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We'll need more than champagne to get through the next four weeks. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
Professor Susan Michie, a behavioural psychologist who sits on the all-important Sage committee, made headlines last week by appearing to suggest that social distancing and wearing facemasks should remain in place “forever”.
The Professor of Health Psychology has been an outspoken advocate of strict lockdown measures, both serving on Sage’s Scientific Pandemic Insights group on Behaviour (SPI-B) and advising the World Health Organisation on Covid-19.
She spoke to UnHerd about whether lockdown will ever be lifted, why people are no longer obeying the restrictions, and she addresses criticism of her Communist politics.
Will we need facemasks forever?
“I actually used four words [in that interview with Channel 5], and only one of them was reported. The full words I used were “forever to some extent”. What I mean by this is that, sadly, this isn’t going to be the last pandemic. For as long as humans are around viruses are going to be around.
And so I think the issue is: what have we learned?
What I’m talking about is really population-wide cultural shifts in certain behaviours, and certain lifestyles.
I went on a work visit to Japan several years ago, and I was amazed at the fact that they were so frequently wearing masks… From their point of view, they just regard it as good manners… Now, I’m not saying that we should all adopt that. But I think it’s a good idea to keep these behaviours that we can turn on or off as needed.
I hope we don’t have to wear face masks. But I think that if we are in a situation, like we are at the moment — when we’re actually we’re on a bit of a knife edge — we could go either way. Hopefully the vaccination roll-out will be good and quick enough to not allow the Delta variant to get away. Or it won’t — and in this sort of situation where there’s a threat, I think for people to wear masks in enclosed indoor spaces, when we know it’s transmitted by aerosol, is really sensible.”
This might not be the last delay:
“I don’t think there’s really any alternative other than delaying for four weeks and seeing what’s happening. It’s a very tricky situation… I think [Boris] is right — I think the question is: is it going to be sufficient?
The Prime Minister very wisely said several weeks ago that we need to look at data, not dates. And I think he’s absolutely right. And I think he and the Government and everybody should really heed that advice. There are too many uncertainties in which way this kind of race between the vaccine and the variant may go. So I think four weeks, then review it and see where we are.”
Britain’s poor pandemic response:
“I don’t think anybody would hold the UK up as a great example of pandemic response in this pandemic. I think it’s actually been one of the least good… It is very frustrating for everybody to know that, had we done things differently, we could have been in a very different place.”
People are no longer isolating:
“We have a situation still, after all this time, where tests take too long, where there aren’t traces on the ground, as there are in other, even relatively poorer countries. And people aren’t isolating. Our own research data shows that only about half people, even when they have symptoms of Covid, don’t isolate at home for a whole variety of reasons. But this is a failed system. And if we want to be serious about controlling the pandemic, we need to sort that out.”
On reports that she’s a member of the Communist Party of Britain:
“My politics are not anything to do with my scientific advice. And I’ve never discussed my politics with people like yourself, so nor am I going to now. And the important thing is that when one gives scientific advice, one does so using the expertise one has — not going beyond the expertise, being transparent about what expertise you provide. And I think that the kind of articles you refer to are a really disturbing kind of McCarthyite witch hunting, which I don’t think should have any place in a liberal tolerant society.”
How the pandemic will affect climate change:
“What I do hope is that this brings countries together more and there’s a more global way of looking at travel. Because actually, there’s an existential crisis around the corner, which is much greater than pandemics. And that’s the climate crisis. And air travel is one of the big contributors to global warming, and the kind of problems we’ve already been seeing.”
We should have closed the borders:
“I think if we’d had better border controls, we wouldn’t have the Delta variant doing what it’s doing at the moment. We were far too late to really restrict travel.”
The travel traffic light system doesn’t work:
“One of the problems about [it] is that people often come through third countries. And so they might have come from a green, but gone through amber or red. And the other issue is: it’s not just about the country people have come from. If they’ve been in a large tourist resort, they’ll be mixing with people from lots of other countries.”
