YouSaid · the spoken record

Sir David King

lines on the record: 34
first: 2020-09-04
most recent: 2020-09-04
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

“But it's not only women. So I'm going to actually give you an example of Tony Blair during the foot and mouth disease epidemic. He was really in a quandary because it was just taking off. It looks as if we were going to cull 50% of our livestock to get it under control. And I came to him with a group of people who had an alternative to the way it was being handled in the government. And he didn't even go on television. He simply said, right, you are taking over. I was on television every day. The head of the civil service, and this goes back to an earlier point Mark made, actually said to me, you do realize that you are now in the firing line. But the whole point is that I think I developed the trust of the public in a way that the Prime Minister couldn't, and he understood that.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the Prime Minister there herself is able to absorb the science that she's given. So I think an awful lot depends on the personality and the character of the head of government, on the head of government, because if the head of government pretends that he understands you've lost the trust of the people. And I think our Prime Minister also lost the trust of the people because of some of the things he was doing. What about saying, wash your hands, wash your hands? And then he goes into a hospital and shakes hands with six people who have COVID-19. Now, that was not an illustration of him understanding the nature of this epidemic.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I come in on that one? Because I think I'm going to come back to Greece, where the Greek population are not the best behaved group of people around. Oh, no, we don't want to wear crash helmets. The European Union law. So you see Greek people riding around a motorbike with a crash helmet on their arm. It's on my arm. The law doesn't say where you've got to wear it. So why did the Greeks all behave so well? Trusted the scientists, right? So because the scientists were explaining every detail in as much care as anyone wanted when they asked questions. Another example of good behavior”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just compare that with the Greek Prime Minister. So the Greek Prime Minister in late January or February went on television at 6 p.m. in the evening with his chief scientific advisor and he explained, I'm handing this over to the science advisors and they are going to tell me how to run this epidemic 6 p.m. in the evening. Every Greek citizen was watching television to learn what they were going to do. The lockdown would end and it ended on that day. Everything was planned and it was put into the public domain by the scientists. There's the contrast.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No question. No question. I think this idea of herd immunity was an example of groupthink. But the other strange idea was that you've got dealing with the epidemic against dealing with the economy. The sooner you deal with the epidemic, the sooner you can open up your economy again. And we left it later than any other country before we went into lockdown.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So just to say, absolutely, Mark is right. So if you look at the independent SAGE group, we have more public health experts than epidemiologists. We only have one epidemiologist. We have a virologist. But also we are 50% female, 50% male, and we have a good representation from the BME community. So if you look at the composition of SAGE, you can see that it is designed to do exactly what Mark suggests.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we can pick up instances where they have listened. So, for example, when we held our first public meeting and they hadn't yet published any of their minutes, they hadn't even told the public who was on their science advisory group. While we were holding the public meeting, they were all published. Secondly, we said going back to schools should be a priority at the beginning of the summer. We said this. The Prime Minister came out saying, going back to school is our priority. What we said is use the summer to get the epidemic down to the lowest possible level. So why hasn't he followed our advice? What the government says every time people in the media ask the government what the government reply is, oh, we're taking account Okay, I don't know the real answer to that question.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happen. I'm saying that because when I introduced Independent SAGE, I was illustrating what it ought to be like with a science advisor who was allowed to talk openly to the public and get public advice. We've been holding public meetings to get feedback from the public and changing our views on the basis of that. So I think it is really important, again, the public trust in this process. And we actually failed in that. So there's many, many things that I would have done.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so quite simply, this is what I would have said back in February. So this isn't with hindsight. What I would have said is when you were setting up for Brexit, preparing for Brexit, the government set up a department for Brexit. And that became a very big department in government. I would have set up a department for the pandemic, and I would have brought in some experienced individuals to run that department, by which I mean a previous minister, somebody who's held a job as a minister in government for some period of time and performed well. I would have brought in a very top-level permanent secretary to run that group. I would have brought in top civil servants, and I would have made sure that the chief scientific advisor was able to talk to the public about the disease and what was needed and what should happen.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they are vulnerable puts them into a difficult position they have to make that decision. I'm going to say, again, repeat what Mark said. So important that children get back to school. Being out of school for four or five months is just really challenging for most of our young people. So I'm all for schools opening. I'm all for kids going back. And everyone in that position really has to justify this in terms of infection rate in their local community. If the infection rate in your local community is low, then the chances of the child ring the disease back is going to be very small, very small. So I think everyone has to make that judgment.