Calum Inverarity
Welcome, everybody, and welcome to this Chatham House members’ webinar. My name’s Calum Inverarity and I’m a Research Analyst and Co-ordinator with the International Security Programme. Today’s webinar, Led By the Science? The Complex Relationship Between Policymaking and Research, comes in response to the renewed tension to the boundary between these two influent processes. The use of evidence-based policy is one of the central processes of democratic governance. In recent years, however, we have found certain terms gaining traction and discourse that have contributed to undermining the relationship that is key to this process. Some examples include people have had enough of experts, alternative facts, and mis or disinformation, which are just some of the sentiments and terms that have become increasingly commonplace in the media and political discourse.
The uneasiness of this complex relationship became more explicit during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, where we became accustomed to hearing responses were being led by the science. Whether this was in genuine deference to Scientists, or an anticipatory move to shield the government from subsequent criticism, this mantra received mixed reactions from the scientific community, for a variety of reasons, namely, that the science is not uniform. To refer to it in this way oversimplifies the complexity and nuances involved in making decisions on this basis.
One consequence that we’ve seen of this messaging has been that certain members of the scientific community have been elevated to somewhat unenviable positions in the public’s consciousness by Politicians and the media, and there was concern that they would be expected to shoulder a greater level of responsibility for the practical implications of government decisions than they have before. Ultimately, this sets a dangerous precedent and once more brings up the question of what role does and should research and science play in policymaking?
Set against the backdrop, today we have a brilliant panel of speakers who are going to unpack some of the key issues surrounding this relationship. Some questions that we hope to cover, in the next hour include is it possible, or indeed desirable, for politics and science to influence one another yet remain separate? To what extent should Scientists be made accountable for policy decisions that the research informs? And are we doing enough to communicate the complexities and uncertainties involved in science and protesters that are behind policy decisions?
Just before we get into it, there is a few housekeeping notes that I just want to cover. First of all, our event today is being held on the record and it’s also being recorded. Please feel free to tweet throughout the event using the #CHEvents. Also, we’re welcoming questions from the attendees, so please use the ‘Q&A’ function to submit these. Also, if possible, we would like to have attendees to actually ask their questions, so if you’re not going to be able to speak through your microphone, please also just make a note of that in your comment which you leave in the Q&A.
So, without further ado, I’ll move onto the panellists that we have. First up, we have Sir David King, who is Chair of Independent SAGE, Founder and Chair for the Centre of Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge, and he was formerly the Chief Scientific Advisor of the UK Government from 2000 to 2007. Sir David is also presently an Affiliate Partner of SYSTEMIQ Ltd and Senior Strategy Adviser to the President of Rwanda. In addition to serving as the UK Government Chief Scientific Advisor from 2000 to 2007, Sir David also acted as the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative on Climate Change from 2013 to 2017, and Chair of Future Cities Catapult from 2012 to 2016. He has a PhD in Physical Chemistry from Witwatersrand University and has since received 23 honorary degrees from universities around the world. Sir David was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991, Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2002, knighted in 2003, and made Officier dans l’ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur in 2009, and for any French attendees, forgive my pronunciation. Sir David, it’s an absolute pleasure and honour to have you joining us here today to speak about this issue. I’ll keep my introduction to that, and I’ll pass over to you.
Sir David King
Calum, thank you very much for that introduction, a bit too much I thought, but here we go. So, what I’m going to be talking about is the job that I had initially in government as Chief Scientific Advisor. So, after 35 years as a Research Scientist, I was parachuted into government to be the Prime Minister’s Chief Scientific Advisor, and at that time, it was important to understand, when you’re in the university sector, there’s the rigour of scientific discovery divorced from political influence, and then you’re parachuted into government and your function, as a Science Advisor, is to advise on policy, and I stress that, that is written into the function of the Science Advisor, and the reason I’m stressing this is, even this has been in question recently.
So, the very first thing that happened to me was the foot and mouth disease outbreak in 2001, and I very quickly managed to assemble a team of experts, some of those experts are on the SAGE team at the moment, to help me. Now, what is important to understand, when I say help me, there was one channel of information going into the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and that was myself. It wasn’t a multiple of voices all expressing different opinions. So, the function I saw, as the Chief Scientific Advisor in this situation, is to have – we had daily meetings of the experts, I had daily meetings with the Prime Minister, and it was to extract from the expert one storyline and one policy line that I could give to government. The reason I say that is because the Government Ministers are not experts, for example, in infectious diseases in animals, and so what they do rely on is this very clear advice coming into them. At the same time, Tony Blair immediately asked me to go on radio and television and he was never on radio and television with me, he simply left me to get on with the communication job with the public, and I see that as a critical way forward.
If we look at the opposite happening, before I became Chief Scientific Advisor in the year 2000, we had a BSE crisis in the farming community, as well, in the livestock, and in that crisis the Minister of the then Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries went on television famously offering his daughter, his young daughter, a hamburger with British beef, and what he was emphasising was, it’s perfectly safe to eat British beef. And at the same time the scientific community were coming up with this understanding that if you ate British beef that had been exposed to BSE, you were likely to get what was now discovered as variant CJD, which is a similar brain disease in human beings, and it is a killer.
