Matt Ridley's Blog, page 5

Flawed modelling is condemning Britain to lockdown

My article for The Telegraph:

Britain leads the pack on vaccination, but lags far behind America, Germany and France on liberation. A big reason is that our Government remains in thrall to a profession that has performed uniquely badly during the pandemic: modellers. The Government’s reliance on Sage experts’ computer modelling to predict what would happen with or without various interventions has proved about as useful as the ancient Roman habit of consulting trained experts in “haruspicy” – interpreting the entrails of chickens.

As Sarah Knapton has revealed in these pages, the brutal postponement of Freedom Day coincided with the release of a bunch of alarmist models predicting a huge new wave of deaths. The most pessimistic, inevitably from Imperial College, forecast 203,824 deaths over the next year. It did so by assuming just a 77-87 per cent reduction in hospitalisations following two vaccinations, despite the fact that real world data shows two vaccinations to be between 92 per cent (AstraZeneca) and 96 per cent (Pfizer) effective in preventing hospitalisation. That would cut the Imperial forecast of deaths by a gob-smacking 90 per cent to 26,854.

This keeps happening. In April the modellers assumed a 30 per cent effectiveness for the vaccine at preventing the spread of the virus. This was described as “a pessimistic view – but it is plausible, it’s not extreme”, by Professor Graham Medley, chairman of the SPI-M sub-group of Sage. It turns out it was far from plausible. At the end of March the BBC’s favourite modeller, Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, was forecasting that by June 21, even with “optimistic” assumptions, less than half of Britain would be protected against severe disease by vaccination. The true figure is over 80 per cent of those aged 18 and over that have been vaccinated at least once.

Photo Credit: Marco Verch on Flickr

This is the same Professor Ferguson who told us in the 1990s that millions might die of mad-cow disease. The correct number, as it turned out, was 178.

The experts would reply that ours is an uncertain world, but we knew that already. If you don’t know, say so. That new variants came along at the end of 2020 and ignited a terrible second wave may seem to have vindicated pessimists, but their models had no assumptions about variants in them. Being right for the wrong reasons was the excuse of haruspicy, too.

Again and again, worst-case scenarios are presented with absurd precision, sometimes deliberately to frighten us into compliance. The notorious press conference last October that told us 4,000 people a day might die was based on a model that was already well out of date.

Pessimism bias in modelling has two roots. The first is that worst-case scenarios are more likely to catch the attention of ministers and broadcasters: academics are as competitive as anybody in seeking such attention. The second is that modellers have little to lose by being pessimistic, but being too optimistic risks can ruin their reputations. Ask Michael Fish, the weather forecaster who in 1987 reassured viewers that hurricanes hardly ever happen.

As Steve Baker MP has been arguing for months, the modellers must face formal challenge. It is not just in the case of Covid that haruspicy is determining policy. There is a growing tendency to speak about the outcomes of models in language that implies they generate evidence, rather than forecasts. This is especially a problem in the field of climate science. As the novelist Michael Crichton put it in 2003: “No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world: increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality.”

Examine the forecasts underpinning government agencies’ plans for climate change and you will find they often rely on a notorious model called RCP8.5, which was always intended as extreme and unrealistic. Among a stack of bonkers assumptions, it projects that the world will get half its energy from coal in 2100, burning 10 times as much as today, even using it to make fuel for aircraft and vehicles. In this and every other respect, RCP8.5 is already badly wrong, but it has infected policy-makers like a virus, a fact you generally have to dig out of the footnotes of government documents.

In 2020 even the BBC ran an article about how RCP8.5 had been misused. Yet a year later in March 2021, the Met Office published a study claiming that climate change would make dairy cattle and potatoes wilt in the heat in 30 years. Sure enough, it was based on RCP8.5, which the Met Office described as “credible” in its press release. They just cannot help themselves.

Nearly two decades ago, Professor Philip Thomas of Bristol University got the death toll from mad-cow disease right – “a few hundred”, he said – and was pilloried for his optimism.

He told an inquiry that “the Government’s continued inability to give proper consideration to the spectrum of scientific opinion… must be a cause for major concern. It is clear that those tasked with devising policy – ministers and civil servants – need to adopt a more critical attitude to the scientific advice they are offered, even when that advice comes from one of their advisory bodies.” That warning was ignored.

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Science journals, Wuhan and a truly bizarre Twitter episode

My article for CAPX:

One of the subtexts of the debate over the origin of the pandemic concerns the role of the scientific journals. The magazines that publish scientific papers have become increasingly dependent on the fees that Chinese scientists pay to publish in them, plus advertisements from Chinese firms and subscriptions from Chinese institutions. In recent years observers have noticed that the news coverage of China in these magazines has begun to look a little less objective than it once did. 

Springer-Nature, the Anglo-German publisher of the world’s leading scientific journal Nature, announced in 2017 that in some of its publications it was censoring articles that used words like “Taiwan”, “Tibet” and “cultural revolution”, when printing in China. In April 2020 Nature ran an editorial apologising for its “error” in “associating the virus with Wuhan” in its news coverage.

Around the same time Nature also attached an editorial note to a number of its old articles reading:

We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.

The headline on one such article, from 2015, read: ‘Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research’, and it concerned an experiment done by a team partly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Sceptics have noticed that any paper arguing against a lab leak is rushed into print in days, while ones that argue for a lab leak are rejected or delayed for months. Elsewhere a paper about pangolins and the coronavirus has been exposed as rehashing data from an older paper, but has not been retracted.

Now, in an episode that would be farcical if it was not about such a serious topic, one of Nature’s journalists has got in a muddle contradicting herself in a bid to distance herself from one of the scientists most vocally defensive of China.

She denied having ever met him, then claimed that a picture of them together was “doctored” by rightwing media. She now admits she met him but claims she forgot.