On whether Sage is political:
“We don’t even advise on policy. We are posed questions, and then we provide the scientific evidence and thinking in answer to those questions. It’s up to the policy makers and politicians what they decide.”
More should be done now:
“There’s a lot more we could be doing that would reduce transmission right now, and it’s not being done. And that’s frustrating.
Ensuring secondary schools have good ventilation… ensure that secondary schoolchildren wear masks within schools, and ensuring there are very small bubbles within schools.”
The ideology of Public Health:
“If you look at the publications coming out from the behavioural group of Sage, many of them talk about the problems of inequality in our society and… the fact that the pandemic itself and the response have increased those inequalities.
We never talk about each other’s politics; I assume there’s a very broad range. But everybody’s unanimous about wanting a more equal society. And in order to get a fairer and more just society, it does require [that] the government has… policies that reduce rather than increase inequalities.”
I think there is an ideological difference with Public Health science taking a more population-wide view of things… that is a different kind of emphasis to… the media you mentioned who would have much more emphasis on individual freedom, individual rights, rather than taking a more collective population approach.
This pandemic has shown everybody that no individual is an island — we’re very interconnected. No one community, no one socioeconomic group within society can think they can solve it for themselves and protect themselves.”
Freddie Sayers is the Editor-in-Chief & CEO of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.
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SubscribeI’m callin’ BS on this. Prof Michie’s great sociological insight upon which we’re expected to accept a drastic shift in our own culture is her trip to Japan? Hate to break it to you, but prior to March last year, many others of us travelled widely and frequently, including to east Asia and can assess evidence or otherwise of the supposed near universal Japanese trait of mask wearing for ourselves. I have lived, worked and travel frequently in East Asia, so am aware of contexts in which masks are worn there – not mandated – most years. Indeed I spent several weeks in Japan and South Korea in Dec/Jan 2019/2020 and can assure you that, while many people do, most don’t. It is erroneous to suggest that the practically the entire population goes about masked during cold and flu season. Hell, anyone can look up images or videos of massed ranks of Japanese pedestrians at Shibuya Crossing prior to March 2020 and see that Michie’s talkin’ mince! With patronising, anecdotal nonsense like this my respect for this woman diminished from an already low point … and she’s advising govt? God help us.
Oh by the way, I don’t believe her protestations that she hates lockdown. She shows every indication that it’s suited her very well professionally and, one suspects, temperamentally.
absolutely. Japan has fewer cases than us because it closed its borders.
However, her comment is useful for those of us who have not been to Japan! She is writing for a broad range of people!
How is the misinformation she offered re Japan useful to anyone other than those who wish to set policy based on it?
More obviously, you’re useful to her if you haven’t been to Japan so she can waffle without fear of contradiction.
However, I do prefer evidence based faith to blind faith!
perhaps you need to mug up anecdote -v – evidence?
If the Japanese are more considerate in their dealings with one another it could be something to do with their living in a monoculture , without much immigration .But she could be exaggerating the mask wearing because it corresponds to her preconceptions about Japanese behaviour .
Agree that lockdown well suits her temperament and ideology, her protestations aside.
We are all biased. To be aware of and factor in your biases in relation to your analyses of information and your opinion forming is the best we can aim for; to deny that your politics has anything to do with them is ignorance and hubris. I suppose Michie is a proponent of ‘nudge’; just horrific. The terrifying thing about her is she believes in her superiority and that it has been useful this last year and a half and is totally unaware of what damage her and her ilk have caused.
Eleven measures that Michie omitted for preventing the next pandemic:
1. Do not conduct dangerous medical research with extraordinarily evil regimes.
2. Do not enable such regimes to gain so much economic leverage that they can pressure you not to close your borders to them when they are undergoing an epidemic that looks like it will transform into a pandemic.
3. Do not permit global health bodies to become dominated by such regimes to the extent that they will deny a pandemic is a pandemic and cover for them.
4. Do not rely on such regimes for your production of PPE and other essential health products.
5. Do not place individuals whose integrity is grossly compromised by their cooperation in dangerous research with such regimes in prime positions of authority during a pandemic.
