I have long been a supporter of HealthWatch-UK, the organisation initiated in the 1980s by the radio and television presenter of Crimewatch fame Nick Ross. HealthWatch-UK has a good record of exposing the fraudulent nature of much of the complementary and alternative therapy movement, on the one hand, and exposing some of the excesses of Big Pharma, on the other. Essentially, they promote evidence-based medicine and campaign for proper education of nurses and doctors in how to assess and implement evidence. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of HealthWatch-UK they invited the eminent statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter to deliver a lecture titled Naughty Numbers. Until recently David Spiegelhalter was Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge.
Professor Spiegelhalter rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is notable for his reasonably balanced assessment of the statistics related to COVID-19 and has criticised the UK government on its poor use of the numbers related to the pandemic. He has been critical of the anxiety created by the lockdown message and the way the government has been unwilling to say that it is uncertain about some of the advice it was promoting, for example, on face masks. Spiegelhalter is an entertaining and authoritative public speaker, unusually able to self-deprecate and say when he does not know something. He abides by Nate Silver’s dictum that “Numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.” But after listening to Naughty Numbers, I got the impression that he was mainly happy provided that the meaning with which he imbued them was the accepted version of the truth.
He laid the groundwork for his lecture by making it clear that as a statistician commenting in the public square “you will get things wrong” and the important thing was to “pick yourself up”. He also complimented most of his fellow statisticians and the mainstream media journalists but did exemplify how numbers can be used wrongly, usually by sub-editors trying to spice up a story. But the lecture descended into a dark phase where it was clear that “you will get things wrong” was acceptable when he got things wrong, but not when others did. He could hide his dislike of Toby Young for whom he “did not have enormous respect” and made much of his tweet stating that the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 was 0.1%, which was out by an order of magnitude. The decimal point was in the wrong place. An easy mistake to make as another eminent statistician Tim Harford has pointed out. Professor Spiegelhalter did not refer to Young’s admission of the error and subsequent correction and deletion of the tweet. Toby Young has been at the forefront of the lockdown sceptics movement and has been prolific in his outpourings related to it. He has made mistakes, as we all do, and is not afraid to admit them. As Spiegelhalter said “you will get things wrong”.
Next up for a smug sideswipe was Lord Jonathan Sumption, surely one of the genuine heroes of the pandemic. Lord Sumption’s 20 July assertion on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that, amongst other things “The virus has not killed over 100,000 people” was presented and ridiculed as “bullshit”. And he was also criticised as someone “speaking outside their expertise”. All Lord Sumption’s assertions were wrong according to Spiegelhalter and he was able to point that out later the same day on the BBC Radio 4 progamme The World at One. Likewise, Full Fact challenged Lord Sumption. It is possible that Lord Sumption made an error in the heat of the moment and, perhaps he should not have been so specific about numbers. According to Full Fact he was two orders of magnitude out in one of his assertions but, as Spiegelhalter himself said “you will get things wrong”. There was absolutely no appreciation of the work that Lord Sumption has done to defend freedom and point out the errors of the way the pandemic was being managed by the government. There was also no acknowledgement of his considerable expertise in the area having written extensively in his books about The Hundred Years War and Edward III which covered the years of the plague in Britain.
The famous graph comparing COVID-19 deaths with influenza deaths, the latter having virtually flatlined, was Professor Spiegelhalter’s favourite graph. He interpreted this as proof that the lockdown had protected us from influenza, a tacit approval of lockdowns. But the obvious question “if so, then why were they not effective in preventing COVID-19 deaths?” was not addressed. Finally, our evidence-based supremo admitted that there was little empirical evidence for the effectiveness of face masks in preventing the spread of COVID but continued, nevertheless, to support their use. He pointed to laboratory studies which supported the wearing of face masks. Evidence that is known to be equivocal. He also said that a randomised controlled trial of masks would not be possible, but we had to go with other forms of evidence and use the best available evidence. A strange assertion given that the best study to date, a randomise controlled trial, was unable to demonstrate the effectiveness of mask wearing.
The lecture is worth listening to and Professor Spiegelhalter makes some excellent points about the general use and misuse of statistics. However, his vicious words for those he clearly dislikes and whose mistakes have been uncovered suggested that an objective, if not the aim, of the lecture was to take the opportunity to criticise people like Toby Young and Lord Jonathan Sumption. While Spiegelhalter’s lecture was strong on statistical rectitude, it was low on the health and social consequences of the measures such as lockdowns and face masks that have been inflicted on the UK population. In fact, the adverse effects of any measures were not considered. The Lockdown Sceptics Newsletter (recently renamed The Daily Sceptic) has been a genuine and measured challenge to the COVID-19 orthodox narrative and is a continuing source of reliable information. Lord Sumption has continually challenged the lockdown philosophy and, quite apart from any figures he got wrong, his essential argument that the lockdown measures are disproportionate to the risks for the young healthy of dying of COVID-19 is extant. He has also urged the government to ignore experts who proffer advice on the pandemic that does not take the adverse consequences into account. We were not furnished with any of the mistakes Professor Spiegelhalter has made in his career. I hope that anyone including them in a future lecture will be more forgiving of his errors than he is of the mistakes of others.
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