So, what the – what happened there was that immediately after the BSE crisis, Lord Phillips was asked to set up a commission to look into how the government responded to that crisis, and in his 12 volume report, the most important thing he said was, “A Chief Scientific Advisor needs to have the freedom to explain to the public what advice he’s putting into the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, so that the public can understand what the science advice is,” because, of course, at that time, they were again using the mantra, ‘we are following the science’. So, all of that time that I was working with Blair and Brown, I had the ability, the freedom to go on television and radio and explain what advice I was putting into the government on whatever issue came up, except, of course, for security issues. And the net result is that trust in public science in government did rise, and all of the measures of the trust, and this is a critically important part of the whole process. If you are going to give advice into government and then Politicians make decisions and let’s remember, science advice is advice, the Politicians and the Prime Minister in particular make decisions. But if the two are seen to be making the same decisions, it increases public trust in that voice of science.
Now, equally, this may sound a bit dogmatic, but it was very important that I was the only one going on television and radio from that team of Science Advisors that I had and any disagreements had to be sorted out under my Chairmanship, outside of the view of government. So, at that point, the meetings were not held in the public domain. Subsequently, it became the norm for the meetings themselves to be held in the public domain.
Now, I think what I really want to emphasise here is the importance of gaining trust of the public by being able to go into the public domain, without any strings attached to what you were saying by the government of the day. Now, the second thing is that, as we look ahead, a Chief Scientific Advisor needs to be supremely wise, on so many future things that may happen, and what I set up was an in-depth Foresight Programme. We had what I would think was a rather shallow Foresight Programme, the in-depth programme, it took about 100 to 300 experts about three years, two to three years, to come up with a programme of analysis and what actions would have to be taken by government in a crisis.
The biggest programme we looked at was infectious diseases and, in 2006, we reported that it was very likely that a pandemic of the kind that has happened this year would happen before 2030, and we set out the kind of actions that government would need to put in place to be pandemic-ready, because of the importance of that as a crisis. We then move onto 2010-2012, and in that period of time, the government began to be much clearer about who could go on television and say what. It was all directed through Number 10 and when I came back into government in 2013, while it was expected that I had a public voice and this would help to put across the government’s policy on climate change, I discovered that I was kept off all of the channels by Number 10 Communications Office, not even the Foreign Office’s Communications Officer, everything was channelled to Number 10. I would get my response four days after the request, the moment had gone anyway, but it was always turned down. Now, for me, this was a very backward move.
When the current crisis began, it was very clear that the Chief Scientific Advisor was not able to go into the public domain. In fact, he set up a group of people to advise him, they were not known, this was not in the public domain either and the minutes of the meetings were not put into the public domain. So, this is the very opposite and this really is the reason why Independent SAGE was set up, because we felt what the public needed was public meetings where they could attend, meetings where advice from the public came in, as well as advice from the Scientific Advisors, so that was a double way of communication, and the public are aware of things that we often are not. And – but the second thing was, the gaining of trust and the public did begin to trust us, more than that, we found we were into a media avalanche.
As soon as we were established, I got media requests three, four times a day and by farming these out to all of the members of Independent SAGE, we were able to manage these, and this continues to the present time. As we all know, the crisis is now getting worse, much as we all predicted, for reasons that were predictable, and so, once again, we are very much in demand. What I’m therefore saying is, there is a demand from the media, there’s a demand from the public to hear what the best science advice is and on Independent SAGE, unlike SAGE itself, I would say we have the good range of Scientific Advisors, including in particular public health, where SAGE is unrepresented, but we are also 50% female/male, we are also – we are diverse. So, it was very important to be able to show to the public that we were a diverse organisation.
Now, I was also asked to address the question, in this very short time space, what – does Indie SAGE depoliticise the science? And I think that is the objective, we are not political, we are a team of top-quality experts, and is this a way to continue a role to hold governments to account in the future? And, yes, we are discussing that right now in Independent SAGE. There has been quite a big response to us saying, yes, you’re doing a good job, and we’ve got to see there’s got to be a way to continue. Thank you.
Calum Inverarity
Thank you so much, Sir Dave, for those opening remarks there, and before we move onto our next panellist, I actually, if it’s okay, would like to maybe just bring up, or draw out one little point that you made there on the idea of trust and about how Independent SAGE has garnered so much public trust. Is there any potential problems that you can see or envisage with that, with the trust in Independent SAGE surpassing that of the actual SAGE, or how this might erode the trust further in the government?
Sir David King
I think the first difficulty we had, at the first public meeting, we have the media present at the public meetings, and one of the questions came from, let me say, the Daily Mail, and the question was – and it was framed as a question, but it was, “You are a political bunch. You are clearly attacking the Conservative Government therefore you are a crowd of Lefties.” Now, what I was able to say was, “I don’t think one of us is political in the sense that you’re suggesting, and nor do I think it matters. What I am telling you though, is please judge this group of people by what they’re saying, by their expertise.” And actually, since that moment, we haven’t been faced with that kind of charge again. I think it becomes very apparent that, when you’re talking to a Virologist of the quality of Deenan Pillay that the quality comes through in everything he says. It’s not possible to pull him down and say, “You must be left-wing because you’re disagreeing with the government.”
