Health Protection (Coronavirus, Wearing of Face Coverings in a Relevant Place) (England) Regulations 2020

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Friday 18th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD) [V]]

My Lords, debating these instruments after the event and after the earlier messaging against masks is a sorry state of affairs. I wish that there had been encouragement of voluntary wearing of cloth coverings at an earlier stage.

I am not a medical expert, although I am a physicist and mathematician with some experience in the spreading computations that are relevant for viruses. I also practised for over 25 years as a patent attorney, where I learned that it is often necessary to deal with and protect inventions at a stage well before the high level of academic proof is reached—indeed, adherence to academic levels of proof has held back until too late some commercial exploitation of university research. Against that background, I cannot help but think that the need for academic levels of evidence, prevailing over a precautionary principle, in the matter of masks did not serve us well.

There is a reason we have the adage “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases”. The science is pretty clear that Covid is spread by droplets that come out of infected people’s mouths or noses when coughing, sneezing, talking and even breathing. If coughing into your elbow or a tissue is a safeguard against spreading, it seems logical that so is a mask. What was wrong with a precautionary principle? I have no evidence that my young grandchildren will run into a road and get hurt, but I hold their hands just in case.

The Government followed the line taken by the WHO about there being mixed evidence and there was panic about using up supplies of PPE, but it is astonishing how little face coverings were discussed in NERVTAG and SAGE, with minutes recording reasons to oppose masks rather than any precautionary principle. The reasons were that they would create fear and anxiety but also a false sense of security; that they would lead to the abandonment of hand washing and social distancing, although there was no suggestion that they might be a visual reminder; and that they would lead to more touching of faces, although in my own case I found them quite good at reminding me to do it less. The “not to mask” reasons were not tested to levels of academic rigour and confused the message just in time for the U-turn and compulsion, with, most probably, lower levels of adherence as a result.