SAGE minutes

[Eddy Edson]

Up to early May, published on Friday: https://www.gov.uk/government/group...mergencies-sage-coronavirus-covid-19-response

A lot of this is quite bizarre, even in light of what should have been known at the time. Really confirms my guess that the UK govt was indeed "following the science", but unfortunately SAGE's "science" was wrong & seems to have been impervious to what was happening in countries which were coping well with the thing.

As Devi Sridhar, public health prof at Edinburgh, says:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1266423527739215874

Shows that advice was to treat it like flu, unstoppable, & aim to stay within NHS capacity as it spread. Assumed coronavirus could not be contained- by China or any other country. They completely missed that countries could 'crunch' the curve & buy time for a better solution than mass death.

 

[Docb]

Had a look at the first few minutes and I would not actually describe them as minutes because they are a series of statements and give no clue as to the discussion that led to the statements. Unless of course, everybody around the table agreed to what was being minuted without any reservation.

And yes, the flavour is to treat it like flu, model it like flu, and don't worry too much. Actually that's probably the best thing you could do at the time but I would be surprised if there were no dissenting voices but if they were they do not come through. Have to read some more.

 

[Eddy Edson]

Actually that's probably the best thing you could do at the time ..

Not in Feburary and probably not in January. There was quite a lot of evidence for how the thing transmits by then, and countries which assimilated and acted on this evidence quickly have done well. SAGE seems to have ignored or dismissed most of it. Why?

 

[Eddy Edson]

IMO there's a bigger risk here than people ignoring guidelines because of Cummings (Why should anybody care much what some advisor does? Were people really only acting because govt told them to? Etc etc).

The risk is that govt, believing itself to have "followed the science" into a bog, now starts to ignore all of it & go full-Trump.

 

[mikeyB]

The Sage meeting minutes have been redacted. We have no idea how many Sage committee members urged the government to follow WHO guidelines. Everything that comes from Sage is filtered by political operatives.

Only now have a couple of Sage members. have lifted their heads above the political parapet and said the government have ignored their advice on lifting lockdown.

Who knows how many previous decisions have ignored their advice?

 

[Docb]

Have you looked at the minutes mikeyB? The redactions are all marked and confined to junior civil servants names which is fair enough.

They don't show any of the arguments thats for sure but you would not expect that. More interesting from that point of view would be the minutes and papers presented to the sub-committees.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

The redactions are all marked and confined to junior civil servants names which is fair enough.

And some people for national security reasons, and "Participants who were Observers and Government Officials were not consistently recorded therefore this may not be a complete list."

Overall the minutes (probably as expected) doesn't really give an impression of what the meetings were like. Whether there was tension, what the arguments were like, etc. They do seem to me to give the government plausible deniability that they were "following the science".