Calum Inverarity
Thank you so much for that, Sir Dave. We will be returning with some further questions later on, but -d so as not to get stuck, we’re going to move on next to Dr Patricia Lewis, thank you very much for being here with us. So, Dr Patricia Lewis is Research Director, Conflict, Science and Transformation, and also the Director of International Security Programme at Chatham House. Previously, she served as Deputy Director and Scientist in Residence at the Center for Non-proliferation Studies at the former Monterey Institute of International Studies. She was Director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research and Director of the Verification Research, Training and Information Centre in London. Dr Lewis was also on Hans Blix’s 2004 to 2006 Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, the 2010 to 2011 Advisory Panel on the Future Priorities of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and was an Advisor to the 2008 to 2010 International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament. One last point is that she also has a PhD in Nuclear Physics from Birmingham University and studied Physics at Manchester University as well.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Thank you, Calum, and, like Dave, I’m a bit embarrassed by that very long introduction, but I appreciate it, and thank you very much for inviting me to speak on this. This is such an interesting topic and what I’m going to do is address the role of think tanks in this debate and, as you will have heard from that long introduction, I’ve worked in academia, as a Scientist, but also as an expert in non-proliferation and international security issues. I’ve worked in think tanks and I’ve worked in the UN Research Institute, which is a, sort of, international style think tank. So, I’ve got a kind of interesting range of experience on the intersection between policy, science policy and science, which I think is probably why you asked me to speak. I think we need to think about the way in which think tanks, policy think tanks work to interpret knowledge and to present knowledge and to present our understanding, perhaps is a better word than knowledge, our understanding of things to people who don’t have the full range of expertise, because nobody can, be they Politicians, be they Civil Servants or other Scientists. And I think it’s very much about interpreting what’s going on and framing what’s going on and, to a large degree, challenging what’s going on in the way in which our understanding is being created. So, we need people in think tanks to actually understand the science, as well as being able to interpret the science for people without the full range of jargon and scientific vocabulary.
So, to interpret and explain the concepts, but perhaps, more importantly, to understand the significance of the science, as well as the potential range of impacts of the science. And, of course, that’s a moving feast, nobody knows all of those at the beginning of anything, and probably, nobody understands it as things are very well developed as well, and there’s all sorts of new things that can be thrown up, as time goes on. And so, part of what we really have to understand and interpret is that constant flux, constant change, constant revision of understanding, that is indeed the scientific process. I think there’s a special role for science policy think tanks and I think that Mahlet will speak about that later, and I think, you know, we can look at some of the very big scientific institutions, like the Royal Society, for example, and all the other Royal Societies, we can look at the universities, where they have policy units, and those policy units do a great job at helping policymakers understand the impact and importance and significance of the research that’s being done in the scientific world, as well as in other aspects of university life, for example.
One of the big issues that I think we have in interpreting what’s going on in this world is the understanding and communication of the uncertainties, which is a very difficult thing for Politicians and policymakers to be able to deal with. And understanding uncertainty is really important, it is, in fact, the very essence of our universe, and we have to get to grips with this because increasingly, what we’re seeing in our policy world is a demand for certainty, a demand for big statements, a demand for, you know, this is a – this is what we understand, and a lot of people think that’s what science is about. Whereas, I would say that science is about the opposite. It’s about really understanding the uncertainty. It’s about constantly challenging what we think of as certain. It’s about seeing the possibilities in uncertainty, for changing the way we understand the world, for developing new technologies for reframing the science quite differently, and that’s the history of science and it demands, it relies on uncertainty.
But in our policy world, there’s an increasing demand for there to be certainty, and you hear it today, for example, in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis that we’re in, people keep saying, “Why do you keep chopping and changing? Why can’t you tell us, you know, what we will be doing?” And the answer is that actually a lot of what we understand is uncertain and we are trying to grapple with what’s going on with this virus that we don’t fully understand. We don’t fully understand its impact, we don’t – didn’t fully understand its transmission. There’s probably all sorts of new surprises still to be had there, and we are constantly trying to grapple with it, but Politicians then make statements with certainty and then, of course, because the science changes, to some degree, as you say, led by the science, they have to change that certainty, and then it sounds like they’re making U-turns, they’re making flipflops, etc. And I think it’s because Politicians find it really hard to communicate uncertainty, that somehow they – in our political systems, they often think of that as some kind 0of failure, and I think we need to really change the public understanding of uncertainty, and going with that is understanding the range of uncertainty.
So, one of the things that happens is, if you talk about the uncertainties, then people say, “Well, nothing’s certain, therefore I can believe what I like.” No, that’s not the case. There’s a range of uncertainty associated with all sorts of things, and an awful lot of our scientific endeavour, we have pinned down to a very high degree the uncertainty and are very certain of many things. But there are new things, such as the new virus, where we would be very uncertain and we’re trying all the time to, you know, reduce that uncertainty, understand it better. So, we really have to understand that whole range of uncertainties.
