August 19, 2020 - 3:39pm
I know Jeremy Farrar a little. Not well, but I’ve interviewed him several times. He’s the director of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest charitable foundations; it spends hundreds of millions of pounds every year supporting biomedical research. He’s also a member of SAGE, which has advised the government throughout the Covid-19 crisis.
Farrar himself is an infectious disease specialist: he was there in Vietnam when the 2004 bird flu epidemic broke out, and in fact was one of the two doctors who identified it as a new and dangerous strain; he was also on the front lines in Vietnam for the Sars outbreak. There aren’t many people in the UK with more experience in the spread of respiratory viruses.
But he is also a person with responsibilities. If he speaks, it’s taken as speaking for Wellcome, or for Sage. So interviewing him is — from a journalistic point of view — sometimes frustrating: as a controversy-seeking hack, you want him to say “and these idiots in government have messed the whole thing up from top to bottom”, and lo, you have your headline. Instead, he would usually be more conciliatory, reluctant to place blame. It was very inconsiderate of him, frankly.
That’s why my attention has been very much caught by him tweeting this morning about the government’s decision to axe Public Health England (PHE) and replace it with something called the National Institute for Health Protection.
Arbitrary sackings.Passing of blame.Ill thought through, short term, reactive reforms.Out of context of under investment for years. Response to singular crisis without strategic vision needs for range future challenges.Preempting inevitable public enquiry. https://t.co/maS5ckabVa
— Jeremy Farrar (@JeremyFarrar) August 19, 2020
PHE itself was indeed underfunded; it was brought in by the Coalition government in 2013 as a replacement for the Health Protection Agency and other bodies, under the aegis of the Department for Health and Social Care, and like most other public bodies has suffered years of underinvestment. It may well be in need of reform, or indeed of replacement.
But the idea that the best time to do this is the middle of a major global public health crisis seems insane to me — like discovering that your engine is on fire and deciding to build a whole new plane in flight. Better, surely, to start carefully thinking about the best way to build a new agency, and be ready to create it — with proper funding, and freedom from political interference — after the Covid-19 pandemic is in the past, or at least under control. Doing it this way does indeed look knee-jerk, or even an exercise in blame-shifting.
So I agree entirely with Jeremy Farrar. More than that: the fact that he is willing to say it out loud, and not, as he usually and sensibly does, keep his concerns behind closed doors, makes me think it’s an even worse decision than I already did.
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SubscribeIt is isn’t done now, it will never be done. Better to sort it out now than kick it into the long grass. How may times have we heard about the kicking of the can down the road?
Maybe Daniel Hannan is right. Maybe the government can never win.
Maybe we should all give up, lie down and expire.
Honestly, they are trying to sort out the civil service, defence procurement, manage a pandemic, reorientate Britain towards the East, and reform social and health care. Maybe be conciliatory to the tories for once?
Actually Tom, I would love to read an article in which you dished some dirt on times when you or your colleagues did manage to goad someone into making a needlessly provocative comment, and thereby confected an entire news story from virtually nothing”especially given, as you yourself say, the desired media bias is always for a story in which the government messed up.
Indeed.
If PHE was underfunded, maybe this is one of the reasons:
As of 2015, Selbie was paid a salary of between £185,000 and £189,999 by the department, making him one of the 328 most highly paid people in the British public sector at that time
The head of Northern Ireland’s public health agency has an annual package of over £300,000, making him the highest paid health executive in the UK, it has been revealed.
As of 2015, Fenton was paid a salary of between £175,000 and £179,999 by the department, making him one of the 328 most highly paid people in the British public sector at that time
They don’t seem to mind being paid a lot of money. Where was OUR value for that money in March?
I suspect that the head of a charity, is probably a labour supporter.
So an article of him attacking the government, has all the importance of a story about a dog biting a man.
PHE was simply bloody useless. Dithering, inept, lacking foresight, lacking spirit, lacking innovation, lacking critical thinking, unable to think out the box. A bunch of useless fat cats sucking the system for absurd salaries they didnt deserve, and didnt have the competance to earn. Appallingly bad value for taxpayers.
Well we probably need to get rid of it given that it failed the first time it was called into action. But we certainly shouldn’t be putting this absurd Dido Harding at the head of whatever comes next. Whatever…I think we all gave up long ago on the prospect of any competence or integrity in any of Britain’s governing bodies or public institutions.
