The following is a guest post from Lockdown Sceptics’ in-house doctor, formerly a senior medic in the NHS.
In early November, Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty were summoned before the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and questioned about their presentation of data to justify a second lockdown. Following their appearance, the government was obliged to ‘correct’ a number of misleading graphics which portrayed the situation as being far more serious than it actually was. The Government was officially criticised by the U.K. statistics watchdog for the misleading presentation.
After last night’s Downing Street press conference I expect Greg Clark, the Committee Chair, will be scheduling a repeat appointment.
Professor Whitty’s presentation was a blatant example of data selection. At the risk of image overload, I will run through a few points he made and quite a few more that he somehow overlooked. This is by no means a comprehensive critique – to be frank, I don’t have time and I doubt the readers have the patience to go through all the egregious errors and data manipulation that went on last night. We will have to leave that to the Science and Technology Committee.
Let’s start with hospital admissions. The official slides measure admissions per 100K population. Here it is, showing an alarming rise in admissions in the North West of England in Graph One.
Read More: Chris Whitty’s Slide Show Yesterday Was a Blatant Exercise in Biased Data Selection