That also means that – that gets embedded into our understanding of risk and our understanding of probability, where we tend to be quite poor at our understanding of those things. We might be able to think about all the full range of impacts, although we are actually quite bad at that, in some respects, and – but trying to understand the probabilities associated with each of those impacts is far more difficult for us to do and we often get that very wrong. And so, that’s where I think we really need to understand uncertainty in each of those things. So, when we’re making predictions and when we’re trying to think about the future, which is really where we’re at, we need to factor in quite a big range of uncertainties. And I won’t talk about the complexity of all of that, but, as you know, that’s one of my big issues is trying to understand the interconnectivity and the complexity of our decision-making, which is so important.
And I’ll just finish that I think, you know, one of the big things in science is about accountability. It’s about being transparent, and I think that’s so important with the public. You know, most of our science is publicly funded, not all of it, but somewhere along the line, the public is engaged and funding it, whether it be through taxes or through purchasing things that then go on to fund science in the private sector. So, somewhere along the line we’re engaged with it and we, as Scientists, people as Scientists need to communicate and be transparent and accountable for what we do. But we also have to be able to make mistakes, because, you know, we cannot develop new things, without the ability to make mistakes. That’s absolutely fundamental to the scientific process. In fact, you can argue, and many do, that the scientific process is about making mistake after mistake after mistake, in order to be able to work out what isn’t right, in order to be able to then finally get to some interesting answers. And I think most people in the general public understand that, but we, I think, have a problem with our scientific education.
We’ve somehow managed to create a scientific culture in our society, I would say, that excludes rather than includes, that creates an elite group of people who think about these things rather than a resilient group within our societies, and that has tended, I think, to alienate a large group of people. And this has allowed, I think, for there to be some conspiracy theories, some fake news about all sorts of things to do with science, and particularly in the realms where we have some uncertainty. So, this is something that is not going to be easy to tackle, but we do need to face up to it and engage in a different way with a bigger group of people who perhaps feel somewhat excluded from that discussion. Thank you.
Calum Inverarity
Thank you so much for that, Patricia, you touched on some really important points there and particularly the part towards the end about this division in sciences, and it being – or excluding at the moment rather than being inclusive, and then it’s feeding into some other sort of similar narratives that we’ve seen recently, which has seen a bit of pushback. So, thank you for that. We’ve actually got a question in from one of our audience members that I hope that we can maybe just quickly jump to, if that would be okay. Ahmed, you – would you like to unmute yourself and ask your question? Okay, in this case, I’ll just ask – here we are.
Ahmed
Hi, this is Ahmed here.
Calum Inverarity
Thank you, Ahmed.
Ahmed
Yeah, and just touching base on what was mentioned just before, the govern – given this day and age, I want to understand why the – why do you think the government still has issues with portraying uncertainty, especially with COVID, because of – I think the majority of the public understand that there is – it’s very – it’s an unknown situation to the majority of people? And wonder why or how we could bridge this gap between showing the outcomes that science can provide, i.e. the different scenarios, and letting the government also portray it to the public. And also tell them that there are these scenarios that could happen, this is more likely, this is this, and actually portray – give like a tree situation, i.e. if this scenario happens, we can do this, if this scenario happens, we can do this, rather than having multiple U-turns and people distrusting the government and not knowing what exactly they want to do. So, the question simply being, why do you think we can’t bridge that gap between uncertainty and government policies? Is it feeling…?
Calum Inverarity
Thank you very much. That’s a terrific question, Ahmed, and Patricia, I guess, seeing as we’ve just been speaking on this, would you like to immediately respond or maybe we can fish it out?
Dr Patricia Lewis
Sure, I think it’s a really important question and I’m not sure I have the answer. I think it’s something to do with culture. I think, in our culture, our decision-makers are required to make decisions in uncertain environments and one of the ways they do that is they tend to present the information that’s coming to them as more certain than it might be. And I think we’ve seen some – in recent history, some really bad outcomes, as a result of that approach, and I think that we create a situation in which the public, perhaps the media, demand that certainty from them. They’re going to have to make that – those decisions in an uncertain environment. They’re going to have to make decisions with uncertain information, but then they have to justify those decisions and if they turn out to have been wrong, then it’s no good going back and saying, “Oh, well, you know, actually, I was uncertain, I just decided to do that because it felt like a better decision than the other decision.” And that may have been the actual truth of how they did it, right? But they can’t say that in the culture that we exist in. So, if we want to deal with uncertainty, if we want our Politicians to be more honest with us about the decisions they’re making, we are going to have to allow them not to understand fully. We’re going to have to allow them to be uncertain, and that means changing our attitude to them as well. So, that’s what I would say is one of the key issues that we need to grapple with, and I think it’s a very hard one, in the culture in which we live.
I think if you look at some other countries and what happened more recently with the COVID-19, you’ll see how different countries have actually laid out more clearly the pathways, and I think it’s been easier for people to understand that when this happens, we’re going to have to go back and go back some steps. And they kind of are expecting it and it’s more clearly laid out, and then, the government doesn’t deviate from that, so there is a less sense of perhaps it being made up on the foot, as it were. I’m sure those governments are grappling with the same amount of uncertainties, but perhaps they wanted to communicate that better at the beginning.