The journalist in question, Amy Maxmen, has been covering the issue of the origin of the virus for Nature and on May 27 she published an article headlined: ‘Divisive COVID ‘lab leak’ debate prompts dire warnings from researchers’, in which she reported that scientists found the speculation about the possibility of a lab leak “unsettling” and that they were warning “that the growing demands are exacerbating tensions between the United States and China”, while the debate “has grown so toxic that it’s fuelling online bullying of scientists and anti-Asian harassment in the United States, as well as offending researchers and authorities in China whose cooperation is needed.” (When I was a journalist, offending authorities was a badge of honour.)

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On June 8 a photograph and film emerged of Dr Peter Daszak, the researcher who collaborates with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, helps to fund its research and has been campaigning for months to quash rumours of a lab leak and insist on the innocence of his Chinese colleagues. Speaking at a scientific conference in 2016 and discussing his collaboration with the Wuhan virologists, he says: “my colleagues in China did this work, you create pseudoparticles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells and each step of this you move closer and closer to: this virus could really become pathogenic in people”

Sitting next to Dr Daszak on the panel at the conference and listening intently to him is Amy Maxmen. Shown the photograph, she responded on Twitter: “I want to make clear that this is a doctored photo of me from an outlet run by the former EIC of Breitbart News. I’ve never met Daszak.” She has since deleted this tweet.

The event in question, on February 23, 2016, was organised by the Pulitzer Center at the New York Academy of Medicine and entitled ‘Where will the next pandemic come from?’.  Until a few days ago, the page describing the debate on the Pulitzer Center’s site made no mention of Dr Daszak’s name – you’ll see it there now, but the internet archive Wayback Machine reveals it was only inserted on June 14 of this year. Quite why the Pulitzer Center tried to obscure his participation is a mystery, especially given that an account of the meeting on the NYAM’s site already mentioned Dr Daszak’s appearance on the panel: “the panel includes Peter Daszak…and Amy Maxmen”.

What’s more, a tweet sent on February 26, 2016 confirms that he did indeed show up, and that the photograph and film of the event are not deep fakes: “Honored to sit beside such experts in cholera, Zika, HIV & more @soniashah @PeterDaszak Ian Lipkin @NYAMHistory”. The sender of the tweet? Amy Maxmen herself.

Thus rumbled, Dr Maxmen then claimed to have forgotten about the event, which is hardly persuasive. The bizarre part of this whole saga is that there is nothing wrong with Amy Maxmen having met Peter Daszak or shared a platform with him. His remarks quoted above are not some giveaway, because the “pseudoparticles” he describes cannot reproduce or transmit between people. This was not in itself a dangerous experiment, though it was part of a program that did include riskier experiments.

It’s the cover-up that has tripped up Dr Maxmen, catching her in an unnecessary lie. Which immediately raises the suspicion of those of us trying to figure out what happened in Wuhan: why is Nature’s reporter prepared to go to such lengths to deny having met a scientist at the centre of a debate? What is going on here?

As one commenter on Twitter put it: “She could’ve been like, ‘Oh, yeah, might’ve met him once at an event but don’t really remember.’ Why go on a mass deleting spree and try to cover tracks if it’s insignificant? Why not just shrug? Makes it more suspect.”

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Organic lobbyists show ‘sheer hypocrisy’

My article for the Genetic Literacy Project:

The Government was right to make provision for a temporary and limited derogation for the use of the neonicotinoid seed treatment Cruiser SB on sugar beet for the 2021 season, although the colder conditions of recent months mean it will not be required this year.

The impact of virus yellows on last year’s beet crop for many growers was absolutely devastating and explains why the UK, after resisting in previous years, followed 13 EU member states in granting this emergency derogation. But I cannot help calling out the sheer hypocrisy of those in the organic and anti-pesticide lobby who portrayed the Government’s decision as heralding the extinction of all bees and other pollinating insects.

Firstly, sugar beet is not a crop greatly frequented by pollinators and, secondly, the derogation granted was subject to highly restrictive conditions precisely to minimize adverse impacts on biodiversity.

What these campaigners conveniently overlook is that a similar emergency derogation was granted by Defra earlier in 2020 to spray copper hydroxide as a blight fungicide on organically grown potatoes. This was expressly advised against by the Expert Committee on Pesticides due to environmental concerns over acute aquatic toxicity.

My point here is not simply to take a cheap shot at the organic lobby — although I do think they have a case to answer when promoting their approach as ‘pesticide-free’, which manifestly it is not – but rather to emphasize that unless we are prepared to let our food crops rot in the fields, or to become vectors for harmful and potentially lethal mycotoxins spread by insect pests and crop infections, then we must enable technologies which control those pests and diseases.

The same risk of infestation applies whether crops are grown conventionally or organically. Following a public consultation earlier this year, the Government is currently considering whether to allow innovative breeding technologies such as gene editing, which offer faster development of crop varieties with better and more durable pest and disease resistance.

The development of virus yellows resistance in sugar beet is a case in point. Research funded by Innovate UK points to promising genetic sources of virus yellows resistance in sugar beet.

Integrating

I understand that integrating these novel sources of virus yellows resistance into elite beet varieties using conventional breeding could take 10-12 years, but with gene editing it could take as little as two to three years. The need for pesticides would be much reduced, and similar approaches could be envisaged for genetic control of late blight in potatoes.

The outcome of the consultation will determine whether consumers can enjoy the benefit of these truly game-changing technologies with the potential to cut costs, cut pesticide use, improve food security and enhance biodiversity, while underlining the post-Brexit opportunity to resume our role as a world leader in innovation. I suspect many consumers would be concerned to learn that certified organic potatoes on sale in our supermarkets had been treated with a banned fungicide classed as toxic to aquatic life.

Like others before me I would therefore urge the organic lobby to keep an open mind on the potential of these precision breeding techniques to enable more environmentally friendly farming and food production in future.

