stay strong and fight 🙏

maybe because our beaches are heavily polluted by the water cos?

You can read more about the terrible decisions happening in the corridors of power, and how Indie SAGE offered an alternative approach here, in Marres and Barragán’s article: 8/8
journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

All of this was why a previous CSA, Sir David King, decided to set up Independent SAGE - to provide open, honest, transparent communication between scientists and the public during this public health crisis 7/8

“At key decision moments in the early phase of the Covid emergency, the UK government chose to rely on the advice of informally assembled experts with positions in the tech industry and long-standing ties to the Conservative party, instead of the official scientific advice prepared by SAGE.” 6/8

The reality was a little different, in fact, as Marres and Barragán write in their new paper… 5/8

The government tried to keep the membership of - and the advice being offered by - its scientific advisory group secret. They essentially told the public they were “following the science” while ensuring the public couldn’t check up on this claim. 4/8

Meanwhile the Chief Scientific Advisor noted that the government was “cherry-picking scientific advice “in order to publicly claim they were following the science” while using scientists as ‘human shields’ to protect politics””3/8

An email from a cabinet secretary on March 11 2020 provides a glimpse of processes inside no10, as he opined: “We are not running a dictatorship here & the PM is not taking nationally significant decisions with a bunch of No10 SpAds and no ministers, no operational experts and no scientists” 2/8