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Opinions PROSPECT The revenge of truth Rafael Behr Boris Johnson’s dalliance with the science has ended, like most of his relationships, in acrimony. When he backed Dominic Cummings instead of the lockdown rules, Johnson abandoned any claim to rigour in his pandemic response. At the same time, he also squandered a precious moment of rapprochement between politics and facts. A national emergency usually has a sobering effect on debate, but the threat from a microscopic virus achieved something more profound. It twisted the lens to focus on a level of empirical reality that had been invisible in the preceding years of hyper-partisan frenzy, when any notion of established truth seemed lost in a fog of culture war. A virus cannot be campaigned against or sidelined by intrigue. It resists all the techniques that brought Johnson to power and he seemed, for a while, genuinely chastened by it. Maybe the shock of a scientific challenge—the revenge of hard facts—will have some more durable corrective effect on wider politics, if not him. The contrast with Brexit, the dominant issue before the pandemic, is profound. Many Remainers believed they were holding a line for reality against a barrage of fake news. They deployed experts—economists, diplomats, trade specialists. Leavers dismissed them as agents of a foreign plot against sovereignty. As the ultimate victor in that battle, Johnson was reviled by the vanquished side as a populist, a monstrous creature of the new “post-truth” era, Britain’s Trump. The pandemic is a different type of crisis. Arguments over Brexit came down to rival concepts of Britain’s future. They could never be settled by scientific measurement. There is no “R” number for the spread of identity politics, but a virus has quantifiable risks. It also has no campaign advocates. It gets help from complacency and from conspiracy, but dangerous ideas about 5G signals causing sickness are not endorsed by mainstream British parties. UK government advisers have been spared the indignity inflicted on US counterparts, watching Trump advocate bleach ingestion as a possible remedy. There are disputes about policy—how far, or not, to lock down—fuelled by culture warrior prejudices. But there is consensus on the metrics. We do not yet know enough about transmission or immunity. That leaves ambiguities that allow some to insist the data favours lighter-touch quarantine while others see grounds for caution in the same numbers. There is attention-seeking and paranoia on the fringes, but the two Westminster camps are mostly trading in the same scientific currency, focused on common aspiration to get to the truth. In that sense, Covid politics uses facts in an old-fashioned sense of the word— demonstrable and universally accepted. Left and right biases have not been banished, but there are people on both sides drilling towards the same verifiable core of evidence. rency, focused on common aspiration to get “Covid politics uses facts in an old-fashioned sense of the word— demonstrable and universally accepted” Does that represent a durable shift in political culture? Much will depend on the American presidential election in November. The US exerts a powerful gravitational pull on the UK. There will be very different trajectories for Johnson depending on whether they see the inauguration of Joe Biden or a second term of Trump. The latter will offer sinister lessons in what is available to an incumbent prepared to incinerate democratic norms and set himself in flagrant defiance of the truth. No one doubts that Cummings is capable of applying that lesson in the UK, and few expect Johnson to rein him in. In the pandemic response, Downing Street still notionally defers to science, although the medical advisers themselves have been humiliated by shambolic messaging. Johnson has made it clear, by implication, that evidence is subordinate to Cummings, who is subordinate to no one. But it turns out the British public still holds truth in high esteem. Cummings’s slippery excuses provoked outcry that took the Tory party aback. Perhaps there will be a lingering cultural legacy from the promotion of science to the frontline, even if it was then demoted. Something appeared to change in the debate during the truce between Johnson and the experts, when the chief medical officer was more prominent than cabinet ministers, and epidemiological models made front-page news. Johnson’s usual shtick of frivolity and play-acting was suspended. Is it naive to hope that a residue of seriousness—the quality we might call factfulness—remains when the pandemic recedes? Post-truth politics is marked by the separation of information into discrete camps. Rival tribes do battle with arsenals of customised “fact.” The more explosive the claim, the truer it seems to its partisans. Pandemic politics demands a different approach. When research undertaken in a spirit of open-minded curiosity confirms a new fact, the equation changes, as it always should have done. But more than that, responding to the virus requires politics to renew its accommodation with uncertainty: the choices involved are trade-offs. There is, for example, a tension between the need for a functioning economy and the need to prevent transmission. There is a wider lesson here we would do well to relearn—and we just might. Democratic politics is rarely a matter of locating the easy win-win solution. It is usually an exercise in finding the reasonable balance of risk and collective reward. That is another truth that might be a little better understood in the context of Covid-19. We have an opportunity to move beyond relativism towards politics that recognises truth as something that takes time and care to assemble from evidence, and to recognise, too, the truth that most policy solutions will always be imperfect compromises. As a society we can internalise these lessons, or recoil from them because false certainty is more comforting. Such is the choice that coronavirus lays bare for us. The stakes are high, when one path could lead to a rehabilitation of liberal democracy and the other to its ruin. Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