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The Covid lab leak theory is looking increasingly plausible

My article for Spectator:

In March last year, it was widely agreed by everybody sensible, me included, that talk of the pandemic originating in a laboratory was pseudoscientific nonsense almost on a par with UFOs and the Loch Ness monster. My own reasoning was that Mother Nature is a better genetic engineer than we will ever be, so something as accomplished at infection and spread could not possibly have been put together in a lab.

Today, the mood has changed. Even Dr Anthony Fauci, the US President’s chief medical advisor, now says he is ‘not convinced’ the virus emerged naturally. This month a letter in Science magazine from 18 senior virologists and other experts — including a close collaborator of the Wuhan lab at the centre of the debate, Ralph Baric — demanded that such a hypothesis be taken seriously. Suddenly, too, journalists have woken up and begun writing articles admitting they might have been hasty in dismissing a lab leak as a Trumpian conspiracy theory last year. CNN reported this week that the Biden administration shut down the State Department’s investigation into this.

The turning point, ironically, was the ‘press conference’ on 9 February in Wuhan where a team of western scientists representing the World Health Organisation sat meekly through a three-hour propaganda session at the end of a 12-day study tour. Strictly chaperoned throughout, the western scientists (approved by the Chinese government) had mainly listened to presentations by their Chinese colleagues during their visit and done no research themselves. Yet the result was presented to the world as if it was the WHO’s conclusion.

The press conference was told that the lab leak theory was ‘extremely unlikely’ and would not be investigated further, because the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology said so during a three-hour visit by the study team. By contrast, the theory favoured by the Chinese government — that the virus reached Wuhan on frozen meat from a rabbit or ferret-badger farm in southern China or southeast Asia — was said to be plausible, despite a total lack of evidence.

So risible was this little stage play that even WHO’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had to backtrack a few days later: ‘All hypotheses remain open and require further study.’ Dr Peter Ben Embarek, who led the study team, added wishfully: ‘I don’t think the press conference was a PR win for China.’ The governments of Britain, America and 12 other countries issued a joint statement expressing ‘shared concerns’ over the study.

The upshot was that far from putting a stake in the heart of the lab leak hypothesis, like Peter Cushing as Dr Van Helsing in a Dracula film, the WHO-China study acted more like Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein, galvanising a dead thing into life with a jolt of electricity. Almost every day now brings a new article or broadcast demanding an open-minded investigation. The veteran New York Times and Nature science writer Nicholas Wade pointed the finger squarely at the lab in a long essay published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Two lengthy essays by left-leaning journalists, Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs and Donald McNeil in Medium, have argued that it’s time to revisit the lab theory and that just because Donald Trump thought the virus came out of a lab does not mean that it did not.

The problem is partly that journalists confused two different theories last year: that the virus might have escaped from a laboratory openly doing research that was intended to prevent a pandemic, or that a secret project to create a nasty virus for use as a bioweapon had either gone wrong or succeeded all too well. The latter theory remains implausible; the former has never been so.

After all, the first Sars virus — which is not nearly as infectious — was caught in the lab by scientists at least four times in 2003-04, in Taiwan, Singapore and Beijing (twice). Alarmingly, there is still no clear evidence as to how it happened in three of those cases: no dropped test tube or punctured glove. So there need not be any record of an incident, and the Wuhan scientists who swear that no accident happened might be right, but it still might have leaked.

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It was not entirely journalists’ fault that the two ideas got confused. Early in the pandemic, two group of scientists published articles insisting on a natural origin and criticising lab-based theories. Both made little distinction between a leaked virus and an engineered one. In early February 2020, when almost nothing was known about the virus, let alone its origin, Dr Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance drafted a letter to the Lancet that was eventually signed by 27 scientists: ‘We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that 2019-nCoV does not have a natural origin.’ This was taken to rule out the leak of a natural virus from a lab as well as the engineering of a synthetic one.

The language was dutifully echoed by the mainstream media. By raising the possibility of a lab leak, Senator Tom Cotton was accused by the Washington Post of ‘fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts’; the New York Times said the Wuhan laboratory had been ‘the focus of unfounded conspiracy theories promoted by the Trump administration’; and National Public Radio reported that ‘scientists debunk lab accident theory’. In the Guardian, Dr Daszak wrote an article headlined: ‘Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab.’

Dr Daszak, a British-born parasitologist, is an accomplished ‘grantrepreneur’ who built an empire out of hunting viruses and analysing them in laboratories, much of it in China. The EcoHealth Alliance, a foundation he created a decade ago out of a sleepy wildlife charity, has been garnering $17 million a year mainly from the Pentagon, the US National Institutes of Health and the US Agency for International Development — and paying him $400,000 a year. No wonder he wanted to squash any ‘rumours, misinformation and conspiracy theories’, as he put it in his email to fellow scientists. ‘We declare no competing interests,’ said the Lancet statement, which was odd given that Dr Daszak had collaborated closely with, and provided funding for (and shared karaoke sessions with the boss of) the laboratory in Wuhan that was under suspicion.

The other article that convinced many people, including me at first, that a lab theory could be ruled out came from Dr Kristian Andersen at the Scripps Research Translational Institute and four of his colleagues, and was published in Nature Medicine magazine in March 2020. They assembled arguments against the virus having been engineered, relying particularly on the logic that engineering a virus would have left traces in the genome and would have used a known template. Both are arguable, but in any case the paper said little about the possibility of a natural bat virus leaking from a lab by mistake. Yet it was taken by ‘fact checkers’ at Facebook, Wikipedia and in the mainstream media as ruling out that too. For months, therefore, any discussion of lab leaks got tagged as ‘conspiracy theory’.

The lab that has been assiduously and energetically collecting coronaviruses from horseshoe bats for more than a decade, gathering a far larger collection of samples and genetic sequences than any other lab anywhere in the world, just happens to be in Wuhan, as part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Run by Dr Shi Zhengli, it boasted in 2019 of having at least 100 different Sars-like viruses in its database.