Calum Inverarity
Thank you so much, Patricia. Yeah, this question has really spurred on some further questions, which we’ll get back to at a later point. I’m just wondering perhaps maybe if Sir Dave or Mahlet if you have anything to add on this, before we move forward? Okay, in that case then, I’ll do my introduction for Dr Mahlet Zimeta. So, just at the beginning of this month actually, Mahlet started there with the Open Data Institute as the Head of Public Policy. Prior to joining the ODI, Milly was – Mahlet was Senior Policy Advisor at the Royal Society, the Independent Scientific Academy of the UK, where she led the Society’s policy programme on data and digital disruption, including projects on data governance, data skills, science skills and privacy enhancing technologies. Before that, Mahlet was previously Programme Manager at the Alan Turing Institute, which is Britain’s national institute for data science and AI, where she managed the Turing’s Research Partnership Programmes in Health and Finance and Economic Data Science. She’s also worked at the Medical Research Council and served on an advisory group at Chatham House. She holds degrees in philosophy from Oxford, Cambridge and York. And that’s the end of the long introductions, thank you so much for being with us, Dr Zimeta, I’ll just pass over to you.
Dr Mahlet Zimeta
Thank you very much, Calum, and it’s a real honour to be part of this discussion, so thank you for the invitation, and I really like the questions that’s come in so far and I’m hoping we can explore it together in the Q&A. So, I’d like to begin my remarks by observing that this is the first pandemic of the information age and maybe we could think about some of the implications of that. So, one really important implication is that citizens can compare experiences across borders in real time, with media coverage or with all the open data that’s available about country responses and this has implications for the social contract at country level.
A second major implication of this being the first pandemic of the information age is that researchers and policymakers can share information and learning across borders in real time, and this has implications for the speed and versatility with which we can respond to the crisis. So, a good example of this is the way science journals have been making their work open access to speed up collaboration and research across borders. At the University of Oxford, the School of Government has created a COVID-19 Government response tracker, which is kind of listing all the different policy responses governments have made, according to sort of restrictions and so on. So, for example, school closures and travel restrictions, and this is happening in real time and is internationally accessible.
At the heart of all of this is data, its availability and its quality, what is measured, how it’s interpreted and what kinds of tools or technologies are built on the back of it, such as predictive technologies like AI or digital surveillance. At the Open Data Institute, the ODI, we think that data is a kind of infrastructure, comparable to traditional national infrastructure like transport or electricity. So, part of that kind of national or international data infrastructure is physical, like computing hardware, in the same way that, you know, a transport system has physical roads. But that’s not the entirety of the infrastructure, right? So, with the transport system, you’ve got your physical roads, but it’s the placement of those roads and how they serve purposes for those communities that makes it infrastructure. It’s the vehicles that use the roads and their features and whether they’re fit for purpose. It’s the road users who know how to handle those vehicles safely. It’s the traffic legislation that prevents accidents and it is the community of cultures and behaviours that means that there’s a shared understanding or expectation about interactions around this.
So, I was born in Ethiopia and grew up in Britain, driving in Ethiopia and driving in Britain are completely different experiences, I can assure you of that. So, similarly, data infrastructure includes purposes that data serves. It includes the data assets themselves. It includes the skills to work with those data assets, and it includes the institutions or legislation that governs how that data is used, as well as the cultures and community beliefs and behaviours around data. So, this first pandemic of the information age has highlighted the importance of data and what we stand to gain from good data infrastructure.
So, for me, a major kind of pillar of that is data infrastructure for policymaking. So, data collection is never complete. Even with the best intentions in the world, it will be biased because information is never complete, that’s just reality, it’s not a conspiracy. So, it’s important that data policy, or policy derived from advanced data analysis, is human-centred rather than data-centred or tech solutionist. You can’t assume that because you’ve kind of made an effort to capture comprehensive data that anything that comes out of it is going to be accurate or ready to be applied. You’ve got to think about the kind of the human implications first, before you start implementing the technology.
So, Ada Lovelace Institute have done some really good work on how, particularly in the context of public health, introducing a data-driven technology could actually introduce or exacerbate inequalities. I mean, public trust must be in the system, not in just one piece of kit, and I think we’ve seen some of the kinds of inequalities that could arise with the pandemic in the way that there wasn’t sufficient data available on the causes of ethnic minority deaths in this and the disproportionate impacts on them. So, that’s a really, kind of key example of, you know, the importance of having a human-centred approach rather than assuming that anything derived from the data will be comprehensive and accurate.
Another aspect of this is that data analysis is interpretation and so, you know, even if you have a really, kind of thorough dataset, the assumptions that we bring to it, or the focus that we bring to it, again, will be flawed. And so, it’s important to have a diverse team, with different social, professional and disciplinary perspectives on that data or on the question that’s being asked of the data. So, a good example of the importance of a kind of humanities perspective in public health is the way that the Ebola outbreak was handled in West Africa. So, anthropological insight was needed, in order to understand and navigate the cultural importance of burial rites there, and the importance of washing the corpse, for example, and also the importance of the kind of – the significance of the colours. So, it was really important that bodies be kind of covered in white fabric, whereas, the kind of the western medical staff were bringing black body bags, which was not appropriate for mourning or for respect and were not allowing proper kind of washing of the bodies. So, you’ve got to have that anthropological insight in order to have effective community interventions and public health measures. So, the kind of hard data about, say, genetics or, you know, about economic predictors is not sufficient.
