2022-12-20
No, not that particular Jeremy (although many may think he was secretly promoted Prime Minister a while back); this is Jeremy Farrar of SAGE, the Welcome Trust, and now right-hand "Chief Scientist" to Tedros of the WHO.
"Shortly after Xi Jinping enacted the strictest lockdown in history in Wuhan, China, and long before that lockdown produced any results, Farrar echoed his new boss, Tedros, in praising China for 'setting a new standard for outbreak response' "
I wonder if Tedros advertised the vacancy? How many applications were received? and what selection criteria were applied?
After all, the WHO is certainly financed by tax-payer dollars / pounds / euros, so should we not be told?
"Farrar is the second former SAGE member who has been rewarded by the WHO with a major promotion ... the first being 40-year British Communist Party member Susan Michie ... who earlier this year was promoted to lead the WHO’s nudge unit"
Nudge nudge, wink wink?
Come to think of it, how are members of SAGE selected/appointed?
"SAGE is generally convened and chaired by the Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA), but depending on the emergency, it may be co-chaired with a relevant expert.
SAGE participants are scientific experts from within government, academia, and industry from a range of fields relevant to the nature of the emergency and the specific issues under consideration. Participants vary from meeting to meeting, depending on the expertise required. As such, SAGE has no standing membership"
So the GCSA brings together membership as he "considers appropriate".
So who appoints the GCSA?
How the GCSA is selected/appointed really isn't very clear to me - but this report makes for interesting reading!
If as seems likely the GCSA is appointed by the government, and if SAGE is full of the GCSA's appointees, then is the government really entitled to say that they are "guided by the science" with the unspoken implication that "the science" has been identified by independent scientists with no axe to grind?
Would we have a different view of this process if we knew that many of these "scientific" experts have a history with the big corporations that might benefit from major government decisions?
It's beginning to look like a small club, and we're not in it - but then as Groucho was said to to have remarked: "I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members".
The Brownstone Institute lifts the stones.