We cannot check these samples because the database went offline on 12 September 2019, just before the pandemic began, and Dr Shi persistently refuses to reopen it, arguing that it’s been subject to ‘hacking attempts’. Right… in September 2019? And there’s no other way to show the data? Dr Daszak says he knows what is in the database and that it is of no relevance, which is why he has not asked his friend Dr Shi to share it. Right. When I raised this lack of transparency with a senior British scientist, he said: ‘They are communists, what do you expect?’ It is not clear why that should be reassuring.

The purpose of all these virus hunts and experiments was to predict and avert the next pandemic. At best they failed in that; at worst they might have caused it. It is still possible that somebody got Covid through an animal in a market, which had been infected by a bat. But in the case of the Sars epidemic of 2002-03, it was just a few weeks before scientists figured out that food handlers were catching it from infected palm civets on sale in markets in Guangdong province. And that was before modern high-speed genomic sequencing was invented. Today, with better technology and after 18 months of searching, Chinese authorities have tested north of 80,000 animals in markets, on farms and in the wild all across China and found precisely zero that are or were carrying Sars-CoV-2 (not counting cats, mink and so on which caught it from people once the pandemic was under way). The virus found in two pangolins in 2019 is a dead end: too distantly related, nowhere near Wuhan, and none of the pangolin handlers got sick.

Finding some close cousins of the pandemic virus last year in horseshoe bats in Thailand, Cambodia and Japan led to a flurry of excitement in China that the blame could be laid elsewhere, but no, the closest related virus to Sars-CoV-2 is still one that was swabbed from the anus of a horseshoe bat in a mineshaft at a place called Beng-ping in Mojiang county in Yunnan in 2013. And Dr Shi’s colleagues, who swabbed that bat’s bum in 2013, had travelled all the way from Wuhan, to which they promptly returned with the sample. They were there because six men shovelling bat guano in the mine in 2012 had fallen ill with symptoms like Covid-19 and three died. This was one of seven such trips to the mine: a fact that was figured out by a bunch of amateur investigators called the Drastic group long before the lab admitted it.

So the only known link between Wuhan and the only known source of the only known specimen of the most closely related virus to the cause of Covid-19 is the scientists. It’s highly unlikely anybody else went down the mine and then travelled a thousand miles to that particular city. Yet this bat virus from Mojiang is still not Sars-CoV-2, so either there is a closer cousin out there, or a similar bat virus was brought to Wuhan by scientists and leaked. If we are to avoid another pandemic, we badly need to know which.

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We no longer need to fear Covid

My article for the Telegraph:

The whole aim of practical politics, said HL Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

It is hard to avoid the impression that officials are alarmed rather than pleased by the fading of the pandemic in Britain. They had a real hobgoblin to hand, and boy did they make the most of it, but it’s now turning into a pussy cat. So they are back to casting around for imaginary ones to justify their draconian – and deliciously popular – command and control over every detail of our lives. Look, variants!

And yes, the pandemic is fading fast. The vaccine is working “better than we could possibly have imagined”, according to Calum Semple, of the University of Liverpool, based on a study which found that it reduced hospitalisation by 98 per cent. With deaths from the virus now falling by more than 20 per cent a week and with overall mortality from all causes now below the long-term average, “we’ve moved from a pandemic to an endemic situation”, according to Sarah Walker, Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at Oxford and Chief Investigator on the ONS’s Covid-19 Infection Survey. The UK’s covid positivity rate at 0.2 per cent is now the fifth lowest in the world and lower than Taiwan and Israel.

Yet there is still barely a peep of optimism from Boris Johnson or Matt Hancock, with the former wrongly crediting lockdown and not vaccines for the fall in infections and gloomily adding: “As we unlock, the result will inevitably be that we will see more infections and, sadly, we will see more hospitalisation and deaths.” In summer? With the vulnerable half of the population almost fully vaccinated? With data showing that vaccine reduces hospitalisation by 98 per cent?

Sure, he was just being cautious, and is haunted by the memory of being too blasé about the virus last year, but there comes a point where such pessimism is itself irresponsible. It condemns the lonely to more anxiety and isolation; it prolongs the wait for treatment for too many cancer victims, for whom every day counts; it messes up the education of children and students; it drives more businesses to the wall; it deepens the national debt.

These hobgoblins matter too, but the solution to them is not more state intervention but less: to accelerate, not stick to, the timetable to liberate the country. It is still almost two months before we are due to lift the restrictions, and the virus is already struggling to survive. What happened to data not dates?

Yet the Government’s caution remains popular. Why is this? Because of the pessimism of officialdom – it is a circular argument. People readily believe in hobgoblins, and they rightly took fright at this horrible virus last year, so when Professors Whitty and Vallance tell them it’s still scary out there without a mask on, of course they believe it and resent their neighbours who do not comply. Yet to take that one example, the evidence that mask wearing has contributed to the decline in the virus is surprisingly thin, and especially among children in school mask wearing has been a grisly price to pay. To say so is to risk a furious response because mask wearing is no longer so much about preventing infection as about signalling that you are being careful.

As a group of doctors in Boston put it last year, “masks are not only tools, they are also talismans that may help increase health care workers’ ‘perceived’ sense of safety, well-being, and trust in their hospitals. Although such reactions may not be strictly logical, we are all subject to fear and anxiety, especially during times of crisis.”

But, variants! Yes, the virus is evolving: not just mutating, but changing through the selective survival of those mutants in certain environments. Some settings such as hospitals may well have selected for more virulent variants – because these sent you to hospital where more people came into contact with you – while others, such as outdoor gatherings would probably have promoted less harmful, if more infectious, versions. In short, I worry that lockdowns and the confinement of so much spread to healthcare settings may have delayed the taming of the virus.

In any case if a new variant appears that can evade the vaccine, then the answer is a new vaccine, not a new lockdown. What good would it do to keep us under house arrest forever in the vain hope that such a variant never got into the country in the first place?