page 13
JULY The Covid race riddle defies skin-deep simplicities Angela Saini /SHUTTERSTOCK CAWTHRA BEN © On 8th February, in the early days of the pandemic, a farright American website posted the headline: “STILL No Non-Chinese Deaths from coronavirus.” It claimed that Chinese people were so biologically exceptional that a virus originating in Wuhan couldn’t possibly infect white people in Europe, even if it reached that far. This nugget of nonsense barely survived a month before being comprehensively debunked by the spread of Covid-19 through Italy and then western Europe. We may be united in our vulnerability, but as the crisis has rolled on, we have seen more and more strange speculation around human difference, part of it fed by the idea that the races are so distinct that some are innately more susceptible than others. Early on, one widely-circulated notion held that black people were naturally immune to the virus. That melted away as people of black and minority ethnic backgrounds began to die in disproportionate numbers in the United States and the UK: by May it was reported that African Americans constituted half of coronavirus deaths in Chicago, despite being less than a third of the population. Suddenly, the narrative switched to the possibility that black people were innately more vulnerable. Rarely have racial myths risen and fallen so quickly. The habit of forming myths in the first place has deep roots in the scientific racism of 19th-century Europe, when slavery and colonialism were justified by the assumption that non-white people were biologically inferior: white slaveowners claimed that black slaves felt less pain than they did. But even today, many people—including scientists—are not beyond leaping to assumptions of racial difference. In early April, prominent medical researchers told the Science Media Centre that genetic differences in race, a sociallydefined category if ever there was one, might account for the emerging race gap among the casualties. In early May, this idea had become so popular that I found myself having to reassure a British Asian dentist who got in touch to ask if his genes might make it unsafe for him to return to work. Another unsubstantiated theory posited that Vitamin D deficiencies might be compromising the immune systems of those with darker skin, accounting for the gaps in virus deaths. Risks on the frontline: ethnic minorities make up almost half of NHS medical staff One of the problems with drawing snap conclusions during a pandemic is that data changes dramatically from month to month. In South Korea in February, for example, a 61-year-old woman inadvertently infected dozens after attending church services, wildly skewing the country’s infection rates. When it comes to minorities in the UK, the sharply disproportionate number of black and Asian deaths near the beginning of the crisis declined as the virus spread from London (a city in which white Britons are a minority) to the rest of the country (in which they are a large majority). By early June, four of the worst-affected regions were relatively deprived parts of the northeast, including Sunderland, which was 96 per cent white British at the last census. Public Health England data released on 30th April showed that, overall, the proportion of white deaths from Covid-19 was 82.9 per cent of the total death toll. But by the end of May this had climbed to 86.3 per cent. Clearly, we need to exercise care in analysing moving figures. That said, the average age of white Britons is higher, and the age-adjusted mortality figures really do suggest that ethnic minorities have so far borne a disproportionate toll. But what then is the least-speculative reason as to why? Demographics are surely key. Ethnic minorities make up almost half of NHS medical staff. Frontline workers such as bus and delivery drivers and cleaning staff also come disproportionately from less well-off, minority backgrounds. Minorities more often live in poorer conditions, including overcrowded housing, which affects underlying health and patterns of infection. There are cultural factors, too, depending on which community you belong to, affecting patterns of social mixing and gathering. In the US, black Americans have waited until they are more severely ill before going to hospital, possibly because of the high costs of healthcare. And this is before considering racial discrimination in the healthcare system. Coronavirus is laying bare society’s schisms—underlying disparities that make some individuals statistically more vulnerable. Whether the issue is poor living conditions that give rise to the sorts of underlying health problems that are associated with poor Covid-19 outcomes, or working in a frontline job without proper protective equipment, there are myriad factors here which certainly correlate with race—but they also overlap with many other demographic categories, including class, gender and poverty. Much of this is tricky and uncomfortable territory, even for experts. There’s a desperation for crude, simple explanations for the gaps that are seen, rather than calm, measured analysis that accounts for all the complexities. The government itself got into a tangle on the day it was supposed to release a report about the excess deaths of minority Britons—there was a delay, reportedly because of “worries” around “current global events,” possibly a euphemism for protests in the US over the death of George Floyd, and then later another row about evidence some said had been omitted. But any report was bound to be limited. When you begin to tally everything properly, you realise that it’s almost impossible to account for all the variables that might make some people statistically more vulnerable than others. The job of science here is to account for all external factors until we are left with what can only be biology. The problem is, no researcher has anywhere near the information needed for such exhaustive analysis. We are edging closer to a vaccine for Covid-19. Finding a cure for society’s complex webs of disadvantage will take longer. Angela Saini’s book “Superior: the Return of Race Science” is published by 4th Estate

