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Nafeez Ahmed reveals how a high-profile letter to Boris Johnson was based on ‘fringe pseudoscience’ and co-drafted by a Government advisor who downplayed the COVID-19 death toll
A pernicious but flawed narrative has come to dominate the public debate over the second COVID-19 wave. It is the idea that the science is somehow irreparably divided on what to do about the pandemic.
This notion is encapsulated in two different letters sent to the Government by what the press has portrayed as two groups of esteemed scientists – one group supporting the reintroduction of social distancing restrictions, and the other criticising efforts to ‘suppress’ the Coronavirus.
Widespread media coverage of the letter has suggested a deep-seated schism at the heart of the British scientific community about how to respond to the crisis.
In reality, the authors of the letter that is critical of a COVID-19 suppression strategy have numerous ties to Conservative and Republican Party lobby groups as well as to various agencies of the Government, including HM Treasury, the Ministry of Defence and the ‘Nudge’ Unit – ties which represent potentially serious conflicts of interest.
The damage to public discourse has been done. Large segments of the public are convinced that the scientific community is fundamentally divided on how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. But this is untrue.
Worse, this group’s claims about the Coronavirus have no basis in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Instead, it represents what one top British epidemiologist has described as “a fringe group of scientists”, out of sync with “most of the public health experts in the world”.
The ‘Let It Rippers’
The main authors of that letter are Professor Sunetra Gupta (a theoretical epidemiologist at Oxford University), Professor Carl Heneghan (director of Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine), Professor Karol Sikora (consultant oncologist at the University of Buckingham) and Sam Williams (director and co-founder of the Economic Insight consultancy).
A version of this letter was published by the Spectator magazine on Monday under the title ‘Boris Must Urgently Rethink his Covid Strategy’. It criticised the current strategy of ‘suppression of the virus, until such a time that a vaccine can be deployed’ as “increasingly unfeasible”. The strategy, it claimed, is “leading to significant harm across all age groups, which likely offsets any benefits.”
But, according to Professor Stephen Griffin of Leeds University’s School of Medicine – who is also the Chair-Elect of the UK Microbiology Society’s Virus Division – the letter amounted to “little more than a thinly veiled return to a herd immunity strategy and the human cost for this has not changed since Spring, nor is it likely to – one only has to look across to countries like the US, Brazil and India to see this reality”.
Griffin pointed out that “whilst certainly not the majority, we know that younger and otherwise healthy individuals can sadly succumb to the virus, plus it is becoming increasingly clear that long-term effects, even in patients with relatively ‘mild’ COVID-19, represent a significant clinical concern going forwards”.
Letter to Government – Drafted by Paid Advisor to the Government
What neither the Spectator nor the original letter acknowledged is that one of the co-authors of the letter, Sam Williams, is a Government consultant who has worked with a range of government agencies including HM Treasury.
From August 2018 to September 2020, Williams’ firm, Economic Insight Ltd., received a £2.3 million Government contract. It has worked with the Conservative-led Government since as early as 2013.
The firm has advised HM Treasury and the Government’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), as well as performed economic research for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (as well as its former incarnation the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills), the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), along with several other agencies such as the Office of Rail and Road and the National Air Traffic System.
Under the tenure of his latest contract, Williams’ firm published a bizarre piece of research in late June, An Improved Measure of Deaths due to COVID-19 in England and Wales. The paper aimed to show that COVID-19 deaths in the UK were being massively overestimated (by as much as more than 50%) and that the lockdown had only killed 21,000 people. It claimed that the lockdown had produced more net deaths than the disease.
The same lobbies that helped bring Johnson into power, many of which are climate science deniers, are doing their best to dismantle the already frayed and flawed structures of scientific advice informing the Government’s strategy.
The paper, co-authored by Williams himself with two economists (from Loughborough and Sheffield Universities), received high-profile coverage from the health and science editors of The Telegraph, despite not being peer-reviewed or published in any scientific journal.
Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at King’s College London, described Williams as “the author of the single worst ‘economics’ paper on COVID-19 I’ve read so far, which is a *very* high bar” and said that Williams “is *not* representative of economists’ views”.
Documents from the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) reveal that, back in March and April, the Government was about to commission “actuarial analysis” to examine “health impacts associated with the economic consequences of interventions” and “long-term impacts of interventions on health, including socio-economic effects on health”. Some of this “economic work” was already being undertaken under the purview of the Treasury, the minutes showed.