6.Do not send untested elderly patients from hospitals to care homes where they will infect other residents.
7. Do not pretend that PPE/face masks are not helpful in preventing the spread of a disease because the supply is short and behavioural psychologists tell you that there will be mass anti-social behaviour if you tell the public the truth.
8. Do not employ behavioural psychologists in positions where they can influence policy during a pandemic (or at any time), especially if they are proponents of nudge theory.
9. Do not prevent and discredit use of pharmaceuticals because they are not profitable.
10. Do not discredit highly plausible theories of the origin of the virus for political and commercial reasons.
11. Do not enter a lockdown whilst allowing anyone from anywhere in the world including the pandemic hotspots to enter your country without so much as a temperature test let alone a PCR test.
12. Be honest with the public.
https://www.cnbsnewsdotlive/documentaries/cdc-removes-150k-deaths-from-vaers-system-vaccine-genocide/
Susan Michie is completely wrong about her political views having nothing to do with her scientific advice. The fact that she is a communist goes to the very heart of her desire to deal with the problem by tightly controlling people, rather than leaving them to make their own decisions.
And of course giving whatever advice she thinks is likeliest, if followed, to discredit the government.
Professor Michie is a psychologist. She is not medically qualified (at least not according to Wikipedia). My strong impression of psychology is it’s a pseudoscience. Psychologists use a lot of science-sounding jargon to make common sense ideas seem more profound than they really are. It’s also my impression most psychologists have a rudimentary knowledge of mathematics and statistics. They must use some statistics in their studies but the statistical analysis is of a basic kind.
We are constantly exhorted to follow the ‘science.’ I seriously question whether any psychologist can advise us on science. Theirs is a discipline founded in the humanities and given a gloss of scientific respectability, much like the whole of ‘social science’. I am reminded of Jordan Peterson’s remark that the only solid conclusion to come out of half a century of psychological research is that genetics is the biggest single contributor to intelligence.
Perhaps psychologists can tell us something useful about group behavior and how to influence group behavior during a pandemic, but I suspect the UK might be better served by a smaller SAGE committee primarily composed of epidemiologists, statisticians and physicians with a grounding in hard science.
I think it had some uses before the “talking cure” was stopped. Now therapists are not allowed to “diagnose or prescribe” and must be patient centered applied psychology is near univerally a cause of harm rather than good.
Unfortunately the professor does not offer a wholesome, intelligent, worldwide solution. Her ideas are only applicable to the 1st world & are culturally & reality ignorant. She does not talk of the key point , of philosophy of acceptance of death and why that is now an important subject that the population needs to be educated on.
She thinks we can all (the whole world not just the 1st world) shift our behaviours that have evolved over time because of a perceived threat that has been made popular by the 1st world due to its own screw up. Maybe we can, but it will be a slow acceptance.
She misses the reality that maybe this disease is not THAT deadly.
She talks about an equal world but it is not reality based. Maybe we are never meant to be equal. Not even 2 children born in the same family are ever EQUAL. This obsession with equality is mind bogglingly hypocritical. It’s natural to have differences but in order to survive as a species we accept the differences as do other species.
So all in all there is needs to be an acceptance that in a world of 7b population,
1. Diseases are inevitable
2. Deaths are inevitable
3. Inequalities are inevitable
4. Mistakes are inevitable and not all can be corrected by a heavy intervention
5. Science is both a boon & bane
The academia as a whole have tended to/been conditioned to focus so narrowly and deeply (specialising) in their fields that while they may have learnt some important insights into their fields, to then apply it to a world population requires disengaging from that narrow thinking, which is extremely hard to do.
Crikey. Ok:
1. Diseases are inevitable, but their impact can range from catastrophic to inconvenient, depending on our preparedness, the emphasis we give (or don’t) to communal, public health based response, and the priorities we agree to adopt;
2. Who knew?! How many deaths is the issue, and how caused;
3. Another revelation. But 100:1 is *qualitatively* different in impact terms from 1.5:1. Devil is in the detail, eh?
4. Indeed they are, and a policy of only light intervention will most likely increase their impact, even if it comes across as rugged, independent-minded and nerveless to one rather small audience;
5. Is this your own, or did you spot it in a Matt Ridley popsci book? When I want to be a little vacuous, I usually say ‘Good science good, Bad science bad’, which avoids the boon/bane half-rhyme. But then perhaps I am just mind-bogglingly hypocritical too.