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JULY

The Covid race riddle defies skin-deep simplicities Angela Saini

/SHUTTERSTOCK

CAWTHRA

BEN

©

On 8th February, in the early days of the pandemic, a farright American website posted the headline: “STILL No Non-Chinese Deaths from coronavirus.” It claimed that Chinese people were so biologically exceptional that a virus originating in Wuhan couldn’t possibly infect white people in Europe, even if it reached that far. This nugget of nonsense barely survived a month before being comprehensively debunked by the spread of Covid-19 through Italy and then western Europe.

We may be united in our vulnerability, but as the crisis has rolled on, we have seen more and more strange speculation around human difference, part of it fed by the idea that the races are so distinct that some are innately more susceptible than others.

Early on, one widely-circulated notion held that black people were naturally immune to the virus. That melted away as people of black and minority ethnic backgrounds began to die in disproportionate numbers in the United States and the UK: by May it was reported that African Americans constituted half of coronavirus deaths in Chicago, despite being less than a third of the population. Suddenly, the narrative switched to the possibility that black people were innately more vulnerable.

Rarely have racial myths risen and fallen so quickly. The habit of forming myths in the first place has deep roots in the scientific racism of 19th-century Europe, when slavery and colonialism were justified by the assumption that non-white people were biologically inferior: white slaveowners claimed that black slaves felt less pain than they did. But even today, many people—including scientists—are not beyond leaping to assumptions of racial difference.

In early April, prominent medical researchers told the Science Media Centre that genetic differences in race, a sociallydefined category if ever there was one, might account for the emerging race gap among the casualties. In early May, this idea had become so popular that I found myself having to reassure a British Asian dentist who got in touch to ask if his genes might make it unsafe for him to return to work. Another unsubstantiated theory posited that Vitamin D deficiencies might be compromising the immune systems of those with darker skin, accounting for the gaps in virus deaths.

Risks on the frontline: ethnic minorities make up almost half of NHS medical staff

One of the problems with drawing snap conclusions during a pandemic is that data changes dramatically from month to month. In South Korea in February, for example, a 61-year-old woman inadvertently infected dozens after attending church services, wildly skewing the country’s infection rates.

When it comes to minorities in the UK, the sharply disproportionate number of black and Asian deaths near the beginning of the crisis declined as the virus spread from London (a city in which white Britons are a minority) to the rest of the country (in which they are a large majority). By early June, four of the worst-affected regions were relatively deprived parts of the northeast, including Sunderland, which was 96 per cent white British at the last census. Public Health England data released on 30th April showed that, overall, the proportion of white deaths from Covid-19 was 82.9 per cent of the total death toll. But by the end of May this had climbed to 86.3 per cent. Clearly, we need to exercise care in analysing moving figures.

That said, the average age of white Britons is higher, and the age-adjusted mortality figures really do suggest that ethnic minorities have so far borne a disproportionate toll. But what then is the least-speculative reason as to why?

Demographics are surely key. Ethnic minorities make up almost half of NHS med ical staff. Frontline workers such as bus and delivery drivers and cleaning staff also come disproportionately from less well-off, minority backgrounds. Minorities more often live in poorer conditions, including overcrowded housing, which affects underlying health and patterns of infection. There are cultural factors, too, depending on which community you belong to, affecting patterns of social mixing and gathering. In the US, black Americans have waited until they are more severely ill before going to hospital, possibly because of the high costs of healthcare. And this is before considering racial discrimination in the healthcare system.

Coronavirus is laying bare society’s schisms—underlying disparities that make some individuals statistically more vulnerable. Whether the issue is poor living conditions that give rise to the sorts of underlying health problems that are associated with poor Covid-19 outcomes, or working in a frontline job without proper protective equipment, there are myriad factors here which certainly correlate with race—but they also overlap with many other demographic categories, including class, gender and poverty.

Much of this is tricky and uncomfortable territory, even for experts. There’s a desperation for crude, simple explanations for the gaps that are seen, rather than calm, measured analysis that accounts for all the complexities. The government itself got into a tangle on the day it was supposed to release a report about the excess deaths of minority Britons—there was a delay, reportedly because of “worries” around “current global events,” possibly a euphemism for protests in the US over the death of George Floyd, and then later another row about evidence some said had been omitted.

But any report was bound to be limited. When you begin to tally everything properly, you realise that it’s almost impossible to account for all the variables that might make some people statistically more vulnerable than others. The job of science here is to account for all external factors until we are left with what can only be biology. The problem is, no researcher has anywhere near the information needed for such exhaustive analysis. We are edging closer to a vaccine for Covid-19. Finding a cure for society’s complex webs of disadvantage will take longer. Angela Saini’s book “Superior: the Return of Race Science” is published by 4th Estate

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