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So I think the first thing is, let me just confirm what Mark said. This isn't a disease that is impacting on children as severely as it is on older people. It's really age-related in terms of the number of fatalities, but even in terms of the way the disease impacts on people. So very interestingly, even up to the age of 16 to 18, it is not impacting heavily. Very, very small number of people are getting very ill in that age range. However, people over the age of 11, 12 do become infectious. So even though they're not suffering at all, they've become infectious and they can spread the virus as easily as an adult who has the disease. So this puts the carer at risk, the person back at home. Now, that is something that every single person who is being put into isolation”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Closed for another three weeks if we had kept restaurants closed for another three weeks. If we had not lifted all of that and used the summer months to get rid of the disease, if we had headed towards zero COVID, we could open school safely. Now, I don't know what's going to happen, but I seriously worry that there is going to be an increased number of people going down with the disease. But the good news is, and this is a real puzzle, the number of people dying is not going up. It's down to a very small number today. And that is the good news. The number of people going into hospital is also coming down. We don't know really how it's all going to”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very important question and independent SAGE has got a second report on going back to schools coming out this week. I think the answer is schools are preparing themselves as best they can to see that there is a separation of groups of students. Here's the problem. If one student is tested positive for the disease, one pupil is tested positive, The whole class are in contact with that person and the whole class therefore have to go into isolation. So my question is going to be how prevalent is that going to be in the situation where the number of infected people in the country is on the rise? It would have been far wiser if we had kept I'm afraid if we had kept pubs”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“public before it being through the final third phase of testing we may have a very bad outcome where a few people start dying as a result of having the vaccine now for me that's the worst possible outcome all right this this epidemic is causing a lot of deaths but my worry is nobody will trust vaccines again right so it's it's more what will happen to mmr vaccines what will happen to the standard vaccines that have saved so many millions of lives so i'm i'm really worried about the current pressure being put on by putin by the president of the united states and by our prime minister to get these vaccines out quickly i fully understand but i'm really worried about that we're still six months To 12 months away from a fully tested vaccine.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a lot of laboratories attempting to produce a vaccine. They've been at it since that January 23rd paper was published. And we get a lot of hype about these vaccines. And I say hype because a vaccine isn't a vaccine until it's been all the way through all the tests. And the test go through group one, group two, group three. And it really needs to go through phase three to completion before we can actually say we have a vaccine that will be safe and can be used in the public domain. I'll tell you what my biggest worry is right now. It is unlikely that, for example, let's take the Oxford vaccine about which we know quite a lot because it's a British vaccine. If that was released into the”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I come in with an additional fact, which is, of course, in the winter, we spend much more time indoors. We tend to meet up indoors. Schooling is indoors. And this means, because we know this virus spreads indoors, that we are more likely to see the virus spreading. Everything depends on who you're with indoors. If you're in a pub, I would say this is a very, very dangerous place in terms of transmission equally in a restaurant. And of course, both of these are now open.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, we're already beginning. It's a fairly soft second wave, but we are moving up in terms of the number of infections in the country quite substantially. And that is occurring very much in our cities, for example, in Leicester. It's in East Leicester, which is the more deprived area of Leicester. So that is exactly what is going to happen. But of course there's then a big question of, and how do we handle that? How do we handle that and also see that we have some sort of justice in the handling? If we simply say schools in those areas will have to close down, I would say not enough. Now what do you do about the children that are deprived of education? These are often the children that don't have laptops and things at home where they can continue with their education. What we need to see”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I am expecting exactly that, and that is what we've got now. So if you're asking about a second wave, the number of infections today...”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The worst. In those communities, you very often find multi-generations living in one house. And of course, if that happens and you've got children going off to school coming home with the disease, they're not suffering, but they've got the virus, passing it on to great-grandmother, then great-grandmother is likely to suffer very badly. So all of these issues have to be taken into account.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I agree with everything Mark has just said. The real issue is does a government actually put up with, and I'm now talking about Britain, not Sweden, because it is very different from its demographics. Does the country put up with a very large number of fatalities, even if those fatalities are only with the over 60-year-olds? It's a real question of ethics, and it's a question also of managing communities. So let me just remind everybody that it is in the deprived areas of our cities that the epidemic is at its worst. And in those deprived areas, you find the highest percentage of BME community people, and that is the ethnic community that is suffering.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we're not going into lockdown. And so we were told to put up with the deaths of our older relatives. I suspect I'm one of those older relatives. And he did say that on television. So I think there was an idea that we could manage this with herd immunity.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The plan is that I could, back in 2006, you mean? Yes. I think Mark's already referred to that. The big austerity measures introduced 2010, particularly 2012, the unwinding of the healthcare system, all of that left us in a very weak position. And we weren't able to cope with it. But now I'm going to say another thing, which is I believe the Prime Minister really believed that it was better not to go into lockdown because he felt that would be very damaging to our economy. He actually made a speech in this period, I think it was about March the 12th to 15th. He made a speech saying we will be like Superman stepping out of that post box, whatever it was, and flying off into the world, leading it on our economic”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New cases per day in the United Kingdom, that's a large number for a single company to operate centrally. But if you divide it out amongst all of our GPs, it becomes a small number, and they can handle it. So we have just handled it late, too late, and exceptionally bad. We're now here in August with a pandemic that began in February in Europe, and we still haven't got a test and trace system picking up the full range of people going down with the disease.