A recurring feature of this crisis has been anti-lockdown journalists trying to gaslight their readers into believing that experts have said something which they not only didn't say, but is the polar opposite of what they did say. First of all, there was the army of right-wing journalists on both sides of the Atlantic who falsely claimed that Professor Neil Ferguson had "walked back" his projection that the virus would cause hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths in the UK if suppression measures weren't implemented - in fact Ferguson had stood by that projection in full. Then there was Mark McLaughlin falsely claiming that Scotland's celebrated former Chief Medical Officer Sir Harry Burns "agreed" with Graham Medley that the virus should be allowed to spread widely in order to prioritise other health concerns (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one, because of course allowing the virus to spread would mean the NHS wouldn't have the capacity to deal with much else). In fact, Burns appears to take entirely the opposite view to Medley - he believes in full suppression of the virus. And now, most absurdly of all, we have Iain Macwhirter taking some comments from Mike Ryan out of context to give the false impression that the WHO have done a U-turn and have come to regard Sweden - which has a far worse death toll than all of its Nordic neighbours - as some kind of international gold standard. Iain then added "here's why" and linked to a paper by one of the advisers to the Swedish health authorities, in which it is claimed that practically everyone will inevitably catch the virus and that we therefore should try to manage its spread, not stop it - ie. the 'herd immunity' philosophy, which is the complete opposite of what the WHO believe now and have consistently believed right from the start. Essentially, Iain is trying to give the false impression that the WHO have suddenly and randomly changed their minds and now think that full-on suppression should be abandoned and replaced with a mitigation/herd immunity strategy - which is so far removed from what they're actually saying as to be utterly laughable.
In reality, the WHO in recent days and weeks have been urging governments to be extremely cautious about lifting lockdown and to only do so when certain conditions are met, most obviously very low numbers of new cases and sufficient capacity to keep the numbers persistently low by means of testing and contact tracing. It's been pointed out a number of times that if governments actually heeded the WHO's advice to the letter, very few countries in Europe would be easing restrictions just yet, including the ones that appear to have the virus under far more control than the likes of the UK. But that doesn't mean the WHO think that lockdown is a good thing in itself - as far back as March, Mike Ryan was at pains to point out that lockdowns were a "poor substitute" for breaking the chains of transmission by means of mass testing and contact tracing. Even that left him open to misinterpretation, because some people (including a troll on this blog's comments section) then claimed he was telling countries not to impose lockdowns, but that isn't what he meant at all. He fully accepted that once an epidemic was out of control, lockdowns were needed to take the heat out of the situation, but he also regarded that outcome as a sign of failure. The countries that hadn't failed were the ones that had suppressed the virus from the start and therefore hadn't needed to lock down - most notably South Korea.
The goal of the WHO is to move countries onto the South Korean path - which means once lockdown has calmed things down sufficiently, it should be replaced by a blend of 'test, trace, isolate' and more moderate social distancing. It may seem odd to mention Sweden in that respect, but in fact the Swedes have one part of the equation in place - the problem is that they've neglected the other. As Professor Neil Ferguson pointed out in the Unherd interview I linked to just before his fall from grace, the notion that Sweden have been letting the virus rip is a misconception - he described their strategy as "semi-suppression", with enough social distancing to reduce the reproduction rate of the virus quite radically. So that's all that Mike Ryan meant by his remarks about Sweden - he was pointing out that
once it was actually safe to lift lockdowns, the social distancing measures that remained in place would probably look similar to what Sweden is doing now. But he certainly wasn't saying that it was a remotely good idea to jump to the Swedish approach before numbers are sufficiently low, or before 'test, trace, isolate' is ready to go. I haven't the slightest doubt that, if he'd been able to speak freely, he'd have been critical of Sweden for not properly getting on top of the virus in the way that its neighbours did. But the WHO don't make direct criticisms of countries in that way. Instead, they use positive reinforcement when countries are doing something right, even when that something isn't remotely sufficient. If you go back in time, the WHO posted tweets complimenting minor things the UK were getting right even during the herd immunity episode. And at one point Dr Tedros even complimented Donald Trump on his leadership. Limited praise for Swedish social distancing measures has to be seen in that context - it's categorically not a general endorsement of what Sweden have done, or more to the point what they haven't done.
It really is bitterly ironic when Iain peddles his fiction of a WHO U-turn with words to the effect of "it's hard to keep up with what they believe". In truth, the WHO have been a beacon of consistency and clarity since the start of the year. Countries like the UK that thought they knew better have fumbled around in the dark before concluding that "the science has changed" and that just by complete coincidence the science now says exactly what the WHO have been saying for months.
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I said in my iScot column a few months ago that the narrow defeats for the self-ID rebels in the elections for the SNP Women's Convener and Equalities Convener were actually moral victories that would make it very difficult for the leadership to press ahead with its plans - as long as the rebels didn't conveniently get out of the way by leaving the SNP. So I was disappointed to discover that Colette Walker, who lost to Rhiannon Spear in the Women's Convener vote by the slimmest of margins, is now the leader of a small breakaway pro-indy party called Independence for Scotland (IFS). I do think that's a major tactical misjudgement.
