policy decisions underpinning the invasion of Iraq in the Bush era. I cannot see any meaningful analogy between the two events. The first is concerned with scientific advice and its effects on health policy, whereas the second looks at military arguments for an act of war. It's almost as if the invasion story has been chosen because, with hindsight (the 'dodgy dossier', lack of the presumed welcome for the 'liberators' and the development of ISIS), that event is now generally viewed as a policy disaster. The claim that the hated 'experts' were 'at fault' in both cases is simply not supportable. In the Covid-19 story, scientists were giving advice to politicians based on what they admitted to be a rapidly growing but inadequate knowledge base. Emphasis (with a prominent picture) that one scientist resigned (it was from SAGE not his university but the wording is ambiguous) on the basis of breaking his own quarantine rules doesn't negate all the (actually varied) advice. In the Iraq invasion scenario, politicians were looking for an excuse to invade and largely based this on Saddam Hussain's claim to have Weapons of Mass Destruction (as have since been acquired by a number of dodgy regimes). If I remember rightly, a number of knowlegeable experts suggested that it was highly unlikely that Saddam had WMDs. The wrong kind of expert? The Covid-19 pandemic has clearly been a disaster on both health and economic grounds but suggesting that governments were 'bumped into' lockdown by scientists when '90% of people only get a mild infection' is pushing it. Ten percent of the population is actually an awfully high number of people who can get potentially serious illness and (perhaps) die. The article also makes no mention of the accumulating evidence (and we are in a very preliminary part of that story) that some people with 'mild infections' go on to have impairments to their neural and circulatory systems. It also hardly considers the fact that different groups show big variations in their outcomes from getting an infection. I think the idea that we could have avoided many of the problems of the pandemic by ignoring scientific advice is actually dangerous.