1. A thread why we are in this mess: It's simple really, as @hector_drummond has repeatedly pointed out, scientists are just as venal and compromised as anyone else./

2. Basic scientific concepts have been disregarded because they are politically unpalatable due to the reaction of cultural influencers, like Frankie Boyle's joke about herd immunity here. Politics is downstream from culture - and the Covid response is political, not scientific./

3. Likewise country comparisons are no longer permitted. Sweden must be ignored because of Norway, Denmark and Finland. Even though the hard Lockdowns of Peru and Belgium led to the highest Covid death rates in the world...we don't talk about those./

4. We're constantly told the entire medical establishment supports lockdown. Yet, I know loads of dissenting doctors, and the ones who do support lockdown tend to simply appeal to the same academics that journalists and politicians./

5. So, who are these academics? Here is a list of signatories to pro-lockdown open letter. Notice anything? They are overwhelmingly public health specialists or psychologists. Social scientists./

6. As @cjsnowdon has pointed out, Many public health acedemics are deeply political, wedded to junk science and extremely interventionist social policies with a roster of unintended consequences. They are social engineers, and social engineering is axiomatically BAD./

7. But look at this equivalent anti-lockdown open letter. Specialists in all sorts of fields, with an understanding of how this will effect people across society. They KNOW the unintended consequences if putting people under house arrest./

8. And yet they are ignored by decision makers. Like Matt Hancock and Grant Schapps, who, @JuliaHB1 discovered this week, do not grasp the mathematical fundamentals of the testing regime which they oversee/ https://twitter.com/talkRADIO/status/1308007004540211200?s=19

9. So why are we in this mess? Well, I've rarely seen a journalist expose a politician's scientific ignorance like Julia did with Grant Schapps. That video has 197 likes. Frankie Boyle's shitty joke about herd immunity? 35 thousand.

10. Sometimes it's the hardest thing to admit you can't do anything. With Covid, hand-washing campaigns are about it. You can try to protect the vulnerable, but in practise, that's extremely hard, and in any case, what if they dont want to be "shielded"?/

11. The inability of society to truly understand risks, costs, and the fact that sometimes, we really can't do much about the world's problems makes me fear for the future. It really does. END

To add - Government scientists CANNOT accept basic epidemiological principles: Herd Immunity, asymptomatic transmission ISN'T a thing, masks DON'T work, the same virus CAN'T reinfect you. The hysterics won't let them. So - we have ever more stupid and bizarre interventions. Ugh!