Public Health

Bob Seely Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

It is pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper). I thank them for their fantastic leadership on this issue.

I want to develop one point specifically: I believe that Government must take a balanced view. I accept the argument made by various people, including the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), that the precautionary principle is good. I think we can be criticised for potentially not acting quickly enough at the beginning of the pandemic two years ago, but overreaction is not good. We have had a damaging obsession with a very narrow view of what we perceive to be health. The poorer you are and the younger you are in this society, the higher the price you have paid, and that is not acceptable.

I look at this debate and this motion in the context of some dreadful forecasts and dreadful assessments that have driven Government’s nervousness. I want to explore them and put them on record because I believe it is in the public interest, but I do so within the terms of the motion. I want to look particularly at Imperial College and Professor Ferguson. I have a great deal of respect for them and I will be careful how I phrase this, but I am concerned that some of the forecasting we have had has had a track record in, frankly, getting it wrong repeatedly. In 2001, Professor Ferguson predicted 150,000 human deaths from foot-and-mouth; under 200 died. In 2002, he predicted between 50 and 50,000 deaths from BSE; in the end, 177 died. In 2005, he said that 150 million people could be killed by bird flu; 282 died. In 2009, a Government estimate based on his advice said that a “reasonable worst-case scenario” for swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths; in the end, 457 people died. I am happy to be corrected on any of those points, but that is the publicly available information.

Moving forward to covid, Ferguson predicted 85,000 deaths in Sweden; in fact, 6,000 Swedes have died. Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, said in September 2020:

“We looked at the”

Imperial

“model and we could see that the variables that were put into the model were quite extreme...Why did you choose the variables that gave extreme results?

I love experts—don’t get me wrong; I know we sometimes have our issues with them—but it is helpful if they are right, if only very occasionally. Johan Giesecke, Sweden’s former chief epidemiologist, said that Ferguson’s models were “not very good”. The Washington Post quoted Giesecke as saying that Imperial’s forecasts were “almost hysterical”. This is the forecasting that has been, in part, driving Government action.

In this country, oncology professor Angus Dalgleish, in this country, described Ferguson’s modelling as “lurid predictions”. He said that Ferguson and his colleagues were getting it “spectacularly wrong”. He said:

“Unfortunately, we have a Sage committee advising a government that is devoid of any scientific expertise, on speculative concepts such as the R number”—

which we now all know is the reproductive rate—

“and the need for everyone to stay indoors, even though the evidence strongly suggests that people are less likely to catch Covid-19 outside.”

So some of the scientific evidence may have actually driven the rising covid rates in the same way that going into hospital may have been the place that people caught covid and died from it.

Viscount Ridley has criticised Ferguson’s modelling. Lund University has applied Ferguson’s models and found a massive difference between his predictions and what actually happened. Professor Michael Thrusfield from Edinburgh University said that Ferguson’s previous modelling of foot-and-mouth was “severely flawed”.

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right in highlighting the predictions that are wrong, but the unfortunate thing is that politicians then jump on to them and quote them. For example, the Health Minister in Northern Ireland, on the basis of Mr Ferguson’s predictions, talked about deaths “of biblical proportions” and scared the life out of people.

[Bob Seely]

The hon. Gentleman makes the point most eloquently. Politicians then become fearful. They think, “What if the worst-case scenario is right?”, and lose faith in more balanced predictions.

John Ioannides from Stanford University said of Ferguson’s modelling that

“major assumptions and estimates that are built in the calculations seem to be substantially inflated”.

He is a serious customer, Professor Ferguson, and Imperial has an impeccable reputation. I pay respect, overall, to their work, and I do not seek to criticise for the sake of it; I want to highlight that bad forecasting and bad modelling drives bad Government decisions that then become illiberal and intolerant of other people who have more balanced views.

More recently, in July 2021, Ferguson predicted 100,000 cases, saying that it was “almost inevitable”. Yet we got nowhere near there. The US forecaster Nate Silver, who is very good at predicting US elections, said:

“I don’t care that the prediction is wrong, I’m sure this stuff is hard to predict. It’s that he’s consistently so overconfident.”



