The pandemic has made cynics of us all

A report by MPs into the spread of the coronavirus has concluded that the government’s approach constituted one of this country’s worst ever public health failures. The MPs say the early fondness for herd immunity plus the delay in locking the country down ended up costing thousands of lives. What makes this worse is that everything the government did was done at the suggestion of its leading scientific advisers, Whitty, Vallance and Sage.

And so one feels another slippage of faith. On this occasion relating to the imperium not of government, but of scientists. I know some people will be amazed that I should have any remaining trust in government scientific advisers. But everybody has to trust somebody, and I tend to trust people who know about things I do not. If I break a bone I do not do my own research into the best ways to heal it, but rather go to the professionals. Likewise, if a global pandemic hits, then I trust the people whose job it is to have been thinking about this before today.

Of course, much of what has happened in the past year and a half has spectacularly eroded that trust. Watching Neil Ferguson’s predictions proving to be off again and again did not help matters. Nor the fact that the faulty predictions just kept coming. I know people who haven’t trusted anything they have been told over the past year and a half. Some are now in the position of refusing to take the vaccine and hunkering down for a life of home cooking. I don’t agree with them — I am pro-vaccine, anti-mandate — but I see ever more clearly where their position comes from. Once you have seen through an institution it is very hard to unsee things.

Yet we already know where this leads.