YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Horton

lines on the record: 28
first: 2020-05-07
most recent: 2020-05-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Whether then you say there's a shadow, a dark shadow that's then cast over society because of the consequences of that lockdown, that's possible. There will be people who will have been harmed. What was the cause of that? The cause of that is that we had not invested sufficiently in having a national health service that could actually cope with both the ordinary demands plus the surge capacity it needed to put in place. We knew what surge capacity put in place because we'd done the scenario planning several years ago. Why was that not acted upon?”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the NHS has done a fabulous job of coping with this pandemic. We have to realize that it didn't have the capacity to deal with it. It only survived because 33,000 beds were kind of decommissioned. And we cancelled elected procedures, cancelled appointments, and there will be, and this is where Chris Whitty is absolutely right, we do need to look at the total or cause mortality before judgment overall about the impact of this pandemic. But I think those numbers, those predictions were right. If we had done nothing, if we had allowed the virus to rip through our communities, as was the initial government policy to get immunity, then we would really have seen a humanitarian catastrophe. Octav prevented that catastrophe.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think Neil and his team has done the most public service. Their research has been absolutely critical to helping us to understand evolution pandemic. I was very sad and resigned. Personally, I didn't think he needed to resign. I think, again, this whole issue has become personalized. Seeing his picture on the front page papers with lurid heads, that's not the way to conduct a public conversation at a time of national emergency.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“don't do it too fast. In Wuhan, they lock down for 10 weeks and a lot of the epidemiological modeling shows that you need to lock down for around about 10 weeks. That takes us to June the 1st. We locked down on the 23rd, 24th of March. I'm really worry that if we come out of this too quickly, maybe two or three weeks too quickly, we could see a flare up of a second wave. And so I would say in place till the end of May to the beginning of June, the danger, both the economic danger and the toll in debt danger is so great. Those extra couple of weeks are worth it. I know it's painful, but it's worth it.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“work. We should be angry, Nick, about this. We should be angry about the failure of the science. We should be angry about the fact that we didn't quickly enough. We should be calling those to account and saying if it was collusion, if it was corruption, we shouldn't be relaxed about that. This is not a polite time for a polite conversation. We've got our key workers on those front lines and they weren't protected. And they were scared. I was getting direct messages on Twitter, hundreds of people on the front lines of the NHS, and they had nothing to protect them. That's not the time for a polite conversation. We should be mad about that.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that is very true. I would also say that it's one of the reasons why I'm very angry about this whole story. I was diagnosed over a year ago with stage three melanoma and he had a pretty challenging surgery. And I'm still on immunotherapy treatment. But the result of that is that I go to the hospital on regular occasions and interact with nurses and doctors there and seeing it under very, very difficult circumstances. And I feel that part of my role now at the Lancet anyway to defend them are key workers these last have been on the front lines protecting the rest of us. While we've all been at home, they are there day in, day out doing unbelievable.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there is a little club of children that would be quite interesting to get together to share stories because it does shape you. There's no question. It does shape you.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my parents didn't tell me I was the parents who brought me up didn't tell me that I was adopted. That is perfectly true. I don't think it was that I couldn't believe. I do think, though, that I felt a little bit of an outsider that somehow who was on the outside of a system looking in on the outside of a family looking in. And I've now about the work that we do at the Lancet that we're part of medicine in many ways, but we're also on the outside looking in, shining a light on medicine and trying to understand what's taking place. So, I mean, you know, I'm not a psychologist. I don't know why one does things.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I put it differently. It's the whole People with Power Account for Decisions which affect the health of citizens. If that's sometimes seen headline chasing, then I would plead guilty to that, but it's actually about accountability. It's not about headlines. It's about accountability”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None of those examples were look at me instances. I mean, if you take the Iraq civilian mortality work, for example, this was incredibly courageous work that was done in Iraq, in the field. And the publishing that was to try and hold Tony Blair's government accountable for decisions that we had again mistakenly made.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what I learned from that is that it's not that the individuals want to do anything wrong. Quite the opposite. The individuals are straining in every possible way to do the right thing. But sometimes the way you've set up whatever the advice is, the relationships, they don't work. And I think that's what's gone wrong here. That's what went wrong back in 1998.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These things do happen. That episode over the paper by Andrew Wakefield was a tragedy and a disaster for Bekhels, not just in this country but elsewhere. So I understand that, but at the same time, right, and it was right that we were criticized and that I was criticized, it's right to shine us when there are failures, when there are mistakes, and to learn the lessons of those and to fix the system.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. This is a pervasive failure amongst Western democracies that have seen these enormous death tolls. This isn't something that's particular to the United”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't take that scenario planning seriously. Part of the answer is that a decade of austerity meant that we'd dramatically cut our public health system in the UK so that we didn't have the public health services to be able to do the testing and tracing. So this story goes back several years where we have NHS and eroded our ability to respond to this kind of shock.