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Britain is in danger of repeating its post-war mistakes

My article for Spectator:

In search of wisdom about how an officious government reluctantly relaxes its grip after an emergency, I stumbled on a 1948 newsreel clip of Harold Wilson when he was president of the Board of Trade. It’s a glimpse of long-forgotten and brain-boggling complexity in the rationing system. ‘We have taken some clothing off the ration altogether,’ he boasts, posing as a munificent liberator. ‘From shoes to bathing costumes, and from oilskins to body belts and children’s raincoats. Then we’ve reduced the points on such things as women’s coats and woollen garments generally and... on men’s suits.’

Does this remind you of anything? One day in November, George Eustice, the environment secretary, uttered the immortal words that a Scotch egg ‘probably would count as a substantial meal if there were table service’, only for Michael Gove to say the next day that ‘a couple of Scotch eggs is a starter, as far as I’m concerned’, later correcting himself to concede that ‘a Scotch egg is a substantial meal’. This is the sort of tangled descent into detail that central planning always causes. We have seen it again and again over the past year. What is essential travel? Is a picnic exercise? Can you go inside a pub to get to its outside space? Ask the man from the ministry.

Three years after the second world war ended, the government was still micromanaging the decisions of consumers. Incredibly, it was nine years of peace before rationing ceased altogether. Bread was rationed for the first time in 1946, potatoes in 1947. Only then did the slow liberalisation of shopping begin. Flour was derationed in 1948, clothes in 1949, petrol, soap, dried fruit, chocolate biscuits, treacle, syrup, jellies and mincemeat in 1950, tea in 1952, sweets in 1953, cheese and meat in 1954. The black market thrived.

The reluctant withdrawal of the state from rationing (and the even longer persistence of price controls, wage controls, exchange controls and central planning generally) infuriated at least some of the British people, though much of the anger was, as now, directed at cheating rather than the rules. The Ealing comedies of the time are suffused with dreams of liberation and rebellion against the tyrannical inspectors that plagued people’s lives. In Passport to Pimlico (1949), a self-governing micro-state abolishes rationing and a pub crowd tear up their ration books in the face of a furious policeman.

‘We risk allowing officials to cling on to their beloved levers of control for too long’

Conventional wisdom has it that Britain’s slow return to normality was inevitable, given the country’s need to earn foreign exchange to pay for imports. But across the North Sea a very different experiment was tried. Ludwig Erhard was the effective finance minister of West Germany under allied military control. A keen follower of Friedrich Hayek, he believed that central planning was a disaster (‘the more the state plans, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual’) and that rationing was the cause, not the effect, of shortages. Erhard announced, a month after Wilson’s complicated speech, that he was abolishing almost all rationing and price and wage controls with immediate effect. He introduced a new currency the same day. He told Germans: ‘Now your only ration coupon is the mark.’

Erhard chose a Sunday, 20 June, to make his announcement, knowing his military masters would be off duty. The British, Americans and French were aghast. One US colonel complained that he had no right to alter a system of price controls imposed by the allies. ‘I have not relaxed rationing; I have abolished it!’ came the reply. General Lucius Clay, the US commander, telephoned him to say: ‘Herr Erhard, my advisers tell me you’re making a terrible mistake.’ Erhard: ‘My advisers tell me the same thing.’

The result was felt immediately. The next day the shops were brimming with food and clothing, as retailers realised there would be ample demand and that money was now worth earning. Economic output began to shoot up, absenteeism to plummet and shortages soon vanished. The German economic miracle was born. Only, Erhard insisted it was no miracle. ‘What has taken place in Germany,’ he later wrote, ‘is anything but a miracle. It is the result of the honest efforts of a whole people who, in keeping with the principles of liberty, were given the opportunity of using personal initiative and human energy.’

Meanwhile across the North Sea, under Butskellite planning, Britain ignored the lesson. ‘A British government spokesman said that there was no prospect of ending rationing in Britain for some years,’ read a newspaper report reacting to the German decision. As Britain fretted under miserable controls, its economic performance fell ever further behind, its complacent masters refusing to acknowledge the obvious lesson from Germany: that freedom works.

We are doing the same again now, as one of the most socially restricted major countries in Europe but the one with the lowest death rate. We risk allowing officials to cling on to their beloved levers of control too long, and to squander the advantage won by our vaccine taskforce. If a new variant of the virus threatens a third wave, permanent lockdown is very unlikely to stop it anyway. And if the new variant is vaccine-resistant, then vaccine passports will be useless.

When things are controlled by bureaucrats, it takes a real effort of imagination to envisage them not being so. We assume that in the absence of direction, chaos must ensue, forgetting the lessons of economics. ‘How does Paris get fed?’ asked Frédéric Bastiat in 1845, and answered: not through the efforts of brilliant and omniscient food commissioners — that way lies inevitable disaster — but through a market that blindly matches demand with supply and thereby summons up the collective genius of millions of ordinary people.

With few exceptions, the tribe of academic scientists and hospital doctors which now controls our government has literally never heard such arguments. Their worldview is a top-down one: they assume things happen because somebody ordains that things happen. Spontaneous order is a foreign concept to them. This is surprising, given that it is the essence of evolution, but when it comes to society they are in thrall to intelligent-design theories. They are political creationists.

So of course the scientists will hesitate to recommend liberation. The politicians must bear this in mind. Erhard’s motto, said one later economist, could have been ‘Don’t just sit there, undo something’. This year, by happy coincidence, 20 June is also a Sunday and is the day before the date on which we were promised the abolition of all restrictions — before the backtracking began.

Erhard’s lesson is that the best way to bring in reforms is fast. The best way to get rid of rules is all at once. The best time to liberalise an economy is far sooner than the experts think you should. Who will make a new version of Passport to Pimlico, with a gleeful crowd in a pub tearing up vaccine passports in the face of a bossy policeman?