So, we also need to think about policymaking for data infrastructure. So, within Britain, for example, we have datasets from local authorities and from central government. We have data from hospitals and from GPs, but these don’t always connect together in ways that make them mutually useful. So, a good example of this might be, you know, if you have a physical address book with your friends’ addresses or phone numbers written in pen and maybe just by first name only, but maybe in your mobile phone, the way you’ve got people’s contact details stored includes some work contacts too, maybe you have them by their initials, maybe your email account has people’s contacts, but only their email addresses, not their phone numbers and it organises them by surname. So, how do you make these different datasets kind of interoperable and with kind of similar standards that you can integrate them and make analysis or find a contact through them? And that’s the – the inability to link datasets like that has made it very difficult to have a joined-up pandemic response. We can also see the possible implications for the global supply chain. So, digital technologies could potentially be used to kind of identify bottlenecks in the global supply chain or help identify capacity gaps. But if data standards are not consistent across international borders, then it won’t be able to do that, and the Royal Academy of Engineering has done some brilliant work on this.
Finally, countries around the world are going to face a new wave of post-pandemic challenges, as we move in and out of lockdowns and physical distancing. For example, how do you maintain existing civic and institutions, or do we need new ones? How do you hold fair and free elections? How do you recalibrate our measures of economic prosperity? How do you monitor and support collective mental health and community resilience? So, the British Academy is doing some excellent work on this that will be out this year and one of the core ideas or themes that’s emerging is that the data needed for long-term recovery or for disaster risk and the aspects and the impacts of that might be different than the data you need for immediate pandemic response.
So, this is the first pandemic of the information age and I think that citizens have a role in this. So, the social contract is being renegotiated and that capacity to compare experiences across borders in real time allows us to kind of identify what good practice might look like and try to make it a race to the top. Ad for policymakers, it’s I think just the importance of realising that data infrastructure, it’s not just the technology, it’s not just the hardware, the computing power, it’s the legislation, it’s the culture, it’s the behaviours, it’s the public acceptance of these technologies, and if we can get that right, then we can move forward together constructively.
Calum Inverarity
Thank you, Mahlet, for those remarks and that’s a lot to digest as well. I hope you won’t mind me picking up immediately on, and sort of delving into your experience with AI and about how it’s been utilised. Well, not necessarily AI in this case, but more the complex modelling as well that was used, and I guess subsequently, we’ve then seen this algorithm used for the exam results in the UK. So, there’s been two quite high profile, sort of, backlashes to this, or a lot of questions being brought up, and I just wanted to ask you, what some of the difficulties that we have at the moment and whether these are things that we can address, with regards to the explainability of some of these systems that we’re using, particularly for policymaking purposes?
Dr Mahlet Zimeta
Yeah, so, here I think this is, again, the importance of infrastructure not just being the technology itself, but the behaviours, the legislation, the kind of, you know, the kind of public understanding and trust in it. So, under the GDPR, for example, we have a right to explanation for automated decision-making, and so that means that, you know, if an automated decision gives you an outcome that you’re not happy with, you can challenge it, right? And that’s kind of – but then, there’s a kind of trade-off because that could also slow down innovation, and don’t forget, also that human decision-making is also not always transparent, right? Sometimes humans make a decision based on intuition or bias. So, it’s, you know, maintaining our rights to explanations and fairness and understanding what we can and can’t ask for the technology.
So, at the Open Data Institute, at the ODI, we believe that the data that goes into a model should be made as open as possible, that the model itself that’s being used should also be made as open as possible, and also, that the insights derived from that analysis should be made as open as possible. So, when you make the data open, that allows other people to work on it, so maybe imagine a hackathon, for example, so other solutions could be derived from that. When you make the model open, it allows it to be tested, it allows it to be validated and potential problems in it could be found. And when you allow the insights from that to be open and to be shared, that allows more value to be generated from that, as well as we can test whether there’s going to be disproportionate impact. So, we think that kind of openness is key for all of those things.
Calum Inverarity
Thanks, Mahlet. We’ve got so many questions coming in and, at the same time, we’re running short on time, unfortunately. But, at the same time, just following on from what you were saying there and taking at least one of the questions into consideration, I hope that the attendee won’t mind me rolling this in, but with regards to nudge theory as well, there is an explicit question on it, but, Sir Dave, I was wondering, just based on the modelling that Mahlet was just mentioning about and making things more transparent and open, as you’ve tried to do through Independent SAGE, do you think that this has had a knock-on effect in encouraging the government and SAGE to be more transparent as well? Sorry, Sir Dave, you seem to be on mute there.
Sir David King
I’m not sure that we’re having any effect on government at the moment. There is a real issue and I wonder if I could just slightly move away from your question and address something that Patricia was really saying? I fully agree with Patricia’s analysis on uncertainty, but at the same time, there is an example, a contraried example to the way most governments have behaved in COVID-19, and that is Greece, and in Greece, there is a national hero. His name is Sotiris Tsiodras, and Sotiris is an expert in infectious diseases, he works within government. The Prime Minister went on television on the 4th of March and said, “This is Sotiris Tsiodras, and he is the expert on this, and he will be telling you every evening at six o’clock how this is all going to be managed in Greece.” Every evening at six o’clock, Sotiris was on television, he produced a very detailed report, based on the WHO analysis that had been put forward at the beginning of February, and today, he is described by The New York Times as a COVID-19 hero.
