(2021-06-04) Why Was It So Easy To Fool The Media On Herd Immunity

Why was it so easy to fool the media on COVID-19 herd immunity? UK planning at the start of the pandemic involved allowing the majority of the population to become infected with covid between April and September 2020, causing five thousand deaths a day and ending with enough cumulative infections for herd immunity, as shown on both the whiteboard photos from 10 Downing St, contemporary tweets from MPs, and the subsequently released SAGE papers

Known inside the government as “single peak” and outside it as the “herd immunity plan”, this idea obviously wasn’t some evil plot to deliberately cause death and suffering- compared with an unmitigated pandemic it cut deaths in half

Alternative measures which would suppress the disease aggressively were thought to be more dangerous

became the plan, until mid March 2020 when, according to the evidence given to the Health, and Science and Technology Committee, the UK changed tack and adopted what became known as the “build” strategy: to instead hold the virus at bay with alternating lockdowns while rushing to get vaccines and treatments in place.

The original plan was all public at the time, endorsed and discussed at length by the relevant parties, and then further explained by the publication of SAGE minutes modelling it, but somehow a large part of the media have developed the view that it never happened, and that any references to “herd immunity” refer only to vaccination, or that a “herd immunity plan” means something different from the above and therefore Britain never had one.

There are dozens of official media interviews and press conferences from the time explaining the single peak herd immunity strategy, MPs tweets defending it

Why were the media taken in? (journalism)

I think there are a couple of parts to this- one is that even after a year of being bad at it, most of the media orgs who are covering this are still giving the job to political reporters, who have a framework that doesn’t really work for analysing a problem of this type.

A systemic failure doesn’t really fit into this mental model since the herd immunity plan was carefully outlined using polite speech codes

Part of the story could also be that expert infallibility is what their readers want to believe. The survey below isn’t perfect, but it does seem like the public also find the idea of bad scientific advice too horrifying to contemplate and prefer to cast the debacle as a morality play.

It’s also possible that understanding this stuff is hard and the media are just not really up to it. Systemic failures require systems thinking to understand, and that’s in short supply.