Dutch MPs trial new ‘gold standard’ for scientific scrutiny

Scientific advice can only tell you how to do something and what the consequences might be, not what to do in the first place: it doesn't tell you whether to make nuclear bombs or nuclear power stations, but can tell you how. That said, most scientists (including the WHO, Vallance and the Imperial report) have been clear from the start that actually eradicating novel coronavirus has been effectively impossible since it successfully broke out of Hubei Province. "Beating the virus" is simply not an option - we have been evolutionarily outclassed by an organism whose direction of travel towards becoming endemic within the wider human race is now effectively complete. This simple reality is however clearly indigestible to an entire generation of politicians, despite its obvious policy implications for managing the virus effectively (that is, in a way that minimizes poverty, suffering and death at the population level). As a consequence of this denial, we flip-flop around, remaining in a near constant state of panic and shock, while effectively engineering the single greatest poverty-creation event since the Second World War. And if science has told us something else, it is that from widespread poverty comes greater disease.

Not sure academics are much use where there is not a body of knowledge developed. Coronavirus good example. A lot of academics were completely out to lunch as there was no time to do any science. Not to say there is not room for experts and science. Issue is when there are no experts on something new such as coronavirus and the science had not been done. Just getting opinions from academics posing as science. Science unfortunately though takes time, sometimes a lot of time