Why Angela McLean’s ‘Dr Death’ jibe matters

Does it matter if the chief scientific adviser referred to Rishi Sunak as ‘Dr Death’ In a private message to a Sage adviser during lockdown? This embarrassing fact came out last week in the Covid inquiry, an apparent reference to his Eat Out to Help Out scheme. Some have argued that publishing this comment, made in a private WhatsApp message, serves to embarrass Professor Dame Angela McLean and not much else.

I’d argue that it exposes one of the most important facets of the pandemic: the psychological effect on those at the top at a time of great pressure. And how this led to tribalism and an environment where facts, data and science took second place to the desire to trounce lockdown sceptics. The Dr Death comment shows that this set in not just among the politicians. Ministers, civil servants and scientific advisers had all come to see themselves as Team Life – and anyone who asked questions of their policy, or sceptical, was seen to be on Team Death. We saw this in Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages: the vitriol poured by politicians and civil servants on Tory ministers who even raised questions about lockdown let alone opposed it.

Dame Angela was messaging Sage member John Edmunds, who with Neil Ferguson was a hard advocate for lockdowns. These two are supposed to be the detached, data-driven experts. Edmunds had told an earlier testimony to the inquiry, he said he was ‘still angry’ about Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out. ‘It was one thing to take your foot off the brake – but another to put your foot on the accelerator’, he said.

But here’s the thing: did it really? Or might Edmunds be talking rot? What does the data, which we now know, actually tell us about whether Eat Out To Help Out incubated a second wave?

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

The Dr Death comment was, most of all, inaccurate. But the Covid inquiry didn't seem to care about the (huge) substantive issue. Which is a shame. Let’s recall that there was never any scientific backing behind lockdown theory. It was hastily put together by Imperial’s Ferguson and a few others. It could not be defended on scientific ground as it had no basis in science: Britain was following Wuhan on a hunch. Ferguson had cobbled together some numbers and models based on made-up theories: a) that lockdown would send the virus into retreat overnight and b) that nothing short of lockdown would stop the growth. But these assumptions had proven false.

Fatally, Ferguson failed to factor in the massive unforced behavioural response where people in a high-information democracy lock themselves down. So lockdown was not necessary to send the virus into reverse, as Sweden twice proved to the world. We now know that Brits actually locked themselves down even more than Swedes, suggesting that their system absolutely could have worked here. The graph below, from Google mobility data, shows it:

By the time Dame Angela’s Dr Death comment was made, September 2020, it should have been clear that Britain had been locked down on a false premise. She and Edmunds should have been focused on that, not inventing unkind nicknames for the Chancellor. The handful of academics that did apply critical thinking and challenge, as per the scientific method found, their ideas was not engaged with and, instead, they were subject to character assassination. Dame Angela’s messages refer to Oxford’s Carl Heneghan as a ‘fuckwit’. Edmunds replies to her: ‘Every statistic is wrong.’ This, surely, is the substantive point that the inquiry should have picked up upon. What statistics was he referring to? And were they wrong? But this expensive inquiry seems not to care about points of substance. 

I feel for Dame Angela. I had heard during the pandemic that she was one of the good guys, asking difficult questions of the lockdown mob when chief scientific adviser at the MoD (which she was at the time). These WhatApps – two throwaway lines – are no way to judge anyone. Which of us, if our every message was scrutinised and made public, would emerge smelling of roses? Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance, Simon Case: these are good people, genuinely dedicated public servants, who were doing the best they could under impossible circumstances. But those circumstances led them into a defensive mindset which science, data and challenge was unable to penetrate.

What these WhatsApp messages show is human nature. Under such pressure, humans buckle. Tribalism kicks in. Cognitive dissonance kicks in: people don’t want to believe that the massive policy they just imposed on everyone is was wrong. That pupils were needlessly denied school, etc. So the experts huddle together, and start to attack anyone who seeks to scrutinise or challenge them. Not because they are malign, but because this is how humans behave in such situations.

So future pandemic planning needs to adjust for inevitable crisis-induced groupthink, and to ensure a critical process is maintained. For example, the creation of a ‘red team’ group of experts to test assumptions made by Sage, and the mandatory commissioning of QALY or cost-benefit analysis calculations as applied to all public health policies outside of the pandemic. If the first casualty of war is truth, then the first casualty of lockdown was critical analysis. The groupthink, exposed in Hancock’s WhatsApps, stands more exposed now. This is the substantive point but the inquiry seems utterly uninterested. So as things stand, Britain is vulnerable to the same happening again.