The total number of deaths in Greece, to date, is less than 200. There are many, many islands where there is still not one case of COVID-19. There’s a few cases arising from young British tourists arriving on some of the islands. But the point I’m making here is, the big contrast between having the calm, knowledgeable voice of an expert who – and what came across from him was this understanding of the importance of every human being who was suffering from the disease and the clear understanding of the pressure that nursing staff were under, for example. So, gaining the trust of the public through somebody who understood in fine detail the best of the uncertainties, but set out a pathway. On the 4th of March, he was even saying, “We will be able to announce in May that we will undo all of the lockdown measures,” he gave the date and they stuck to it.
So, what I’m actually saying is, I think the British Government has operated in exactly the wrong way. We do have Ministers and the Prime Minister who really are not capable. They don’t have the background to understand the details. For example, the Minister of Health saying, “We’re going to run 100,000 tests a day by X date,” not explaining why the tests were important, why they were being conducted, what was the analysis for, and what was the point of announcing a number as a target? None of that was explained to the public, so it was all mysterious.
Now, I just have to also say nothing could change the government’s mind on perhaps what was the biggest mistake they made of all, and that was in creating new companies to take over from the public health assurance system that has been set up. We have quality assurance benefits of accreditation, abandoned in this country in favour of private sector lighthouse laboratories, with unknown quality assurance. There’s no public understanding of the quality assurance being given by these companies that have no public health experience at all. And when we hear the government talking about throwing another £100 billion into these companies, we feel actually this has got nothing to do with science advice, this has got something to do with political aspirations in the middle of a pandemic. So, I’m afraid I’m just very critical of the government because there’s no understanding of how to handle a pandemic, in such a way as to minimise the number of deaths, optimise the economics for the country as well. We’re hitting both very, very badly. Sorry, that was a bit of a rant.
Calum Inverarity
Not at all, thank you very much for that. It’s been very insightful and from a position of experience and background on this as well, so it’s good for it to be aired. I know that we’re running on a little bit, so rather than be selfish, I will move onto some other questions. Could we perhaps have the question or questions from Prashant Rao?
Prashant Rao
Hi, so, yeah, I had two questions that I hope are somewhat related and I’m not abusing my privilege here. I’m curious, you know, has the government here in Britain gotten worse at communicating the uncertainty inherent in science and interpreting that uncertainty? And, sort of, tied up with that, you say Britain is – it sounds like, from what you’ve said, that other countries have done this better, but, you know, for – in a dispassionate way, would you say that Britain is particularly good, bad, average at this? Is this just like a problem that is endemic among governments and political leaders, and Britain simply exhibits it and we see it more here?
Calum Inverarity
Thank you for those questions. I’m not sure if anyone wants to volunteer to immediately take them on? Oh, we’ve got hands up already. Mahlet, maybe we’ll come back to you for just now, and then Sir Dave.
Dr Mahlet Zimeta
Yeah, just really briefly, I think we mustn’t forget the role of citizens in this, as well as the opportunity for citizens. So, there’s two parts to social contract, right? There’s the government, but there’s also the population, and I think it’s really important to think about what citizens can do to be better informed, to be empowered, to know what the right questions are, to ask, to look at the evidence themselves and make their own kind of judgement call about the either individual risks or the kind of, you know, the robustness of policy. So, Sense About Science in Britain have done some great work on this, on, you know, understanding, you know, whether the data that’s being used in decision-making is fit for purpose and what questions can be asked of it. And at the ODI, we see that data literacy and data skills as part of infrastructure, right? That’s part of what makes data, you know, useful to a society.
Calum Inverarity
Thank you, Mahlet. Sir Dave?
Sir David King
Can you repeat the question and I’ve lost track? The gist of it is?
Calum Inverarity
And just, you know, is Britain – has Britain gotten worse at this over the years, at sort of – have British political leaders gotten worse at communicating?
Sir David King
Alright, yeah, yeah. Alright, so I think the answer is quite simply that we had a big transition in 2010 when the government came in with austerity measures. The austerity measures meant, for example, all of the preparations that had been put in place for a pandemic of this kind were no longer being financed because there were other issues that were deemed to be more important, because when the money is cut year-on-year, there has to be a focus on dealing with the crises that are coming in daily at that time. So, that’s the first thing.
The second thing is that the present government has certainly not followed the Phillips Commission Report of 199 – sorry, 2 – no, 1999, in which they said, “Government Chief Scientific Advisors must be free to go on the public domain and explain what their advice is.” Now, so we backed away from that. However, let me just take you to, for example, Germany. There’s another country, which has emerged far better on this pandemic than Britain and, once again, let’s look at the leadership in Germany. The German Chancellor is herself a very good Scientist and her husband is a good Scientist, I know him, so what we have in Germany is an example where the Chancellor didn’t have to back away from television, she could talk very confidently. And then, another very good example is New Zealand where the Prime Minister is a very humane person, she’s already proved that on other occasions, and so she was able to take a very calm, good leadership, fully understanding the science advice that she was given. So, no, I think political leaders are different at different times in different countries. There’s no general phenomenon here.