When Loughborough University was contacted to find out if it could throw light on the funding behind the COVID-19 study by Economic Insight Ltd., its press officers remained unusually reticent.
Government Consultants Appear to Falsify Death Toll
Economic Insight’s website contains no further detail about why the company had suddenly decided to venture into the study of pandemic mortality rates. What is clear is that it conducted the research within the period of its active management consultancy contract with the Government.
Neither Williams nor his economist co-authors Professor Karli Glass and Professor Anthony Glass (both of whom also signed Williams’ letter to the Government) have any experience whatsoever in conducting research on fatality rates.
To help fact-check it in more detail, I sent their paper to D Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist and statistical geneticist at Barts and The London School of Medicine’s William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University. Formerly a senior staff scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Gurdasani co-leads the GeCIP project at the Department of Health & Social Care’s Genomics England. She has published widely in the peer-reviewed literature, including on the COVID-19 pandemic in The Lancet Global Health.
To her, the Economic Insight paper on COVID-19 deaths “is pseudoscience” as the “model or the premise doesn’t even stand up to basic scientific scrutiny”.
The paper argued that problems in the way Public Health England collected and categorised data relating to COVID-19 would lead deaths to be overestimated. But Dr Gurdasani pointed out that the authors relied selectively on data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for “excess deaths” but not for COVID-19 deaths – despite ONS data circumventing those problems because it is based solely on deaths caused by COVID-19 as certified by doctors (either from testing positive, or due to COVID-19 symptoms).
The Coronavirus Crisis Oxford Model Touting ‘Herd Immunity’ Promoted by PR Agency Tied to MOD and Nudge Unit
Nafeez Ahmed
“This is how we collect death data on all diseases,” said Gurdasani. “These have COVID-19 on their death certificate, which is fairly reliable, and don’t suffer from the issues described in the paper. These are publicly available, and used extensively for COVID-19 analysis and modelling – so very unclear as to why they would choose to use flawed data, given their premise that they would like more accurate estimates.”
The Government’s own data produced by the ONS provides a figure of 52,514 excess deaths across England and Wales due to COVID-19 up to 11 September. This is “widely accepted” as a reliable estimate of the “minimum number of deaths related to COVID-19 this year”. According to the ONS itself, the gap between reported COVID-19 deaths as catalogued by Public Health England and the ONS excess death figures is most likely to be “undiagnosed” COVID-19.
“I can go into the many statistical issues with the model, but they’re too many to highlight really,” added Gurdasani. “We can’t really model a pandemic trajectory with the sort of model that’s been used.”
Funded by a Financier Linked to Trump’s Inner Circle
Sam Williams’ co-authors of the anti-suppression letter to Government also each have dubious potential conflicts of interest.
Professor Carl Heneghan set-up and directs the Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service, the “major benefactors” of which are “Maria and David Willetts”. The latter are regular donors to both Cambridge and Oxford Universities (largely via the Ferraras Willetts Foundation).
Maria Willetts made her wealth in finance, serving her last position as President of Chase Capital Partners in New York, but now has direct ties to senior figures in US President Donald Trump’s inner circle. She sits on the board of Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute (RAI) alongside Christopher B. Burnham, a former official in the George W. Bush administration who went on to join Trump’s Transition Team and in 2019 was appointed to the Pentagon’s Defense Business Board. Burnham is also co-founding chairman and CEO of Cambridge Global Capital, which holds major investments in private healthcare.
Another of Willetts’ colleagues at the RAI is Mary Jo Jacobi, a former senior aide to President Ronald Reagan who went on to join President George Bush’s Cabinet. She was later appointed to the Government’s Advisory Committee on Business Appointments up to 2017, and now sits on the Foreign Office’s Wilton Park Advisory Council.
They represent what one top British epidemiologist has described as ‘a fringe group of scientists’, out of sync with ‘most of the public health experts in the world’.
Heneghan’s Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service publishes regular updates on the pandemic – many of which offer sceptical takes on issues such as death toll calculations, but none of which can be considered a reliable part of the scientific literature. Each entry is essentially self-published by Heneghan and contains the following disclaimer at the end: “… the article has not been peer-reviewed; it should not replace individual clinical judgement and the sources cited should be checked… The views are not a substitute for professional medical advice”.