What Patrick Vallance doesn’t say about Sage

Does Sage have a pro-lockdown bias? Sir Patrick Valance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, wrote an article in the Times recently presenting Sage as a ruthlessly neutral force speaking ‘scientific truth to power’. He’s refuting the idea of Sage providing a range of gloomy factoids and scenarios which tend to make the case for lockdown. His description is rather different to what Prof Graham Medley, chairman of the Sage modelling committee, told me last weekend: that  ‘we generally model what we are asked to model.’ Asked by whom? I’d still love to know.

Anyway, Sir Patrick puts all this to one side and stresses how Sage offers a breadth of advice on Omicron. ‘The range of assumptions modelled can be very broad; for disease severity for Omicron one model explored a range from 10 per cent of Delta severity through to 100 per cent.’

What he doesn’t mention is the way in which such options are then presented in the summary seen by ministers.