Calum Inverarity
Thank you, Sir Dave. Patricia, I think I saw your hand raised.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Yes, I wanted to just add into this and say that there’s a couple of things. One is in Kerala we’ve seen the Health Minister there, K. K. Shailaja, I’ve pronounced that badly, who has – you know, she saw what was happening with Wuhan and acted, without recourse, to what Delhi was saying, what the government central was saying, and the State has done comparatively remarkably well, compared with the rest of India, and it’s a really interesting experience. And one of the things that we found in our research at Chatham House, on the work we’re doing on resilience, is that we’re calling it the vulnerability paradox, but there are societies that have learnt not to rely on government because government will never come to your aid. There is no aid, and so they’ve become more self-reliant, and it’s a really interesting thing that often you get developing countries, or more – or poorer countries actually being more resilient than wealthier countries because of the overreliance on government you see in wealthier countries.
Calum Inverarity
Thank you, Patricia. We’re kind of coming into the closing stages now of this really interesting conversation, unfortunately. I think I’ll maybe try and squeeze in one last question, if I may, from the attendees this is. Howard Hudson, would you be able to ask your question?
Howard Hudson
Yeah, thanks. This is just picking up also on what Dr Zimeta was saying earlier, how important do you think it is to raise the level of scientific literacy among the general public, and what can Politicians, Academics and Journalists do to achieve that?
Calum Inverarity
Okay, thank you, Howard. The microphone was a little bit muffly, so it was essentially looking at – or asking about scientific literacy amongst the general public and what can Politicians, Academics and Journalists do to achieve that? Patricia, I think you got in there first with your hand up first, so…
Dr Patricia Lewis
Thank you. I completely agree, I think we need to – as I said in my opening remarks, I think this is a fundamental thing, and I wanted to tie it in with the question on conspiracy theories and say that I think there’s a lot of stuff going on with the conspiracy theories, including, you know, we’re being messed with and there’s a low trust in anything that government says. And – but I think at the heart of it is actually poor scientific education, poor understanding, and poor critical thought in science and a willingness to believe quite fanciful or quite extraordinary theories, rather than the ones that are being presented from the scientific community and, to me, these things are very connected.
Calum Inverarity
Mahlet, I see you’ve got your hand up there.
Dr Mahlet Zimeta
Thank you. Just really briefly, I think it’s important to kind of foster critical thinking in general. So the danger about kind of only focusing on the sciences is, you lose the value of what the humanities and social sciences can contribute, whether that’s a kind of robust understanding of ethics or kind of that kind of critical understanding of history and being able to kind of see, you know, have that long range view, whether it’s, as I mentioned in my comments, you know, anthropology. So, it needs to be both. It needs to be kind of general capacity for critical inquiry, and I like what Patricia was saying about kind of, you know, maybe some emerging economies are more resilient. So, in Cambodia, there’s this – about a year ago, a laptop – or two years ago, a laptop was launched using open source code and what open source code and open models, what they allow you to do is to kind of hack. So, kind of having data available allows people to kind of teach themselves coding, kind of to innovate, to find collaborators and to learn from each other. So, again, it doesn’t have to be this top down kind of command and control government providing solutions, there can be peer-to-peer learning, there can be kind of learning across international borders too.
Calum Inverarity
Sir Dave, I think that you were also wanting to input.
Sir David King
Yes, I think my input is a little more indirect, it’s really to underline what Patricia has been saying. It’s a very, very difficult issue how we improve the level of science education, but one way not to do it is the way that we do it in Britain with A Levels being a very small number of subjects in the last two years at school. But I think what I did want to stress was, let’s take vaccines as an example. It’s very, very topical because there’s a lot of reliance amongst governments on a vaccine emerging against COVID-19. If governments, and I’m talking about Politicians in particular, such as the President of the United States, who doesn’t really understand the science, was to push for a vaccine to be released for public usage before it’s gone through the final third stage of testing, what we could see is the emergence of a large number of negative reactions, people even dying, as a result of being vaccinated.
The worst outcome of that is that it will encourage the anti-vaxxers to take the front floor. In other words, what we risk then is losing all of the amazing response that we get from vaccines, in terms of disease control. So, I think this is a very critical example of where governments could act without understanding why is the process of producing a new vaccine such a long one? It’s a long one because the testing process is vital and it’s also vital to keep the trust of the public.
Calum Inverarity
Thank you for those final comments and also for actually managing to touch on the conspiracy theory question, which also was raised. Apologies to everyone else who I haven’t managed to get round to, I guess this would always be the case, with such a rich topic of discussion and something which is at the forefront at the moment. I need to bring the session to a close now unfortunately, so I want to thank all the members for participating and for asking your great questions. I want to thank all of the panellists for all your great remarks and contributing your expertise and your time to this meeting. I wish that it could go on longer, and who knows, perhaps we’ll have another one or a spin-off one some other time, but for the time being, thank you all once again for participating and I hope to see you again.
