A v.significant error in Toby Young's piece, misreporting the Chief Medical Officer's view of the likely spread by 6-10 times (from 5%-ish to 30-50%), by mishearing/misunderstanding the point he made. Young's thesis seems to collapse without this mistake. https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1249618579126919168

Young is a generalist commentator, not an expert. Perhaps his billing, as an expert, in a head to head debate, partly reflects the paucity of expert support, as well as paucity of public support, for the argument he is making.

Not sure Toby Young would share Sun's billing of him as an 'Expert' @toadmeister ?

Expert fits his interlocutor, Whitworth is Professor of International Public Health, specialist in Epidemiology & Control of Communicable Diseases, at London School of Tropical Health & Medicine

Of course, generalist commentators can have an opinion too. They may often draw on expert views to argue over the policy interpretation of the evidence - as Toby Young tries to do here. But on this occasion he has misunderstood the evidence & the view of the expert he quotes.

This seems a v.clear case of confirmation bias. As a non-expert, @toadmeister did want to bolster his opinion by appealing to expertise. But he misheard/misunderstood what the Chief Medical Officer said - hearing him to say something else, that fitted what Toby already thought.

This thread argues that the use of Young's second piece of evidence is also a misunderstanding of the model, and overlooks relationship of its outlier scenario to the emerging UK data. Again, confirmation bias is likely to be in play here https://twitter.com/cheianov/status/1249646928205414400