The Politics of Chicken Licken

We all grew up with the story of Chicken Licken (or Henny Penny, as the little chicken was called in the UK). An acorn fell on its head. Fearing that the end of the world was nigh – that the sky was falling on its head – the paranoid chicken convinced all the animals in the farmyard of this truth and persuaded them all to go tell their king. It doesn’t end well for the animals (in the version I was told, anyway) when they all got eaten by the cunning Foxy Loxy.

No doubt the story still gets recited to young children all over the world. And it’s worth retelling it to a lot of adults too. For vast swathes of the world’s adult population seem to have fallen - hook, line and sinker - for the same story.

The Curious Tale of Fergy Lurgy

Professor Neil Ferguson is a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College, London. He’s also a fantastic storyteller.

-         He was one of the scientists who advised the 2001 Labour government over the UK’s Foot and Mouth outbreak. The decision to slaughter six million cows, sheep and pigs cost the British economy ￡9 billion and has been heavily criticised ever since.

-         In 2002, he warned the government that Mad Cow Disease could kill up to 50,000 people. It ended up killing fewer than 200.

-         In 2005, he predicted that more than 200 million people would “probably” die from Bird Flu. 440 people died from it.

-         In 2009 (and I quote this from his Wikipedia page) “… one of Ferguson's models predicted that 65,000 people could die from Swine Flu. In the event, no more than 500 died.”

He seems imminently qualified to tell fairy tales. But it is his Imperial College model and the recent advice he gave to the British government that could become his bestseller. His flawed computer modelling seemed to show that 230,000 would die unnecessarily from COVID-19 if the UK government didn’t lockdown the economy. He regaled fantastic stories of how the NHS would be overrun and how patients would be dying in the hospital corridors.

You see, the UK was originally following an alternative strategy. The government would mitigate (not suppress) the spread of the virus. The aim was to reduce and broaden the peak of the infection curve (without any costs to the economy, by the way). It seemed like a perfectly reasonable and proportionate approach.

Then along came Fergy Lurgy with his dodgy computer code. Like poor little Chicken Licken in the farmyard, Boris Johnson had a little USB stick plop onto his lap. He got spooked and rushed off to tell the sheeple in his cabinet. They all bought the story. The UK entered Lockdown, “guided by what the scientist tells us”.

What the Evidence Shows

In God we trust, everyone else must bring data. So what do the numbers say? We’re fortunate to have access to worldometers.info and the data there is startling:

-         Who has it killed?

Without sounding too callous, this virus kills old and sick people. In the UK, the average age of those dying is over 80, and a third of them lived in care homes (where the average “stay” – if I can use that word loosely - is 30 months).

95% of victims dying with COVID-19 were older than 65 or had a serious pre-existing medical condition.

Across all ages, COVID-19 has killed about 2/3rds of the numbers of those killed on our roads every year. Perhaps our Secretary of State for Transport, the hapless Mr Shapps, will consider banning driving and impose a lockdown on our cars?

-         Who has it not killed?

What happened in New York is revealing. An estimated 1,694,781 New Yorkers have contracted the virus to date. Only 690 (or 0.04%) of those who died were under the age of 65 without a diagnosed underlying medical condition. In other words, it doesn’t kill 9996 out of every 10,000 young and healthy people who catch the virus.

Let me put this into perspective:

-         Lightning: With no serious pre-existing conditions, the young and healthy are more likely to be struck by lightning (49 instances per year in the UK) than to die of COVID-19 (33 so far in England under the age of 40).

-         Drowning: Among healthy under 60’s (i.e. children and the vast majority of the working population), 253 people have died of COVID-19 in English hospitals. Compare this to 400 (non-suicide) drownings per year in the UK.

The Politics of Fear

For months, we have been fed apocalyptic warnings of death and pestilence. Graphic images on our TV screens show row upon row of patients with tubes stuck up their noses, gasping for breath, attended to by doctors in full protective gear. It is as if Ebola had struck our population.

We watch daily briefings from politicians and scientific experts warning of us of the dangers of catching this killer virus. We were ordered to “stay at home” and avoid social contact. And when it is suggested that some of the lockdown restrictions could be lifted, the very same experts who got it so wrong before now warn us about “a second wave of infections” that could befall us.

We’ve been cowed. Welcome to the politics of fear.

What People SHOULD Fear

There are some things that people should indeed fear. It’s not what our governments are telling us, but what they’re deliberately NOT telling us:

1)     People who are old with an underlying medical issue: You should fear two things:

-         Catching this virus; and

-         Young, healthy people not catching this virus.

2)     Employees who have been furloughed: Nearly a quarter of UK employees have been furloughed. If you’re one of them, you should be fearful. You’re living on government cool-aid and it will run out soon enough. Your government is cratering the economy and wrecking jobs. Unfortunately, the company you work for is unlikely to return to the size it was before this government-induced crash. You’ll be the first to go, I’m afraid. Use this time to learn some new skills because the job market you’ll enter will be a bloodbath.

3)     Young, healthy people: You should fear not catching this virus. If you don’t, you’ll always have the fear of passing it on to one of your older, at-risk relatives and – unintentionally, of course - killing them.

4)     The Middle Class: Be afraid because someone has to pay for this financial calamity. Enormous tax rises are coming your way.

5)     The Voting Public: It was inevitable that public services would be cut after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. That decade of Austerity was painful, albeit necessary. But this lockdown is going to decimate the public finances in a far more profound way. Our essential public services (like education and healthcare) will be more underfunded than ever before.

6)     Everybody else: Don’t be like Chicken Licken. You have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Let this virus runs its natural course through our healthy population and then we can be done with this awfulness.

#LiveOurLives #ShieldThoseAtRisk #SaveLives