Conflicts of interest
1. The UK’s pandemic response relies heavily on scientists and other Government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture COVID-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.
Many are associated or employed directly or indirectly by organisations that have been funded by the Gates Foundation, including the supposedly independent MHRA. Government appointees are able to suppress or cherry-pick science and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own products and those of friends and associates.
2. Covid-19 was downgraded from a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) in mid-March 2020.
Decision-making has been presented as being the result of ‘the science’ with the goal of delivering ‘consensus’. However, science does not operate as a consensus making mechanism and it is not monolithic.
The current crisis has demonstrated that groups like SAGE are not following scientific norms of behaviour.
Analysis and policy formulation needs more stringent oversight in a way that invites and delivers scientific debate from both within and also outside the group by professional people with no competing interests.