Mark Dolan: Let’s not cancel Christmas - let’s cancel the doomsday Sage scientists

If you thought that Covid modelling, which predicts the spread of the virus was inaccurate and flaky, think again. It's arguably dishonest. In a majestic piece of journalism, Fraser Nelson from the Spectator magazine had a Twitter exchange with one of the key modellers advising the government – Graham Medley, the chair of the Sage modelling committee. This whole exchange has been written up into an article in the magazine, and it’s well worth a read.

In this exchange Mr Medley seemed to suggest that he has been given a very limited brief, and was asked to churn out worse-case scenarios without being asked to comment on how plausible they are.

“We generally model what we are asked to model” said Mr Medley. “There is a dialogue in which policy teams discuss with the modellers what they need, to inform their policy”.

Fraser nelson asks whether this remit could mean leaving out just-as-plausible, quite important scenarios that would not require lockdown? His reply:

“Decision-makers are generally on only interested in situations where decisions have to be made.

There appears to have been no interest from government figures in Whitehall in having any optimistic data that suggest measures are not required. Proof if you needed it that modelling, like so much of what we’ve seen this pandemic, is highly politically motivated. There is an argument to be made, that modelling has been a tool for behavioural scientists, rather than epidemiologists. Time and time again, what former justice of the Supreme Court Lord Sumption calls “junk modelling”, has shaped our pandemic response and devastating policies like lockdown. On the strength of these revelations, modelling looks to have been a PR exercise, theatre and perhaps most damningly, a political weapon, with which to keep us afraid and to make us comply. We know that the viruse’s trajectory has all too often fallen below even modeller’s sunniest predictions. And of course let's not forget Randy prof Neil Ferguson's prediction of half a million deaths at the start of the pandemic, which kicked off this whole nightmare. We have always - perhaps naively - interpreted the modelling, as a prediction of what the virus may well do. But it seems that may not have been its functon. If this exchange is to be believed, it was about providing the government with ammo, with which to lock us all down and retain a vice-like grip on our daily lives. Modelling looks to have been an answer in search of a question, a means to an end. This has echoes of Alastair Campbell's dodgy dossier

in which allegedly sexed up evidence was produced, to justify the Iraq war. Well here we go again with politicians asking public servants to manipulate or frame the facts in a certain way, so they can achieve their political ends.

And we are seeing more of this doomsday modelling in relation to omicron, which all the experts are now saying is on a par with a bad cold, including Tim Spector from the highly respected Zoe Covid data app. This government reminds me of the boy that cried wolf. You know that story. This little boy cries wolf a couple of times as a joke, and the third time, when there IS a wolf there, no one comes to his rescue. Well who is going to believe anything that comes out of those hellish government press conferences now? I've done my own bit of modelling and here it is. I predict that cases of politicians not being trusted will go through the roof and the public will, I predict by the next spring, be done with this pandemic and any future restrictions. A YouGov poll courtesy of The Times already suggests a majority of people are against further measures. That's a watershed moment.

We are now facing the threat of Christmas being cancelled, or punishment for Christmas with a New Year lockdown. The scientific case for these ruinous measures, which damage the economy, society and feed the spiralling non-Covid death toll is crumbling. And with clear evidence that the statistics are being gerrymandered or at least slanted in the government’s favour, in my view, there is no moral or intellectual case for these measures either. We revealed the news last night on the show that Brexit Secretary Lord Frost has left the government.

This is the dynamic figure who got Brexit done. He is leaving the government, we are told, because of concerns over Boris’s uncosted and scientifically debatable green agenda, an ongoing fudge in relation to the Northern Ireland protocol which divides our country down the Irish Sea, and the increasingly authoritarian measures seen by this government.

It's a huge blow for the prime minister after a week to forget. The Court of King Boris is crumbling, as is the case for any future lockdowns. Let’s not cancel Christmas folks, let’s cancel the doomsday Sage scientists, and their dodgy graphs.