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Podcast: Infinite Innovation with The Knowledge Project

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I went on The Knowledge Project podcast with Shane Parrish to discuss "writing books about science, the age-old battle between viruses and humans, rational optimism, the difference between innovation and invention, the role of trial and error and the effects of social media on seeing others’ points of view."

It was a wonderful conversation, and good fun!

Listen now on the podcast website, on Apple Podcasts, on Google Podcasts, or elsewhere.

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How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley is available in the US and Canada, and now in paperback in the United Kingdom. The first chapter is available to download for free.

 

The unexpected history and miraculous success of vaccines

My article from Warp News:

At a time when the miraculous success of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 has transformed the battle against the pandemic, it is fitting to recall that the general idea behind vaccination was brought to the attention of the western world, not by brilliant and privileged professors, but by a black slave and a woman.

His name was Onesimus and he lived in Boston, as the property of Cotton Mather, a well-known puritan preacher. Her name was Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, the literary wife of the British ambassador to Constantinople.

Some time around 1715 Onesimus seems to have told Mather that back in West Africa people were in the habit of deliberately infecting children with a drop of “juice of smallpox” from a survivor, thus making them immune. Mather then came across a report to the Royal Society in London from an Italian physician, Emmanuel Timoni, working in the Ottoman court in Constantinople, which described the same practice in combating smallpox. The Ottomans had got the idea from either China or Africa.

Six years later, in April 1721, when smallpox reached Boston in a ship called the Seahorse, and efforts to quarantine its crew proved in vain, Mather wrote to 14 doctors begging them to try inoculation. Thirteen ignored him but one, Zabdiel Boylston, did not. On 26 June 1721, almost 300 years ago, Boylston deliberately scratched the skin of his six year old son with a needle dipped in the pus from a smallpox survivor’s spots. He then did the same “variolation” to his slave and his slave’s two-year-old son. Imagine how brave, even foolhardy, this act was.

All three survived after mild bouts of the disease. Boylston then began inoculating other volunteers, and by November he had variolated 247 people. Six of these died. On 25 November he inoculated 15 members of Harvard University. The epidemic was by then raging in Boston, over 400 people having died in October alone.

News of Boylston’s experimental treatment caused fury among the Boston townspeople. Doctors denounced him. “Some have been carrying about instruments of inoculation, and bottles of poisonous humor, to infect all who were willing to submit to it. Can any man infect a family in the morning, and pray to God in the evening that the distemper will not spread?" thundered one. The Boston city council summoned Boylston to account for his crime and the mob descended on him. He hid in a closet for nearly two weeks to escape lynching. It is not easy being an innovator.

At almost the same time in Britain, a brave woman pioneer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was introducing variolation to London society, having learnt of the practice while in Constantinople as the wife of the ambassador. She too was the subject of fierce denunciation.

On 1 April 1718 she wrote to her friend Sarah Chiswell from Turkey with a detailed account of inoculation:

“The smallpox, so fatal and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set of women who make it their business to perform the operation . . . When they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together) the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox, and asks what veins you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch) and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle . . . There is no example of any one that has died in it, and you may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of the experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son. I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England.”

Lady Mary did indeed engraft her son Edward, then watched anxiously as the pustules cratered his skin. It was a brave moment, but he soon recovered. On her return to London she inoculated her daughter as well, and became infamous for championing inoculation. In 1722 the Prince of Wales inoculated his own children. Dr William Wagstaffe denounced the practice: “Posterity will scarcely be brought to believe that an experiment practised only by a few ignorant women amongst an illiterate and unthinking people should on a sudden – and upon a slender Experience – so far obtain in one of the politest nations in the world as to be received into the Royal Palace.”

In due course Edward Jenner replaced variolation with the safer practice of vaccination – using the harmless cowpox virus to protect children against smallpox. Vaccination conquered smallpox so comprehensively that by the 1970s the disease – once the greatest taker of human lives on the planet – had died out altogether. The last case of the more deadly strain, Variola major, was in Bangladesh in October 1975. Rahima Banu, then three years old, survived and is still alive. The last case of Variola minor was in October 1977 in Somalia. Ali Maow Maalin, who was an adult when he caught it, also survived, working for most of his life on the campaign against polio, and dying in 2013 of malaria.

Vaccination was invented a long time before anybody understood how it works. Even today, we still face huge uncertainty in designing vaccines. This past year, in record time, using novel technology, scientists have developed a fleet of effective vaccines to prevent a disease, forcibly reminding the world of the incalculable value of innovation.

The pandemic is none the less a rebuke to the human race for not having done more in recent years to improve the speed and success rate of vaccine development. Until last year it was a surprisingly neglected technology, not profitable for pharmaceutical firms and taking second place to lifestyle interventions among public-health advocates recently. Vaccine development, warned Wayne Koff, president of the Human Vaccines Project, in 2019, “is an expensive, slow and laborious process, costing billions of dollars, taking decades, with less than a 10 per cent rate of success…There is clearly an urgent need to determine ways to improve not just the effectiveness of the vaccines themselves but also the very processes by which they are developed.”

Not all vaccines have been safe or effective, but the problems are nearly all in the past. Vaccines are now safe and life-saving medications. The antivaxxer movement is as mistaken the mob that went after Dr Boylston.

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Innovation is a Geographically Localized and Temporary Phenomenon

My article for Discourse:

Innovation is the “main event” of the modern age. It’s the reason why after millennia of comparative stagnation, the last several hundred years featured sudden, dramatic improvements in technology and therefore living standards: from steam engines to search engines, from vaccines to vaping.

It’s also a strangely localized and temporary phenomenon. At any one time, there is usually one part of the world where innovation flourishes best, attracting talent from all over: California in 1960, the U.S. East Coast in 1920, Britain in 1800, Holland in 1650, Renaissance Italy in 1500, Song China in 1000, Abbasid Arabia in 800, ancient Greece in 500 B.C., the Ganges Valley before that. These were places that were relatively wealthy, free and open to trade at the time.