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it is definitely misconduct. I mean, this preparation for a potential pandemic or even epic, actually we need to be going back several years. We know now that there were stimulations that took place just a years ago, which showed that tens of thousands of people could die was an epidemic even of influenza. And we've had previous government scientific advisors write and admit that they were absolutely shattered by the scenarios that were being mapped out. Did they do anything about them? Not enough. They've admitted. So we had stockpiles of PPE. We should have been able to build up the capacity of test and trace and isolate. But we didn't do that. Why didn't we do that? I think part of the answer is that we did”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's the system that's corrupted. I don't think individuals are corrupted. I think that the system was not self-critical enough. There should have been more criticism of, in a sense, let's play this out. So what if this isn't influenza? What if this is a SARS-like virus? Why didn't anybody ask that question? Why don't we go at what was taking place in China? I think the fact that these questions weren't asked, and you see it actually in some of the documents on Sage,”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't what we know is that they didn't risk level too high on nerve tag. They didn't govern that there was a brewing pandemic in China. So we have to understand why didn't they do that? To me, the answer has to lie in the fact that they didn't go and find out from source what was taking place. And they did read the papers that we published at the end of January. And so there was this system failure.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there was a collusion between science and politics. Most of the members or participants in SAGE are actually government scientists. They're on the payroll of government. We did not have truly independent science advice going into government. We actually had people sitting around the table who were part of government in the penumbra of government. And so that is a system which is corrupted. And that, I think, led to a pulling of punches. It led to this collusion.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's absolutely true that China tends to answer about what took place, especially in early mid-December. But the Chinese government alerted WHO on December the 31st. WHO then sent out a message to the world that there was this new disease that was brewing in very early January of this virus was sequenced in early mid-January. Chinese physicians and scientists did an absolutely superb job of tracking down the agents and warning WHO and the world about what this threat was.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's exactly right. And I think sorry to say, there was a little bit of arrogant British exceptionalism in the way that it did too. If they had picked the phone and talked to their counterparts in the Chinese government, we all know who they are. The world of medicine is actually a very small world. Cor the president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, call some of the advisors to the National Health Commission, call the director of the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they would have understood what was taking place on the front line in China. That didn't seem to have happened. We were in the position, fortuitously, of having these papers submitted to us from these very people so we could see what was taking place in China. I don't understand why SAGE or NerfTag or any one of these committees that was advanced government didn't go to”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So everything we were doing was looking at this through the lens of influenza. And that was a mistake. I think the second thing we did wrong was the composition of Sage because we didn't have people from the public health community. We didn't have clinical specialists who understood what a severe pneumonia like this could do. not an individual failure, I want to emphasize, the system failure was that we had the wrong perspective and we had the wrong people around the table.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the reason was twofold. First of all, let's just compare briefly China's response with our response. In China, the entire way they looked at this epidemic was through the lens of SARS. And in 2002-2003, that was almost like another Tiananmen Square moment. The regime was so humiliated, so embarrassed by the deception that it practiced on the world that it go through that again. And so when this virus was desquenced in early January and they realized it was another SARS-like virus, they immediately down because they saw the threat. In the UK, what we were worried about wasn't SARS, we were worried about influenza. And people do die of it, but it is nowhere near as serious as SARS.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were learning every single day how serious this was becoming. It's not hindsight because by the end of January, we had in this research that we published a very clear idea of what we needed to do in these papers. There were calls to prepare personal protective equipment for use on the front line. So what I don't understand is why didn't our scientists Who were advising government, read that work and advise government that this was.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wrote that tweet at about 7.30 in the morning when I was looking at some of the tabloid headlines that include the phrases like killer virus. And panic is not a good way to prepare a country for a public health response to a pandemic. If you then look at over the next three or four days at the tweets that I sent and the papers that we publish, that laid out very clearly the concerns about the threat of a global epidemic. New work was coming out documenting the severity, the seriousness of this problem. And as I say, by January the 30th, we had this public health emergency declared.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was taking place in China. And on January 30th, they declared the public health emergency of international concern, which is the most important, the biggest thing WHO can do is declare a global alert. So we knew all of this. And then nothing. February, early March, nothing. And that's why I'm angry. We publish this work. We could see this was coming. So yes, I understand the point of inflammatory language, but that's because we publish this work.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the last week of January, published five risk papers in the Lancet that really set out the story of what happened in the last three months. And very briefly, what those underlined was that there was this new virus that was coming out of China. There was no treatment for that virus. The number of deaths was rising dramatically. Patients were being admitted to intensive care. Many of those were requiring ventilation. This was the last week of January. So there's no reason, there's no excuse we didn't know this was coming. And then remember that the World Health Organization, they heard this work.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I understand that concern. This isn't about individuals. I think that what's gone wrong is a system failure. It's not an individual failure. I think every single person involved in the response to COVID-19 has really done their absolute best. But the system didn't work. And that's what we need to investigate and learn the lessons from”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“it to the lives of people who died. The number has now tipped over 30,000 higher. That figure is almost certainly an underestimate. We owe it to them who understand what's gone wrong, what we can learn. And this pandemic is not over yet. And so we have to learn lessons if there's a second wave and the lessons that we learn in our country are relevant to other countries that are still to hit their peak. So I think it's our duty to investigate what went wrong. And that process begins now.”
2020-05-07 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Richard Horton One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source