I am (often) reminded of the glorious Yes, Minister quote:
If you’re going to do this damn silly thing, don’t do it in this damn silly way.
Who is this d***o Harding chap anyway?
She does have a good business career behind her, So maybe not as bad as it could be.
PHE failed at the very time it was needed. Of course it needs disbanding, but let’s hope the new organisation is more competent.
The problem is not about the wealthy and what they control. The problem is that whereas the people who work in the NHS/NHE are courageous and hard working, the institutions themselves, particularly the NHS, are idealogically hidebound and thus underfunded. Healthcare free at the point of care for everyone is a wonderful concept, but the NHS is idealogically implacably opposed to any private institution offering to help them with healthcare, even though that means that it is unable to offer the most expert service. Thus in a sense it cheats us all. Take Covid-19 as an example of a similar problem effecting all the world’s health care institutions ( data for a true study in comparison) and then look at the death per 1 million of population from Covid. The UK’s count of 609 is worsted only by San Marino 1237, Belgium 860, Peru 812, Andorra 686 and Spain 619. This result is even though, through our, the population’s, efforts the NHS was never even near being overwhelmed during the high, or perhaps one should call it the low, point of the epidemic. Those figures are sourced by John Hopkins University as at today’s date. Now it seems that we are beginning to suffer with an extraordinarily high rate of “Deaths at Home” possibly caused by us lot trying to “save the NHS” by not going for treatment during the crisis. Oh what a Maze idealogies plant, grow and tender.
If Jeremy Farrar was as good as the author suggests then I doubt he would have denigrated Dido Harding with that tweet, It reminds me of when the media mention Tommy Robinson and feel compelled to add (real name Yaxley Lennon), by continually describing her as a former horse jockey they lose credibility.
He didn’t denigrate Harding. The article author dead. Please read more carefully.
As above. He did denigrate her by reproducing the lie.
Jockeying is her hobby, not ever her job.
You don’t like her – fine. I am not so sure about her myself. But I do prefer facts, dispassionately presented, rather than gratuitous insults.
It’s there in his tweet, or retweet of a daily mail article, a woman who has been an executive of many well known companies in her career is demoted to being “just a former jockey”, by retweeting it he has taken ownership, he agrees with it and is to be held responsible for it.
Is’t Sir Jeremy another member of a self-serving and inept public health establishment that has delivered so many unnecessary deaths and so much socio-economic chaos?
I don’t know if Dido Harding is the right person, or not. But Farrar loses all credibility when he describes her as a ‘former jockey’. She is not. She is a keen horse woman who rides in charity races but has come to the present post through business. Including working for McKinsey, Kingfisher, Thomas Cook, Sainsbury’s and CEO of TalkTalk.
Why does he feel the need to denigrate her? I wonder.
Please read the post carefully. Farrar’s tweet says nothing about Dido. The article author has appended a quote from the Daily Mail that does.
Talk Talk’s service has improved no end since Dodo left. They took her on as a cost cutter, and she cut costs and neglected service.
HE put up the post from the Daily Mail stating she was a jockey. In fact the way he has put in his Twitter feed implies that is all she was AND that he agrees with it, or why put it there?
Resorting to insults does you no credit.
I wasn’t trying to insult anyone, but the fact is it’s the Mail, not Farrar, who describes her as a jockey. Maybe it’s the first firm report of the axing of PHE that he saw (there have been rumours floating round for days) . They describe her as a jockey in the first line, and to get the facts about PHE and her new appointment in you couldn’t avoid the jockey bit.
Farrar didn’t have to quote the Mail and append its photo of Harding in jockey’s silks, he chose to do so.
In your previous post you referred to her as Dodo – I think that constitutes an insult.
And it IS Farrar that posted the quote from the DM with the silks. Not the author of this piece. He did not need to include that.
It may not be the best time to reorganise, and changing the nameplates may not change anything in essence. But how depressing that Tom Chivers, a usually insightful writer, defends PHE on the basis of resourcing. The organisation has become embroiled in endless ineffectual and fashionable Nanny State initiatives on which it spends the great majority of its budget, and has entirely failed in combating a pandemic, which should be one of the prime reasons for its existence.
The complete failure to comprehend the difference between genuinely collective health risks, such as viruses, and those for which in a free society individuals have prime responsibility for, together with centralisation, box ticking and ‘not invented here’ syndromes are among the key causes in its disastrous performance.