The political scientist Professor Philip Tetlock agreed with Nate Silver, adding:

“Expect even top forecasters to make lots of mistakes…When smart forecasters are consistently over-confident, start suspecting”

other factors in play, such as

“publicity or policy-advocacy games”.

I make no such allegations.

More recently, I understand that this summer Professor Ferguson predicted upwards of 100,000 cases. They topped at just over 30,000. In an interview with The Times, the good professor said that his prediction was off because the football messed up his modelling. That for me comes to the essence of the problem with forecasting. When someone can predict 100 million deaths and no one dies but someone gets a sore thumb, they can say mitigations were taken by Government. When a forecaster’s work becomes verifiable, we can see when he predicts and gets it wrong. When that forecast comes up against reality, reality kicks in and makes a fool of the forecast and sometimes, sadly, a fool of the forecaster. Every time Professor Ferguson’s forecasts have been verifiable, they have been seen to be very badly flawed, and this is a serious man and a serious university.

To sum up, if we look at the forecasts made about covid, just like the forecasts for so many other things, reality changes those forecasts and very often undermines their credibility, so we need another set of factors to guide us. Members on the Opposition Benches and on this side have said we need principles. We need a precautionary principle, but we need a sense of balance so that we do not overstep the mark, damage our society, damage our young people and damage poorer people by seeking to control when we need to learn to live with this. My final question to the Minister is: will the Government look into forecasting and perhaps hold an inquiry into the success of forecasting and what we can learn from it, so that we do it less badly in future?

Finally, going from the theoretical to the very practicable, and on a point related to the Isle of Wight, we are not getting the boosters in the Riverside Centre. My hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) raised a specific point about his constituency, and in the same way, will the Minister please look at getting more booster jabs to the Isle of Wight and our Riverside Centre?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

The last contribution before the Minister responds is from Dr Andrew Murrison.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I record my interest as a practising doctor. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) that there appears to be a problem with the availability of slots for vaccinations, and that was before the Government announced this week that we were to expedite the booster programme. I am concerned about that, and I hope the Minister, who has commented briefly on that already, can confirm she has a cunning plan to ensure that people who need to be vaccinated are vaccinated and in particular that those vaccines reach the elderly and the vulnerable. At the moment, I have severe concerns about the availability of those slots, if not the vaccines themselves.

I will be supporting SI No. 1340 today on face coverings. I am mindful that we have to rely on the best available evidence. The evidence for a lot of these non-pharmaceutical interventions is more common-sense than actual. It seems to me to be a minor imposition to ask people to wear a face mask, particularly given the evidence published by The BMJ last week on this matter, which we have referred to already. The hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) in particular spoke about it.

I am more concerned about SI No. 1338 for two reasons. While SI No. 1340 expires on 20 December—or, at least, Ministers can decide whether to continue it on that date—there is no such luxury contained within SI No. 1338. That seems to be illogical. When pressed earlier, I regret to say that the Minister, who was very good at taking interventions from hon. and right hon. Members, did not address that point. She needs to explain to my satisfaction, and that of other Members, why 20 December stands in SI No. 1340, but it is 24 March for SI No. 1338. It seems that there is an appetite in the House to return here, if necessary, to reconfirm or refute the need for these measures to continue into the new year. I hope that the Minister has heard that loud and clear.

I for one would be more than happy to be here well past the time at which we rise, and right up to Christmas if necessary, and the reason for that is this: the things we have been discussing today touch heavily on the liberties and livelihoods of our constituents. These things are not trivial; they are of vital importance, and all actions have consequences. I am worried about things like this because of the messaging it gives off. It will be very difficult for businesses deciding whether to invest. They will look at SI No. 1338 and think, “Good gracious me, this will go on and on and on.” While they have been happy to go along with some of the impositions that we have had over the past 18 months, they are now coming to the point where they are thinking, “This could basically be the new normal. This will go on and on, and on what basis will we continue to invest in our businesses if every few months we have these kinds of things and goodness knows what else that may follow?” I am worried about that.

I am also deeply worried, as other hon. and right hon. Members have pointed out, about this “suspected of” bit. That seems to me to be rather clumsy and I am not comfortable with it. Presumably, anybody showing any coronavirus symptoms could be “suspected of” having the omicron variant.

