The actual Twitter exchange is here:

https://twitter.com/brenc74/status/1472275887655735297

To summarize: Professor Medley, academic epidemiologist and chair of the official UK COVID modelling committee, states that SAGE only produces models that can be used to justify action, because in his view modelling scenarios that don't tell politicians to do things is pointless. "Decision makers are only interested in scenarios where decisions are made ... decision makers don't have to decide if nothing happens"

He also asserts that government officials ask them for models to justify pre-chosen outcomes and they simply make them to order.

The exchange is astonishing for how blunt it is, but not surprising to those of us who have been criticizing epidemiological modelling from the start. I've been writing continuously since the start of lockdowns that when read carefully, COVID modelling papers were continuously turning out to have unbelievable "errors" in them that invalidated their conclusions [1] [2] [3]. It quickly became apparent that many of these errors couldn't be genuine mistakes and motivated reasoning was the most obvious root cause, but these "scientists" constantly insisted that they were entirely neutral, politically independent and held themselves to only the highest standards. Professor Neil Ferguson even claimed his biggest regret about the pandemic was the extent to which other people had politicized it.

Now we have a claim by the head of SPI-M itself that the modelling is not only entirely a product of political considerations, but that he thought it was obvious and can't understand why anyone else would be confused about this.

Medley's comments make it untenable to believe that UK COVID modelling is scientific. Moreover his views speak volumes about the confusion and moral degeneracy that appears to exist inside the civil service/public health academia, something I've been worried about for a long time now. Read enough public health papers and you can't escape the conclusion there are very deep cultural problems in this field. This new event fits that impression completely - note that the Professor is confused and irritated by the exchange. He wasn't forced into the admission by clever questioning, he seems genuinely confused by the idea that not doing something is also a decision. In his world view it's obvious why SAGE didn't model a scenario in which Omicron is less severe than Delta despite the South African data, and he can't understand why Fraser Nelson (editor of the Spectator) is playing dumb as he sees it.

This looks like near-total ideological corruption. Medley doesn't merely disagree with the idea of hands-off government, he doesn't appear to even recognize the concept exists at all. Nor does he recognize that there's a contradiction between presenting himself and his team as scientists whilst working backwards from pre-chosen conclusions to get a model that justifies them.

Frankly though, I don't actually believe the government has been telling SAGE to create models justifying lockdowns. This is inconsistent with what we've seen so far, in which SAGE constantly runs to the press and kicks up a fuss any time the notionally conservative British government tries to relax restrictions. Additionally the LSHTM Omicron modelling paper itself doesn't say anything about equal severity scenarios being requested by the government. In fact it says they assumed omicron severity = delta severity due to "lack of data", which is transparently false. There's been data for weeks saying the opposite. Now even the head of the committee and senior LSHTM academic is disagreeing with their own claims about their severity assumptions.

I think everyone in the UK who has trusted COVID modelling and "The Science" in the past 2 years needs to seriously reflect on what just happened, and what this exchange says about the state of our scientific institutions. Telling people the models are unreliable has felt like shouting into a gale force wind, for years. Maybe now the modellers themselves are saying the same thing, people will start to believe it.

[1] https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569

[2] https://blog.plan99.net/summary-of-methodological-issues-in-...

[3] https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-pap...