LONDON — When 50 British scientists and government officials got on a Zoom call on May 7, emotions were running high, and not just because Britain had overtaken Italy for having the highest death toll from the coronavirus in Europe.
Two days earlier, a prominent epidemiologist on the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, Neil Ferguson, abruptly resigned after being confronted by a newspaper with evidence that he had breached Britain’s lockdown rules by inviting a woman to visit him in his London apartment.
Dr. Ferguson was the undisputed star of the group, known by its acronym, SAGE. The models generated by his team at Imperial College London had guided the government’s response to the crisis from the earliest days. Yet, he was being branded “Professor Lockdown,” fodder for sneering tabloid headlines.
As the scientists vented their anxieties about their colleague’s defenestration — and the unrelenting pressure and scrutiny that comes with advising the government during a once-in-a-century pandemic — they were urged to seek out “pastoral support” from a new member, Ian L. Boyd, according to minutes of the deliberations.
A 63-year-old Scottish zoologist who advised the government during an earlier outbreak of avian flu, Dr. Boyd is a veteran of the tense interplay between scientists and politicians. He was brought into SAGE by its chairman, Patrick Vallance, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief scientific adviser, to observe the group’s debates and to be a sympathetic ear for the rattled scientists.
“There was an internal dynamic going on that needed to be treated,” Dr. Boyd said, declining to get into details. “If it becomes pathological, it’s for me to call it out. But I hope everybody feels they’re listened to.”
That SAGE would need the equivalent of an in-house therapist is less surprising than it might seem. No other group has attracted more attention or aroused more suspicion during Britain’s pandemic than this elite panel of experts.
At first, it operated under a veil of secrecy, refusing to disclose its members and offering only spare details of its deliberations. Then, under pressure from lawmakers, the government partly lifted the veil, naming all but a handful of the participants, who wished to remain anonymous, and posting redacted minutes of its meetings.
The group’s academic firepower is impressive: It includes experts in fields from virology to behavioral science, from labs at Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
But transparency brought its own set of challenges. The role the scientists played in Britain’s dilatory response to the virus has come under sharper scrutiny, especially because Mr. Johnson and his ministers repeatedly claim to be “guided by the science” in imposing or relaxing lockdowns. Some scientists worry that Mr. Johnson is setting them up to take the blame for the death toll, which now exceeds 43,000.
As the group’s work has come increasingly into the public eye, the members’ advice is now second-guessed on social media. Their academic quarrels are hinted at in the minutes of their meetings. And as Dr. Ferguson’s indiscretions showed, not even their private lives are off limits.
“It was utterly horrible to see what happened to him,” said Julia Gog, a professor of mathematical biology at the University of Cambridge. “It was also extremely unsettling to other modelers, especially to junior scientists. It was a huge shock to see one of our colleagues treated in this way, and it certainly had an effect on the researchers.”
Dr. Gog described a pressure-cooker atmosphere, in which the scientists are handed complex assignments on very tight deadlines and have to make recommendations in a rapidly changing environment — all while holding down their day jobs and dealing with the stresses of the lockdown in their personal lives.
“I am desperately worried about the well-being of lots of the scientists involved,” Dr. Gog said. “It has been so immersive. You can’t get away. Even when you are trying to not be working, everything on the news is this, everything anyone wants to talk about, and your life is also controlled by this.”
Academics relish debating with their colleagues. But debating while on a government panel in the heat of a public-health emergency is another matter. Members of SAGE said they had fierce arguments over whether to recommend that the government urge people to wear face masks. A glimpse of that back-and-forth is evident in the minutes.
At its April 21 meeting, the panel concluded, “on balance, there is enough evidence to support community use of cloth face masks, for short periods in enclosed spaces where social distancing is not possible.” But a week later, it amended its minutes to add a line noting that the “evidence is weak, and it would be unreasonable to claim a large benefit from wearing a mask.”
It is not clear what triggered the reversal, but it coincided with an issue where Britain has been an outlier among European countries. Although the government recently required people to wear face coverings on buses and subways, Mr. Johnson and his ministers have never actively encouraged their use, expressing doubts about their efficacy. As a result, relatively few Britons wear them.