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think what I'm saying is the government didn't do anything in February, let alone January. But let me take Greece as the example. They didn't have a test and trace system beyond early March. They were operating test and trace and that it got beyond them and they stopped operating test and trace. They didn't improve the public test and trace system. They decided to set up a new company or two new companies, one to do the testing, one to do the tracing. And those two companies had no previous experience in public health. So what we had, the government is now very proud of the fact that they've set up these companies, these private companies. We could have not one GP is doing the testing. Isn't that where we would normally operate our testing? If I tell you there's now 1400”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Compare that with our 45,000. Germany did quite well. They still under $10,000. So I think the question has got to be why does Britain behave worse than anywhere else in the world? If you look at it in terms of the number of fatalities per head of population, but also if you look at it in terms of the dramatic impact on our economy, where we're coming out worst in the world as well. And I want to say the two are completely related. If we had come in with a lockdown one week earlier, we would have had four times less deaths and we would have come out of the pandemic far, far earlier because it wouldn't have been right around the country.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What did the Greek government do? The WHO in early February put out advice for every country. Interestingly, our deputy CMO in one of the Prime Minister's briefings she was standing on his right hand. And when she was asked, why didn't we take WHO advice? She said, that advice is for developing countries. Unbelievable, unbelievable. So basically, Greece followed every bit of the WHO advice. They didn't have the equipment in their hospitals to manage the pandemic, nor did we. But what did they do in February? They were purchasing the equipment they needed in their hospitals. In February, we didn't do a damn thing in February. So what you have is an exemplar country in Europe, Greece, total number of deaths to date in Greece. less than 200.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the South Koreans did was have a test and trace policy and that test and trace policy was functional and I'm saying that because the British government has never produced a functional test and trace policy. So South Korea much earlier than us get exposed to the disease and what they do is set up to test and trace so that most new cases are picked up immediately and then everyone they've been in touch with over the previous 14 days is put into quarantine. So what they managed to do was to control the epidemic and keep the number of deaths down to a few hundred compared with Britain at over 45,000. So where was the best behavior in Europe? Frankly it wasn't Italy. It was Greece.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was hard to find. I quite simply felt as if the government had stepped back from the problem. They didn't understand, it seemed, the seriousness of the issue, the potential death rate, etc. I think let me just go back to the countries that did operate exceptionally well. The first was China. China actually managed to keep this pandemic very large.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas if you are out of duels, you're relatively safe. Now, with stars in SARS 1, that was a disease that was actually spread very largely in hospitals. It was spread by the virus was spreading in a moist atmosphere, and the moist atmospheres were giving to patients to help them breathe. And so this is why the spread was largely in hospitals there.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there is a new normal. In other words, I think that Mark is quite right. There's a big difference between the Spanish flu, between SARS. These are all very different outbreaks. And, I mean, what is very clear now is that this is a disease, COVID-19 is a disease that spreads very much through the air. It's an aerosol that if we're indoors, that is where most of the spread occurs. It's like 97% of the spread is occurring indoors. And that's simply because it hangs in the air and it can accumulate. You have to be exposed to this virus to quite a serious extent, quite a high density, in order to suffer from the disease itself. And that is where you'll get it indoors if somebody else is breathing out the virus.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a virus from an animal host to a human being, and that would be selected so that it was comfortable in the human host. And once that happened, it would be in the rest of the world within, as I say, three months. Nothing unexpected. We predicted this would happen before 2030, and here we are, 2020, and it's arrived.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People without refrigerators buy live animals and only kill them when they want to eat them. And so we predicted, and we did a very careful bit of modelling on this, that if a viral infection of the kind that we have here was to emerge anywhere in the world, we even tried putting it emerging in a small village in Africa. Within three months it would be in every country of the world. And the reason is very simple. We have got the most efficient way of moving a virus around the world, which is air travel, and people get on planes without any signs of the symptoms of the disease and only develop it when they've arrived at their destination. And so in this way, we predicted a pandemic of this kind would happen through a mutation, a chance mutation.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what I first of all want to say is when I was Chief Scientific Advisor, I produced a very detailed report, 2006. It was published. 350 experts from around the world contributed to the report on infectious diseases. And we included scientists from China and from Africa because we were fairly convinced that a pandemic of this kind was likely to arise in those two areas.”
2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2020-09-04 · Intelligence Squared · Taming Covid and Preventing the Next Pandemic, with Mark Honigsbaum and Sir David King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source