1. While my response to diseases was general, yours was specific. Disease is biology based . A reality that mass population living in close quarters with one another WILL have diseases like any other species. Preparedness is policy like general sanitation and medical science to cut those diseases down. How prepared can you be for everything? Yet something can break through that barrier. It’s my belief that it’s best to sometimes accept that you cannot prepare for everything.
2. Intended or unintended, death is inevitable and rooted in biology . In the context of 7b and growing, you can find a number that you find remarkable or acceptable. Again it’s our society that sets the parameters.
3. ? Sorry, I’ve missed your point. But yes 100:1 is different from 1.5:1
4. Once an mistake of this magnitude has taken place, & the whole world has been affected, some by deaths, most ( ones living) by policies. So are we more fearful of some dying or rest suffering through this new life? Be it through long Covid or through lockdown and restrictions and the myriad of complications it brings? It’s sheer hubris to think we can contain this. Now that it is out, at least don’t make this bad experience worse for those unlikely to be affected. Like children and young adults and healthy & even elderly who have suffered through this due to lack of contact & the poor countries who cannot put all the restrictions the 1st world can. Is this what our education has taught us?
5. I’ve not read that book. I’m talking about unintended consequences of science esp medical science. It is certainly beneficial to individuals and our well being as a society but the population explosion is also a result of saving all lives at any cost. Vast number of people crammed into cities and towns , is that a medical marvel or a headache? You decide. It sounds cruel and stark but it does need to be thought through. I am prepared to be convinced otherwise but at the moment i think we need to accept the consequences more than we do.
I am a seventy-year-old male. In the cold light of day, I know very well – and accept – that the medical resources (limited and finite as they are) expended on me should be less than those expended on younger, healthier specimens, and it would be disingenuous to argue otherwise. How much less my life is worth in dire medical circumstances is a question I will leave to the number-crunchers and ethics committees. In any case, doubtless, formulae exist. In the moment, of course – the emotionally fraught and desperate moment – we will beg, plead, and bargain with medical personnel (and, perhaps, our God) to pull out all the stops and save our loved one. That being said, it is clear that our society has very unrealistic expectations when it comes to length of life and prolonging life. Should every human life be prolonged, no matter the cost? Perhaps it would be helpful to address – with all the self-honesty we can muster – our persistent denial of our own physical fragility and inescapable mortality.
Hang on, this woman is a lifelong Communist. She doesn’t want “a liberal tolerant society”. She wants to destroy western society and replace it with a murderous and expropriatory tyranny. Why would I want to listen to her? Would a paediatric hospital in Tel Aviv listen to advice from Josef Mengele? No? How is this different?
Perhaps not. But it’s not that simple is it?
We would question the credibility of an “expert” who thought the world was only 6000 years old or who held extreme anti-semitic views – so the same applies here.
Cognitive dissonance is high in this one.
“…this isn’t going to be the last pandemic. For as long as humans are around viruses are going to be around…”
We have to agree with this lady. And the principle applies to all existential threats against humanity. In fact, the safest option is that humanity better remain in lockdown until we come up with a solution for the heat death of the universe.
I stopped reading after the first sentence.
SCIENTIFIC Advisory Group for Emergencies: the clue is in the name. PSYCHOLOGY, (like economics), is pernicious bogus pseudo-science. How can this charlatan have any place as a scientific advisor?
See also: Devi Sridhar
Member of the Scottish Government’s covid advisory group, with a degree in medical anthropology and doctorate in philosophy. Neither of which are proper foundations for what she advises on.
“Good manners to wear a mask” – what is this woman on?
Thank you for making me laugh. She is insane.
The Zero Covid people are dragging us to hell. Worst of all, they do not even try promising treatments that could really change the game (e.g. ivermectin). I would like to see Unherd having a good debate on ivermectin with Pierre Kory on one side and some Sage guy on the other.