Today, the most innovative part of the world is probably China. The days when China was a smart copier, catching up with the West by emulating its products and processes, are over. China is leapfrogging into the future.

Chinese consumers are wholly mobile in their use of the internet, floating free of fixed computers. In cities at least they no longer use cash, or even credit cards: Mobile payments are universal. Digital money, controlled by Tencent and Alibaba, is evolving fast. You mostly no longer find menus in restaurants or cash registers in shops. QR codes are used to order and pay for everything. The cost of mobile data has plummeted there faster than anybody could have imagined. In five years, the price of a gigabyte of data plunged from 240 renminbi to just one.

Firms like WeChat started out as social media companies but are now providing everything consumers want: mobile wallets, apps for ordering taxis or meals, means of paying utility bills and much more. Things that require five different apps in the West can be done in China on one. Companies like Ant Financial are reinventing financial services, with 600 million users managing not just their money but their insurance and other financial services, all through a single app.

As for discovery and invention, China is just as innovative, plunging into artificial intelligence, gene editing, and nuclear and solar energy with a gusto that the West can only dream of. The pace of development is breathtaking: 7,000 miles of new freeways a year over the past decade; train lines and metro networks that would take decades in the West appearing in a year or two; data networks bigger, faster and more comprehensive than anywhere else. This infrastructure spending is not innovation in itself, but it surely helps it happen.

What explains this speed and breadth of innovation fury? Partly, work. Chinese entrepreneurs and their employees are dedicated to the 9–9–6 week: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. That was what Americans were like too when they changed the world (Thomas Edison demanded inhuman hours from his employees); and Germans when they were among the most innovative people; and Britons in the 19th century; and the Dutch and Italians before that. Willingness to put in the hours, to experiment and play, to try new things, to take risks—these characteristics for some reason are found in young, newly prosperous societies and no longer in old, tired ones.

What Does This Mean?

China has been here before, of course. During the Song dynasty (960-1279) China experienced an unparalleled flourishing of science, technology and economic growth. Woodblock printing presses served a literate elite; compasses steered traders across the seas; craftsmen turned out porcelain and silk of unrivaled quality; windmills pumped water for rice irrigation; pound locks helped barges travel up rivers; gunpowder deterred barbarian invasions; metal workers forged new alloys; paper money came into circulation. Mathematics, cartography and astronomy all flourished. The population grew, but the food supply grew faster with new rice varieties and new methods of cultivation. Cities sprang up all over the empire.

The Song emperors had hit upon a formula that worked. What was it? The secret sauce was freedom. To an extent unknown under previous Chinese emperors, Song-era merchants were free to do what they wanted. The government gradually withdrew from direct involvement in the economy, leaving administration and economic decisions to the local gentry, most of whom were closely involved in trade. Internal tariffs were largely absent, so long-distance trade flourished, along with the building of canals. Corruption was suppressed, taxes were fair and peasants were able to act as consumers. It was no paradise by today’s standards, but it was a highly inventive time.

This innovation fever came to a shuddering halt at the fall of the Song dynasty. Mongol rulers, followed by the first Ming emperors, reimposed central planning to an almost farcical degree. Merchants were told what they could and could not sell and where they could and could not go. They were forced to report their inventories regularly to mandarins. Overseas trade was restricted and eventually banned. More and more power was drawn to the center. Experiment and enterprise became impossible. China sank slowly into militarized poverty.

How then can one explain the flourishing of innovation in China today? It is after all a communist country run by an unelected nomenklatura of apparatchiks, to borrow some Russian words for the mandarinate. The answer lies beneath the surface. So long as they are not trying to invent democracy, or a new political party, innovators are surprisingly free to try anything. A Chinese entrepreneur faces almost none of the delays and restrictions that a Western one does. He is not required to get permits, licences and go-aheads from multiple beadles and bureaucrats of the state. He just gets on with it: hires new researchers, builds a new production line, sets up a new company. The speed with which business decisions are taken amazes Western visitors.

The deal that Deng Xiaoping did, and his successors mostly honored, was that in exchange for a monopoly on political power, the party would leave enterprise alone. Turns out that’s all enterprise needs: a hint of freedom and off it goes. Three decades of starvation, re-education and repression under Mao Zedong had not extinguished the spirit of the Chinese innovator.

But the party may now be over. Not because the West is sick of seeing its manufacturers undercut, its intellectual property undermined and its appetite for free trade sated, but because Xi Jinping, president for life, is a different type of ruler from those who went before him. The Ming are back. You can see it in the increasingly dictatorial powers and arbitrary decisions of his henchmen. The goose that lays the golden eggs is being throttled.

Chinese citizens are increasingly subject to arbitrary and authoritarian restraints. Ask the people of Hong Kong. Democracy does not exist in China and free speech is impossible, but in smaller ways too, the trap is closing. Surveillance apps deliver mandarins a kind of power to interfere that their Ming predecessors would have envied. Innovation happens when ideas can meet and mate, when experiment is encouraged, when people and goods can move freely, when money can flow rapidly toward fresh concepts directed by the consumer, and when those who invest can be sure their rewards will not be stolen. In other words, in places like Hong Kong as it was.

The West may be slowly forgetting to allow this to happen through bureaucratic strangulation, but China will surely stifle it through political authoritarianism. Xi wants to (in his own words) “consolidate the shared ideological foundation underpinning the concerted efforts of the entire party and all the Chinese people,” which basically means telling people what to think. In an authoritarian system it will be all too easy for incumbent businesses, even those that started out as plucky outsiders, to raise barriers to entry against innovation. China’s spell at the top of the leader board for innovation will come to an end. Maybe not this decade, but soon.

What Next?

Who then will pick up the challenge? My money is on India. If it can sort out its rickety infrastructure, corrupt administration and chaotic communal relations, India has enormous potential: a vast country that speaks English, allows a measure of freedom, values education, and has a long tradition of enterprise and spontaneous, bottom-up development. Then the innovation will have come full circle, back to where it first started.

