Concerns have been raised in recent months after an outbreak of avian flu caused by the virus H5N1 was detected in cattle in the US. To date, 139 affected herds have been identified, and four dairy workers have contracted the virus. The UK Health Security Agency, which previously believed there to be minimal risk of the virus evolving into a form which could spread among humans, now believes there is up to a one-in-three chance of it doing so. A factory in Liverpool has been busy manufacturing stockpiles of a pre-pandemic vaccine which will be given to farm workers and others in occupations that bring them into close contact with bird flu.
We have been here before with bird flu. An outbreak among birds in East Asia in 2005 led to the World Health Organisation predicting that the disease could go on to kill between two million and 7.4 million people. Not to be outdone, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London declared that around 40 million people died in the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, and that given subsequent population growth, you could scale [the potential death toll] up to around 200 million people probably. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease. Not for the first time, Prof. Ferguson was talking nonsense.
If H5N1 does turn out to cause a pandemic in humans, can we expect a more measured response?
The last Conservative government was in no rush to learn the lessons of Covid-19, perhaps as there were plenty of errors made by Tory ministers who were standing for re-election. The official Covid Inquiry is moving with glacial speed: the first part of its report is published only now, three years after it was first announced. And even that is looking only at preparedness. In the end, the thing we were truly unprepared for was the political panic and the devastating effect it had on this country when scientific advisers who should have known better were also swept away in the hysteria.
Sir Patrick Vallance was chief scientific adviser during the pandemic. He has now been named Keir Starmers science minister which is odd given that, under his tenure, science was not properly defended. Instead, advisers turned to faulty mathematical models provided by the likes of Professor Ferguson; and in October 2020 Vallance himself deployed a misleading graph predicting 4,000 deaths a day in the absence of a second lockdown.
Pandemics only end when herd immunity is achieved: a basic point made in April 2020 by Graham Medley, a Sage member. In an interview, he warned about the likely effects of a national lockdown. There will also be actual harms in terms of mental health, in terms of domestic violence and child abuse, and in terms of food poverty, he said. This annoyed No.10, which asked if there was a discreet way of silencing such scientists.
As the chief scientific adviser, Vallance should have been in favour of robust debate, defending the right of Sage members like Medley to speak out even (perhaps especially) if his line differed from official policy. But Vallance was a participant in the government WhatsApp chats and in those messages he agreed to deal with Prof. Medley, asking him to dial back his comments. Vallance reported back to the WhatsApp group that his intervention had been a success and Medley was mortified. Suppressing debate is not in the interests of science. All angles need to be considered and dissent should be welcomed. This, surely, is a crucial lesson we should learn from the Covid era.
Another lesson is that exaggerating a threat can be counterproductive and the resulting panic incredibly dangerous. In his 2010 autobiography, Tony Blair who was prime minister at the time of the 2005 scare said: There is a whole PhD thesis to be written about the pandemics that never arise. He went on: The old first world war flu statistics were rolled out, everyone went into general panic and any particular cases drew astonishing headlines of impending doom. In the end, he said, he tried to do the minimum in preparing for the pandemic that didnt arrive. Four years later he was vindicated when swine flu led to a similar panic. Retroviral drugs were stockpiled and the EU advised against non-essential travel to the US. The virus turned out to be no more virulent than seasonal flu.
When Covid struck a decade later, it turned out that we were embarrassingly ill-prepared, in very basic ways such as not having sufficient personal protective equipment stockpiles for NHS staff. But we were also unprepared for the danger of overreacting.
So we face a vital question: if H5N1 does turn out to be on the verge of causing a pandemic in humans, can we expect the right response? The findings of the official inquiry into Covid will be no help. The disaster that was the lockdowns has hardly been examined; the main intention seems to be to prove that lockdowns were inevitable, so that the only issue at stake is why the government didnt impose them sooner.
The increasing concern over the spread of bird flu has not prompted calls for Covid-like restrictions yet, but it could all too easily lead in that direction. We need to inoculate ourselves against hysteria as much as we do against any virus.
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