“We don’t even advise on policy. We are posed questions, and then we provide the scientific evidence and thinking in answer to those questions.” A completely disingenuous distinction and opt out. But she and other government advisers on Covid have no reservations in taking to the airways to advise the rest of us on policy. It used to be the practice that civil servants and government advisers in Britain were bound by rules of confidentiality. Now they seem to feel free to spew their advice all over our breakfast tables.
Sumption is right. We have crossed a line from which there is no going back. Future governments will now have no moral compunction or precedent restraint over adopting the controls and propaganda tools hitherto regarded as the preserve of national socialist and communist regimes.
Please don’t give people like this the oxygen of publicity. It is a kinder way to choke the woke than removing their actual oxygen and probably just as effective.
On the contrary, give them enough rope…
You are not wrong. She’s quite terrifying.
Full confession – I haven’t yet watched the video but I will do; it’s good to know your enemy, and that is how I think of these people.
Just to note from the transcript though, how can an advisor to the government be so arrogant as to believe their membership of an extremist party is inconsequential and not something she needs to be accountable on?
If you were to work for the government, membership of certain parties – BNP, for instance – would be incompatible with the values of your employer, with all the associated implications.
Communism is a form of political extremism and I have no idea why it is that in the West we seem to treat membership of Western communist parties as just an idiosyncratic indulgence of pseudo intellectuals.
Communism has translated in to a dehumanising and murderous enabler of atrocities since it’s inception. It has only achieved an equality of misery, fear and despair. The presence of its adherents in earshot of the government is a story of public concern at least – possibly even a national security issue.
We should treat membership of the communist party in the same way as membership of BNP, Britain First or EDL – and stop giving it this strange category of ‘acceptable extremism’.
The assertions about lockdown and mask effectiveness lack evidence of effectiveness. We will soon be able to assess the lockdown effectiveness via multivariate analyses. It obvious that those with infection need to avoid being in public and ensuring those at high risk should be isolated. But the belief that asymptomatic transmission is frequent has been demolished. The only effective lockdown is total isolation for some two weeks, not possible in ordinary society.
Then their remains the belief in mask effectiveness when it appears to be a symbol of public awareness. The common surgical mash can’t do much against sub-micron particles, but that’s another area for science to stop pretending.
Softly, softly, catchee monkey! Well done Freddie, I see what you did there. 10 minutes into the interview, I was ready to cancel my subscription. I’m glad I watched until the end. You are subtle. Well done for getting her to admit the climate lockdown link.
Hard to know where to start? What a revealing interview if not very surprising in much of the content.
As ever, Freddie sets a high standard as to how interviews should be done. I don’t know how he managed to remain quite so calm throughout; full credit to him.
One thing I find fascinating is that the impact of vaccines is only brought up by Freddie late into the interview and is not mentioned by Prof Michie at all up until that point. So, whilst we hear endless opinions on how lockdowns need to continue and potentially go backward, no consideration is given to the well understood, positive impact of the C-19 vaccines, including against the current variants.
At 7.06m she mentions the importance of masks for protection against aerosols although everything I have read suggests that face coverings are only really effective against droplets (eg coughing, sneezing). Not great science there.
At 12.20m we find out that communities are supposed to be listened to and engaged with and yet in reality we have had hard-hitting psychological adverts on social media telling children not to ‘kill their granny’. The impact of this on my daughter and her friends at school is still being felt.
At 21.06m, we find out that ‘the more mutations there are, the more likely there are to be variants’. These are the same thing? Viruses mutate all the time as is widely understood and variant is just another word for mutation! Not great science there.
Interesting, if not surprising that at 23.30m the rationale for keeping the restrictions on air travel quickly leads to the Climate Change debate…. however at 24.50, we find out that air travel should be restricted into the future, but not for esteemed individuals such as Prof. Michie attending academic conferences!