One of Dr. Boyd’s mandates, he said, was to review SAGE’s minutes to make sure they accurately reflected the scientific advice. He declined to elaborate further on his role and Dr. Vallance turned down a request for an interview.
But Dr. Boyd clearly arrived at a charged moment. At its May 7 meeting, the panel said it needed “a better mechanism for filtering commissions and requests” from the government. Weeding out extraneous or convoluted requests would “help the resilience of participants of SAGE who will continue to work under intense pressure in the Covid-19 response for many more months.” It added that the “need for pastoral support to be available to participants was noted.”
In addition to their mental health, the government offered the scientists counseling on how to deal with abuse on social media, according to an official, who noted that a few even faced shouted epithets on the street early in the crisis, when the government was still debating how to respond to the virus.
Dr. Ferguson, who did not respond to requests for comment, had his detractors in the group. Some bridled at his appetite for media coverage, which they said interfered with its work. Rivals noted that his early models underestimated how fast the virus spread. But others argued that changes in projections — even radical ones — were inevitable, given how little was known about this virus.
The constant uncertainty has posed a challenge to Dr. Vallance and Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, who serves as co-chairman of the panel. They must navigate between politicians like Mr. Johnson, who often turn to them for validation of their policies, and the scientists, who are often divided about the proper response.
“The evidence is not clear even now,” said David Spiegelhalter, a statistics professor at the University of Cambridge and a member. “That means that there are hugely different interpretations of almost the same information. And there are presumably some strong personalities that can be dominant.”
Other scientists said some degree of dysfunction was understandable, given the panel’s history. Its last major assignment was to advise the government in the aftermath of the poisoning of a Russian former spy, Sergei V. Skripal, in Salisbury, England. That work was conducted at a high level of secrecy, involved narrow questions of security and intelligence and got very little public exposure.
“SAGE went from being this internal advisory group to something that is much bigger in the public domain,” Dr. Boyd said.
Some scientists worry that their advice is cherry-picked and politicized. Susan Michie, a professor of health psychology at University College London, noted that a SAGE committee on which she serves produced a detailed study of the risks of cutting the social distancing rule from two meters (six feet) to one meter.
It concluded that shortening to one meter raised the risk of transmission by twice to 10 times, though it said the dangers could be mitigated with protective measures like ventilation, plastic dividers and face coverings. Mr. Johnson said little about the heightened risks when, after considerable pressure from the hospitality industries, he announced the loosened rules earlier this week.
“The overwhelming majority of our advice is ignored,” Dr. Michie said, “but the pieces are picked up and used for political purposes.”
As the government moves to reopen Britain’s economy, it may rely less on the advice of its scientific advisers and more on a new Joint Biosecurity Center, which it set up last month to detect outbreaks of the virus and advise the government on how to respond to them — for example, by closing schools or offices. The center is led by Clare Gardiner, a cybersecurity expert who worked at Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, Britain’s secretive electronic surveillance agency.
Mr. Johnson cited the center’s Covid-19 alert system, which measures the prevalence of the virus, as one reason to ease the lockdown. The threat level was recently lowered from four, signifying high or exponentially increasing transmission, to three, signifying general circulation in the population.
For some scientists, the new center is a necessary recognition that the coronavirus will be around for a year or more, and the government cannot rely on SAGE’s ad hoc, overworked members to analyze every outbreak. Others, though, worry that politicians could use it to circumvent unwelcome advice.
“Now that the government doesn’t seem to like SAGE’s advice so much, they can set up their own review,” Dr. Michie said. “They can handpick their own scientists.”
"behind" - Google News
June 27, 2020 at 02:03AM
https://ift.tt/2CNSBkF
Behind the Scenes at SAGE: Pressure, Anxieties and ‘Pastoral Support’ - The New York Times
"behind" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YqUhZP
https://ift.tt/2yko4c8
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Behind the Scenes at SAGE: Pressure, Anxieties and ‘Pastoral Support’ - The New York Times"
Post a Comment