This report rings true, and for me, has depressing echoes of the debate around the British military campaign in Helmand (which I worked on, in the Treasury, the Ministry of Defence, and No10). https://twitter.com/WJames_Reuters/status/1247543712667725824

The media (and most MPs) instinctively frame the debate around the quesion of whether the Government is following scientific (or military) advice, implicitly assuming that expert advice is good, and politicians "ignoring" or overruling that advice is bad.

As a result, there is little or no media or parliamentary scrutiny of whether the expert advice is flawed, as it often is, by groupthink, various kinds of bias, or the wrong foundational assumptions.

Our failure, on the Helmand campaign, was not (as the media always assumed) that we were ignoring or overruling military advice. It was that we failed to challenge it, to interrogate it enough, to expose the differences within the expert community and have a proper debate.

This @reuters report suggests something similar may have happened in the early stages of the coronavirus crisis.

This is one of the baleful consequences of politics and politicians being held in such low esteem: that the media discourages them from playing their full & proper role in such situations, until it is clear the experts are getting it wrong, by which time it is sometimes too late.