At 27.15m the strong endorsement around track, test and isolate unfortunately doesn’t deal with the large number of asymptomatic cases, who would logically be unlikely to get tested given no symptoms and yet can potentially still spread the virus. Freddie’s come back about the failure of T, T & I across much of the world was a masterstroke.
At 33m the point is made that the UK C-19 response has been woeful (hard to disagree), however, a touch of irony here given that as she is part of SAGE, these are the principal advisors to government policy.
I could go on but I am not prepared to raise my blood pressure (further)!
So I put up a post questioning Mr Sayers’ wisdom in giving any space to this woman and it is taken down. Hmmm – explanation please because as of this moment I am not renewing my subscription next month and it is goodbye Unherd.
Unherd’s principle has been stated, I believe, to giving a voice to varying viewpoints and presenting a balanced picture of events and situations in society and the world at large. The balanced picture must naturally include such wildly unbalanced views as those put forward by Susan Michie. I think the general direction of comments on this interview give a good picture of what assumed intelligent and analytic readers have for opinions on her views. .
Trouble is I regard Michie is as bad as some of the conspiracy theorists.
Don’t leave us Andrew Harman! We need a range of contributors and your reflections are a valid and valuable part of the discussion. If you leave, whatever your views, UnHerd will be the poorer. And perhaps your post will reappear, as happened to me – one of my posts disappeared for a day or two then pop! Back it came.
Thank you for the kind words.
Don’t give up yet. Yes, the Unherd moderation software is weird. I’ve had posts taken down then reinstated. No idea why. But Unherd is still infinitely better than most other current affairs magazines and news outlets. Let’s see if it manages to iron out the wrinkles over time.
Let’s hope so! I would still like an explanation.
After reading the transcript of this interview I have decided not to watch ‘the show’: I fear that I may trash my computer. We can all have different views but having such a narrow view on things and advising the government really frightens me, …. well, I should have know seeing what the government has been doing the last year an worse: what it has not been doing: looking after the health of people and the society … they have trashed especially the poor part of the society (and of the world) shame on them….
Here in Israel all restrictions (except masks) were removed a couple of weeks ago and finally we removed masks this week. As if people were wearing them recently anyway… We have sixty something percent vaccinated, are at single or lower double figures of daily cases (0.1-0.2% positive tests) and R at around 1.Everything except foreign travel seems to be back to normal.
Is the reason that foreign travel is still restricted because of fear of importing variants? At some point, we’re either going to have to trust the vaccines to do what they do, or become like Susan Michie.
When I said that foreign travel is not back to normal, that is because it is the only time you will be reminded that there is a global pandemic still going on. The Israel health ministry recommends against unnecessary foreign travel, but you can travel (with a negative test on your way out and another one on your way back) to any country not on the red list, which is quite short currently. However that is only any good if your destination country is allowing foreign visitors and if you won’t need to quarantine when you get there. Because of worries of importing an unknown vaccine-resistant variant, testing is compulsory for vaccinated people as well.
In the meantime, here in north central North Carolina and Southern Virginia, most things have returned to normal. No one needs to wear a mask and a lot of the plexiglass is coming down. Daily cases on a 14 day rolling average for the State of North Carolina is 500 and falling steadily, if not spectacularly. I don’t know of any business in these areas that still demand masks, and, if they do, I certainly will not enter them.
Appalling. To say there should be a tradeoff with lockdowns as if they were part of human life norms! Absolutely disgusting.
“My politics are not anything to do with my scientific advice. And I’ve never discussed my politics with people like yourself, so nor am I going to now. And the important thing is that when one gives scientific advice, one does so using the expertise one has — not going beyond the expertise, being transparent about what expertise you provide.”
Methinks the lady doth protest too much, SAGE is riddled with inter professional egos, Alternate SAGE is an example. Politically this group would be just another bunch of self-styled ‘experts’ the difference in their case is their main difference is from a political perspective, mostly opposing the Government which differs from their Leftish perspective.
My, how the Left love to control the masses especially those of us they regard as untermenschen.
Susan Michie is a communist. So she’s a fascist. Why are the authorities not treating her as they would treat her if she was a member of the BNP or National Action?