For it was in India, 1,400 years ago, that the decimal system of counting, together with the crucial innovation of zero as a number in its own right, was first used. In 628, we find Brahmagupta, an astronomer living in a kingdom of western India called Gurjaradesa, known for its scholarship and enterprise. He published a book called the Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta, or the “opening of the universe.” Though mostly about astronomy, it had chapters on mathematics and is the first known work to treat zero as an actual number, rather than as a symbol for nothing as the Babylonians had done.

In simple and easily understood statements, Brahmagupta set out the significance of zero and considered negative numbers for the first time, driving the point home in plain terms: “A debt minus zero is a debt. A fortune minus zero is a fortune. Zero minus zero is a zero. A debt subtracted from zero is a fortune. A fortune subtracted from zero is a debt. The product of zero multiplied by a debt or fortune is zero.”

Gurjaradesa was the Silicon Valley of its day, the place where innovation thrived. Don’t rule out the possibility that it could be again. Gujarat, which covers part of it, is one of India’s most entrepreneurial regions.

But it is only a possibility. The innovation engine may roar into action somewhere else. Brazil, perhaps, a country that increasingly has the infrastructure and education to match its ambitions. Or parts of Africa, a continent that was written off as permanently poor by many people just a decade ago but is now rapidly abolishing the combination of warfare, malaria and malnutrition that has held its people back. Or maybe the Anglosphere of America, Britain, Canada and Australasia will have another chance.

Having left the cumbersome and stifling bureaucracy of the European Union’s Ming Empire, Britain is not only looking outward across the oceans again, with over 60 new trade deals, but is discovering with delight that it can take quicker decisions about vaccines and genetic technologies, about artificial intelligence and fusion energy, while its former partners bicker and delay. The prosperity of our grandchildren depends on somebody discovering the magic of innovation, not just with pixels but with molecules and gadgets too.

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The World Health Organisation's appeasement of China has made another pandemic more likely

My article for The Telegraph:

It is a year ago last week since the World Health Organisation conceded, belatedly, that a pandemic was under way. The organisation’s decisions in early 2020 were undoubtedly influenced by the Chinese government. On 14 January, to widespread surprise, the WHO was still echoing China’s assurance that there was no evidence of person-to-person spread: “it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission,” said an official that day. Within days even China conceded this was wrong.

Later that month the WHO director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said his admiration for China’s speed in detecting the virus and sharing information was “beyond words”, adding “so is China's commitment to transparency and to supporting other countries”. At the time China’s government was

China is a big funder of the WHO and its favoured candidate for director general in 2017 was Dr Tedros, an Ethiopian politician with Marxist roots and long-standing ties to China. In 2019, the WHO endorsed Traditional Chinese Medicine, the belief that (among other things) eating powdered pangolin scales – made of the same material as fingernails – is a miraculous cure for cancer and impotence. Such claims are leading to the trafficking and near extinction of several pangolin species.

As an instance of Chinese influence, consider that on 28 March last year, a WHO executive, Bruce Aylward, thrice failed to answer a journalist’s question about Taiwan’s efficient response to the virus: first claiming not to have heard the question, then apparently cutting off the connection, and then, when it was restored, responding “Well, we've already talked about China.” Taiwan is excluded from the WHO on Chinese insistence.

The World Health Organisation’s defenders point out that it is powerless to act without the agreement of member countries, but such appeasement is not inevitable. In 2003, under the leadership of Gro Harlem Brundtland, rather than praising China, the WHO lambasted it for failing to alert the world promptly to Sars. In 2014 the WHO commissioned a critical report about its own manifest failings at the start of the ebola epidemic in west Africa, when, in order not to offend host countries, it insisted all was well long after medical charities were raising the alarm. The report identified a “failure to see that conditions for explosive spread were present right at the start” of the outbreak.

At the time WHO’s director general was obsessed with a campaign against vaping despite evidence that it was saving lives by helping people to quit smoking. The next year WHO issued a statement that the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century was climate change. At the very least this pattern suggested an organisation not focused on its day job – which is to prevent and halt epidemics. Startlingly, in 2017, the Washington Post discovered that the WHO routinely spent $200m a year on its travel budget, more than it spent on AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined.

The most embarrassing fiasco for the WHO came on 9 February this year when its team of scientific experts, with terms of reference that China had taken six months to agree to, held a press conference in Wuhan to announce the results of a superficial two-week investigation into the origin of the virus. The event turned into a 2-hour Chinese propaganda exercise, entertaining the implausible and evidence-free suggestion that Covid was imported on frozen fish or meat while ruling out even investigating the possibility that it might have leaked from the world’s leading bat coronavirus laboratory, which happens to be in Wuhan.

Afterwards, members of the WHO team backtracked, saying they were still open-minded about the laboratory, that they had only gone along with the frozen-fish theory “to respect, a bit, the findings” of their Chinese colleagues and that the visit had not been an “investigation” after all. But the damage had been done. “I don't think the press conference was a PR win for China,” muttered their spokesman, forlornly.

It emerged last week that the team had not even asked to see the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s online database, locked since September 2019 and taken down altogether in the spring of 2020. That database is known to contain 22,000 samples, mostly of viruses, 16,000 of them from bats. These include eight viruses very closely related to the virus causing the pandemic but whose genome sequences have not been published. They were collected in 2015 from a disused mineshaft, a thousand miles away, where in 2012 six men fell ill with a disease very like Covid.

Had a western city with a big virus laboratory been the site of origin of a pandemic that killed nearly three million people, it would never be allowed – by the WHO or anybody else – to get away with denying access to such vital resources. The WHO has wasted a year failing to investigate the origin of the virus properly, which has reduced the chances that we will ever know how this pandemic began and therefore increased the probability of another one.

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