Public Health — House of Commons, 2021-11-30
Topic: Health
Robert William Henry Seely (Conservative, Centre-right): 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".