COVID-19- is the strategy working? An interview with Dan Hodges
As the COVID- 19 pandemic spread across the world, we became overwhelmed with a huge amount of information about the various strategies adopted across the globe. Several news outlets have harshly criticized the UK plan, under the assumption that the British government was trying to achieve herd immunity to the detriment of the elderly. Is this correct? I asked Dan Hodges, columnist for The Mail on Sunday, to explain what is going on.
What do you think of the government strategy to tackle coronavirus? Do you think its communication was effective?
First thing, a caveat, I am not in any way a medical expert, but I think firstly you have to distinguish between what I would call the communication side of the strategy and, if you like, the clinical side of the strategy. Obviously they are interlinked to an extent. I think broadly at the moment the clinical side of the strategy is one that’s proving at the moment to be broadly effective and I think for two reasons. I think the single biggest decision that the British government, and Boris Johnson especially, took, right at the start was to take the decision that the government would be guided solely by the clinical advice and the clinical experts in terms of development of the strategy and that’s something I’ve spoken to a number of people in the government about, and everybody whether critical or supportive of the strategy informs me and concedes that is genuine and that was very important. That’s why you saw, there was a moment before that when we still had things like the Today programme ban was still in place, and ministers weren’t allowed to go on the programme and talk about it, also certain journalists weren’t getting briefings and we were told the priority was still Brexit.
Anyway, all that was ditched, and that was right and now this is the key issue we are going to follow through, so that’s the key thing.
I think one of the most contentious points has been, when Britain moved to what we call lockdown. I think everything that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks has vindicated the Government strategy, I mean you can already see the extent to which people have started to chafe against the lockdown and the practical realities of the lockdown, and that’s after a week. The deputy Chief Medical Officer saying yesterday we could in this until June/July, so the fact that the government attempted to wait until the last possible moment before introducing a lockdown is something that I think I completely understand and I think is going to be vindicated by time, whichever way this crisis goes actually.
I think you have to distinguish that from some of the communications, which I think on some levels have been appalling. There’s been too much of an attempt even when policy decisions have been taken, to sugarcoat those decisions and to try and present them as options rather than instructions from the government. Today they said on the radio people should only do shopping once a day. No. 10 is not spinning back against them saying that’s not official government advice so on that side I think there have been some serious failings, but overall I think the broad strategy is going to be vindicated.
Do you think Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings clashed in some way?
No, I don’t think that’s where the tension is, my understanding of what happened is obviously we’ve had this huge debate about herd immunity and the ethics thereof, it is quite clear to me that there has never been a herd immunity strategy. That has never been the government strategy, the briefings including the private ones have always been very clear, the government was always going to adopt the strategy of attempting to protect and insulate the most vulnerable members of the society for as long as they can, but at some point also insulate the whole of society and the issue was at what point we move to those more draconian measures.
If you look at the original briefing the government was very, very clear about that. I think the problem is that sitting alongside this, or behind, is the clinical concept of herd immunity, which is a well-established clinical principle with any virus, and any outbreak. Over the long term the only way you are actually going to protect society is if as many of us as possible can build a form of immunity to the virus, either natural immunity by becoming infected and recovering and then building up immunity that way, or through inoculation. It’s quite clear that medical experts were telling ministers and journalists that, as we progress through this, the fact that a certain section of society would get it and recover and develop immunity was actually a positive, because over time it’s how you eventually defeat the virus. You get to a point that so many people in the community have it that those healthy members of community that have had it and recovered from it help protect those who don’t have it, and that’s a long-established scientific and medical principle. The trouble is, Cummings in my view saw that science, took that science, briefed it to selected journalists in a clumsy way, and then they reported that that was the government strategy, and that they wanted everybody to get it, and kill a quarter of a million pensioners. That was never the strategy, the whole herd immunity saga is a consequence in my view of a bungled briefing by Dominic Cummings, it was not the strategy and never has been the strategy. If you speak to anybody in Downing Street they deny Cummings has ever been pushing the herd immunity strategy, but three separate sources of mine say he has done that.
Have you got anything to say about Italy?
Obviously watching it from afar the death toll and impact on Italy has been horrific. I mean, part of the problem that we had very early on in this crisis there are a number of predictions that we in Britain were a certain number of weeks behind Italy, it’s only a matter of time before we had a similar impact here. Italy has become this sort of artificial benchmark if you like for how the government is managing crisis here in the UK. I mean, I’ve never personally seen the value in creating an artificial benchmark like this, but obviously seen from afar it seems to be having an appalling impact particularly in certain hotspots. I think the thing that would be interesting to see, which I think is quite significant for what’s happening here, is the extent to which the Italian people are willing and able to put up with a period of extended isolation, because we start to see reports here now that there is an increasing backlash even within Italy against an extended lockdown. One of the interesting things is going to be how long Italy and Italian authorities are able to sustain this, after the first review that should be around the 12th, the 14th.
As far as NHS capacity is concerned, do you think it will be able to cope when the peak comes?
This is another topic where the media narrative and the reality seem to have diverged a bit. I thought it was very significant last week when the deputy chief medical officer actually said we are not experiencing a capacity crisis at the moment even in terms of ventilators, ICU and general hospital capacity, which took me back, because the whole narrative up to that point was the NHS is about to collapse, to fall over. Now it appears people are expecting the peak in the UK around the 12th , when you are expecting a maximum pressure on the NHS. At the moment all the information I am seeing and all the information I am getting by people in government is that it’s going to be very tight, but they think there will be sufficient capacity to see us through the peak of the crisis, but of course a virus doesn’t perform the way we would like it to, so we will just have to wait and see.
Do you think we can actually believe the information and data coming from China?
I can’t say for a fact that the figures are false, and I completely understand those who are concerned about introducing a racist element into the pandemic, painting this as “China virus” as Trump did.
However, I think we have to be careful about holding up on a pedestal firstly the way the Chinese government has responded to this crisis, secondly the Chinese government in general. I have seen a lot of people wondering why haven’t we done what the Chinese are doing. Certainly one thing I know from the very beginning of the crisis, when I was speaking with British officials here, they were having a very hard time getting accurate information out of the Chinese authorities about the nature of the virus itself, not the numbers of dead, literally just the epidemiological component to the virus to allow for treatment here. Secondly, it might well be that the Chinese have had some success in stamping down on the virus, but I am not entirely sure the methods the Chinese authorities have used to control the virus are methods I would be particularly comfortable seeing employed in a Western democracy. There have been stories of quite draconian measures employed to crack down on the virus, and also we have to remember a significant number of medical personnel in China who attempted to raise concerns about the virus were themselves arrested, intimidated and more broadly silenced by the Chinese authorities, so I think we need to be a little bit careful about putting China on a pedestal in terms of how we respond to this without stoking up unnecessary nationalistic and racist sentiments.
Published in www.atlanticoquotidiano.it