The World Health Organisation touched on a potential solution to that at the weekend, which is the Thermo Fisher PCR test. I assume that it relies on the detection of the S-gene dropout that has been referred to, which could expedite the diagnosis of omicron as opposed to straightforward coronavirus. I wonder whether the Minister could reflect on that and say whether her understanding is that such a test would be the basis on which we would decide whether somebody was suspected of having it, because that could shorten the length of time that people are required to be out of action and might make No. 1338 slightly more palatable for those of us who have concerns about it.

I disagree with some hon. Members about what will change in three weeks’ time, because I think a great deal will change, as a number of international authorities have made clear. Indeed, the doctor who first found the variant, Angelique Coetzee, seemed to be of that view in her upbeat assessment of how it is affecting her patients, as is Dr Anthony Fauci, the adviser to the President of the United States. Many international authorities are saying that in two weeks’ time, we should be a lot further along the journey of understanding how the variant behaves.

That makes sense because, in two weeks’ time, if the variant is a problem, we will presumably see an uptick in hospitalisation at least among the vulnerable population. It is wrong to suggest that everybody in South Africa is young and vibrant; of course it has its fair share of elderly, vulnerable and frail people and of people with comorbidities. In two weeks, I expect there will be at least some indication of whether it will be a problem. We should also keep in mind that it might be part of the salvation, rather than the problem, because we do not know how the virus will behave. Some viruses mutate downwards and others mutate upwards. We must hope for the former not the latter, but at the moment we simply do not know, which is the basis of my support for No. 1340.

There is an assumption that perhaps southern Africa is not sophisticated in healthcare terms, but I gently make the point that the Republic of South Africa certainly is sophisticated. It has been the victim of its own generosity in having invested heavily in sequencing. It is a bit like the UK in relation the Kent variant: if we look, we will find. We need to be careful about suggesting that other healthcare economies are not up to spec, because I do not think that is necessarily the case for South Africa.

I also observe that yesterday, 25 deaths were attributed to covid-19 in South Africa and the seven day average is 35 deaths. Many of us are captivated by the covid graphs; I check them daily. I confess that I do not generally obsess about South Africa, but recent events have made one focus on its graph, which is bumping along the bottom. We are in no way seeing a wave as yet, although we may yet do so, but we need to be careful about suggesting it will be a major problem, as Angelique Coetzee and others have been.

The Government are right to be cautious—of course they are—but we also need a sense of proportion. We need to understand that everything we do in this place with regard to regulation has a consequence for liberty and livelihoods, for the economy in general and for young people in particular. I made that point in connection with the apparent suggestion of the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) that it was a no-cost measure. We need to be careful about the impact that it all has on young people and especially on mental health.

[Bob Seely]

Does my right hon. Friend share my frustration that we have all these charts about covid, but we have never had them in context—how many people are born, how many people die, how many people die of flu, how many people die of other illnesses—so we have become fixated by something when there are many other causes of death in this country that, frankly, claim many more people, and by taking this out of context we create unnecessary fear?

[Dr Murrison]

Yes, I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. The point about that is of course that the national health service at the moment is running very fast to catch up because for the past 18 months, necessarily, it has not been doing a lot of the elective work in particular that it would have wanted to do. That is actually going to be a problem, I think, for years to come. What I would say is that there seems to me to be very little likelihood of our NHS being overwhelmed this winter. There are always pressures at this time of the year, and an overwhelmed NHS was the absolute cornerstone of Government policy towards this particular public health emergency at the start. Those things are not there now, and I think that we just need to contextualise a lot of what is going on.

Of course we need to reduce the number of admissions to the NHS, particularly to ITUs, for covid-19. It is a huge burden for the NHS, and it prevents us from doing other things, but we are certainly not in the position now that we were in this time last year. So while I will certainly be supporting No. 1340, I am afraid that I will not be able to support the Government in respect of No. 1338, because of the lack of a sunset provision similar to that enjoyed by No. 1340 and also because I am very concerned about “suspected of” and what that might mean in terms of a chilling effect on schooling, the economy, liberty and livelihood.