The simile that Chivers uses re an airplane on fire in flight is dishonest. A more creditable simile would be ” like finding your airplane won’t even take off and finding a more reliable one”
I’ve enjoyed reading Tom’s reasoned and thoughtful takes on the science of the pandemic but he has seriously dropped the ball on this occasion.
Farrar has not kept his concerns behind closed doors, he has appeared many times on our TV screens criticising Government actions. He is a well-known Labour supporter, although he did manage to sound rather more measured than the ridiculous Paul Nurse.
He may speak for the Wellcome Trust but he certainly doesn’t speak for SAGE – only the CSA or his deputy can do that.
It’s hard to make the case that PHE has been underfunded. It was PHE’s choice to spend most of its budget on nanny state campaigns against smoking and sugar, etc., rather than on preparations for a pandemic.
Finally, let’s hope Farrar is right about sackings: most of the comment around this announcement have been expressing the fear that no-one will be sacked and just the letterhead will be changed.
When we have the likes of Mr Gates states, that Vaccines are for curing disease and controlling population, does that not give you an idea that they really don’t want people to live longer of recover from diseases. They tell us the world is overpopulated and maybe it is. However, there is enough wealth in this world to provide care and health support to all, but it will never happen. It’s not the mindset or interest of the wealthy to care for everyone in such a manner, even though huge profits are made from medication and not care. Although nobody would ever say that publicly, even if that is what they believe! Health care is only one of the many things with it’s exsistence being challenged! I wonder why that could be?
‘Mr Gates states, that Vaccines are for curing disease and controlling population,’
Please provide verified quote for this. Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
Well said – I couldn’t believe it either, but this lifesitenews.com quote: https://www.lifesitenews.co…
mixes up Gates’s recent sensible comments on vaccines with a claim that in the past he has advocated using vaccines to control population. Maybe that’s where Sophie got it from. They add no evidence of the pop-control claim AFAICS.
It does, doesn’t it. Re the big players there seem to be two conspiracy theories that have gained traction; Involving Gates and George Soros. The latter may have more than a grain of truth as his Open Society Foundation is fairly clear on its agenda. Gates? I just don’t get.
I think the Gates quote is correct, but being used to mean something that wasn’t intended, maybe by anti-vaxxers. I think this is intended meaning, so whilst he said it, he didn’t mean it the way it is often quoted.
In other words, Gates is not interested in using vaccines to reduce the population by using them as an agent of death or a tool to sterilize unsuspecting masses. Rather, Gates is interested in keeping more children alive in order to reduce the need for parents to have more children, thus limiting the overall population growth rate.
Taken from S nopes, but I can’t work out how to paste the link!
PHE was set up 7 years ago with the apparent object of allowing agencies within the NHS to escape scrutiny, while no doubt cultivating relationships with industry. I am not very optimistic that the intention behind the new agency is anything but flogging an all but dead horse but at least if Sir Jeremy Farrar is displeased it cannot be all bad.
SAGE, PHE, NHS QUANGOS have all failed in this disaster, unable to prepare, unable to organise and delegate to use all resources they have left us with extended periods of poor track and trace, inadequate amounts and quality of PPE, poor protection of care homes, empty hospitals and many thousands left to die of other disease. They should all be consigned to the bonfire.
I can’t agree that PHE was “under-funded”. It simply used its funding wrongly. It expanded its remit of “public health”, health issues that only a government agency can solve such as pandemic preparedness, test and trace etc, to also encompass common personal health issues. It expanded its remit and spread its budget too thinly. And even then the expansion didn’t work. It assumed that people drank too much, ate too much and smoked because they didn’t know it was bad for them. They know already. They do it anyway. Well PHE had plenty of money for that highly visible high profile work. But was not so interested in the quiet, low profile preparedness work that you hope won’t ever be needed and definitely won’t be talked about on the media. That is unless there actually is a pandemic.
Being underfunded (and that’s a subjective judgment) doesn’t wholly excuse the dire performance of PHE. Maybe they could have spent more time preparing for the pandemic that many people have been predicting for a long time, rather than “nannying” the population into eating fewer pies and cakes.
It also doesn’t excuse the bone headed stupidity of counting everyone who had a +ve COVID test in the death numbers, regardless of the cause of death.
And how is underfunding the excuse for hiring a Chief Executive with no experience in public health or any medical expertise?