Posts
- Sir David Spiegelhalter suggested the Government tried to 'manipulate' Britons
- Cherry-picked 'worst-case scenarios' to 'instill a certain emotional reaction'
- No10 lambasted for its apocalyptic graphs and spurious data shown to public
Eminent statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter suggested the Government tried to manipulate Britons rather than genuinely inform them on the true scale of the crisis.
The 4,000 deaths per day scenario was based on the assumption that there would be 1,000 per day by the start of November. There are on average 441 occurring across the UK as of November 23
Number 10 cherry-picked 'spurious' coronavirus data to justify England's second lockdown and may have intended to frightened the public, according to one of Britain's top experts.
Eminent statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter said ministers had 'broken pretty much every code of conduct' by choosing only to show worst-case scenarios, which were often based on out of date data.
The Cambridge professor told MPs today: 'I don't want to ascribe motivation to anyone of course. But if someone was really trying to manipulate the audience and frighten them and persuade them that what was being done was correct, rather than genuinely inform them, then this is the kind of thing they might do.'...
What I'm objecting to strongly is the fact such spurious data and graphs were being presented to the public as a justification for the decisions that were being made.
'You didn't need that graph, you just needed quite short-term projections to tell something needed to be done or we could be in real trouble very quickly.
'There is good data available and yet at some point the need to persuade people, to instill a certain emotional reaction in people seems to take over at really quite a high level of decision making. I think it's quite unfortunate.'...
The statistician was giving evidence to the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee today.
Source: Daily Mail
