Liz Stanley

Those following UK political developments in government handling of the coronavirus pandemic will be aware of a high-level advisory body partly composed of senior politicians at ministerial level and partly by ‘experts‘ of various kinds, called SAGE. The initials stand for Scientific Advisory Group for Emergences, with different incarnations of SAGE membership constituted around different emergences since first established as a mechanism within the framework of governance. SAGE most often comes to public attention through its main committee being invoked in political discourse as the source of the expert scientific guidance about the best courses of action to follow in containing and ‘fighting‘ the coronavirus that the government receives and through which it describes itself as ‘following the science‘ or even ‘driven by the science’.

SAGE is usually mentioned just in passing in comment about government policy, with the details of what it is and does rarely mentioned. It exists in a taken for granted way as part of the apparatus of governance. But a closer look indicates some interesting things. Basic information about its composition and formal activities can be found on the UK government website here. It is described as a body that “provides scientific and technical advice to support government decision-makers“, with its two leading members names that often appear in press conferences and media reports: Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, and Professor Chris Whitty, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Adviser from the Department of Health and Social Care. It has 53 other members, listed complete with titles and their formal honours, as are Vallance and Whitty, plus two who requested anonymity. The indications are, then, that SAGE’s role is to provide informed advice; and political decision-making, if not separate of this, is not in the position of either ‘following‘ or being ‘driven by‘ the scientific and technical advice provided.

More detail is also given on a link from the main page on the coronavirus and SAGE, and can be accessed here. Its opening statement is worth considering:

“The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) is responsible for providing Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR) meetings with coherent, coordinated advice and to interpret complex or uncertain scientific evidence in non-technical language.
Typically, SAGE meets in advance of COBR and the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA) subsequently represents SAGE at COBR. SAGE provides COBR with science advice at the UK level.
In relation to COVID-19, SAGE brings together expertise from across the scientific spectrum, including epidemiologists, clinicians, therapeutics and vaccine expertise, public health experts, virologists, environmental scientists, data scientists, mathematical modellers and statisticians, genomic experts, and behavioural and social scientists who feed analysis, research and data into SAGE.
SAGE’s role is to provide unified scientific advice on all the key issues, based on the body of scientific evidence presented by its expert participants. This includes everything from latest knowledge of the virus to modelling the disease course, understanding the clinical picture, and effects of and compliance with interventions. This advice together with a descriptor of uncertainties is then passed onto government ministers. The advice is used by Ministers to allow them to make decisions and inform the government’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
The government, naturally, also considers a range of other evidence including economic, social, and broader environmental factors when making its decisions.”

Some useful pointers can be drawn from this about the role of SAGE, and which throw interesting light on governmental claims that it follows or is driven by ‘the science’:

• SAGE through its key team member advises COBR, so it exists at a high level within the structures of governance.
• It is multidisciplinary and has membership across the sciences, humanities and social sciences.
• It provides unified advice, which given the size and constitution of its membership implies reaching a broad consensus.
• This advice is ‘passed on‘ to government, which ministers use together with other advice.
• Government also considers other sources of evidence in making decisions.

There appears something of a divorce between government pronouncements about following or being driven by scientific evidence, and the formal role of SAGE and its sub-groups, which is to reach a broad consensus of opinion and pass this on in a framework in which government draws on a range of sources. The question arises as to whether custom and practice differs and there is ‘following’, although recent events suggest otherwise when political expediency dictates, something returned to below.

Among other questions that arise is, where are the social scientists located within this? That is, the statement in the quotation above indicates that social scientists are there, but where, and who are they in disciplinary or interdisciplinary terms?

Going through the list of those on the main SAGE committee and exploring the qualifications and positions of its non-governmental members indicates that the clear majority are not social scientists but include epidemiologists, medics, mathematicians and modellers. The most familiar name in social science terms is that of Ian Diamond, the UK’s National Statistician in the Office for National Statistics, and formerly head of the ESRC. There are, however, important sub-groups. The same more detailed document quoted from above states:

“In a highly complex crisis such as COVID-19, a lot of work is done by sub-groups and de-facto sub-groups – covering for instance epidemiological modelling, clinical questions and behavioural science. For COVID-19 SAGE has two main subgroups:
• Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) (40-45 Participants)
• Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavioural Science (SPI-B) (18 participants)”

Clearly the sub-group on modelling is much larger (40+ v. 18), which could be taken as an indication of perceived importance, and there are ‘de facto’ advisory groups as well, which the document provides some more information about. Turning attention to the Behavioural Science sub-group and its members suggests the majority are economists and psychologists of different kinds with at least one ethics specialist. However, it appears no sociologists or anthropologists of relevant specialisms are involved.

This is not to question the relevance of the disciplines and people involved, simply to point out there are notable omissions. Perhaps sociology and anthropology are seen as the ‘soft’ end of the social sciences and absent because of this, but it is impossible not to be shocked about what is excluded. In the case of sociology (and leaving anthropology to fight its own corner), there is highly relevant specialist sociological knowledge that could have been represented, concerning such things as crowds and disasters, social movements in relation to large-scale social events and changes, comparative and historical work on pandemics and epidemics, and narrative inquiries regarding how people behave in exceptional circumstances. And this doesn’t even mention appropriate contributions from risk sociology, sociological work on sustainability and environment, and ‘the biggy’ of medical sociology.

But it seems that social scientists of any persuasion will be social scientists and act accordingly. Thus commentary and debate around the debacle concerning Boris Johnson’s political advisor Dominic Cummings and his ‘one lockdown rule for me and another for the rest‘ has led to at least three members of the SAGE Behavioural Science sub-group breaking silence to specify the advice given, and accepted by government. Among other things, this advice focused on how to ensure trust in government-instituted lockdown rules.

This advice was that trust in UK pandemic governance requires that lockdown and the related rules instituted must apply to all, there should be no special exemptions, no ‘us and them’, and this is key in controlling the virus and ensuing deaths. There was clearly the assumption this had been accepted by government and would be followed. It is now clear the advice, seemingly fully accepted, was subsequently ignored by Cummings as a senior advisor deciding, a prime minister accepting, and senior ministers supporting, that special circumstances applied to him.

As present circumstances indicate, political expediency trumps expert advice. And ironically it also trumps the trust in good faith about trust that sub-group members had seemingly assumed, from comments by those who have spoken about the Cummings matter. Will more of the sub-group speak out? Or will hope of further placements hold their tongues? And what of pandemic governance from now on? The latter is clearly the key question. Will the fallout – which as of late morning on 26 May includes resignation of a junior minister – continue and increase, or will the gamble that people’s anger at being treated as stupid will subside pay off?

IFS event, 27 May, 9.30 – 10.30

The Institute of Fiscal Studies is about to publish the results of its research on how UK families spend their time and who does what under lockdown. From preliminary releases there will be few surprises – women hold up most of the sky and still do most of everything else as well. But there will be important detail and discussion.

All in this together? What impact is lockdown having on how families spend their time?
Date – Weds 27 May 2020 | 09:30 – 10:30
Location – Online via the IFS website, access here
Availability – Places available

What impact is lockdown having on how families spend their time and who does what? At this event, IFS researchers will present their findings on how families are managing day to day to balance old and new demands on their time, as well as whether and how this differs by socio-economic status and gender.

Liz Stanley

Among repeated buzz terms about coronavirus and UK government responses are ‘following the science’ and the much stronger ‘driven by the science’. Their main use has been to present political policies as embedded in or even required by scientific evidence and advice, thereby giving greater authority to political decision-making through associating it with the assumption of expertise conveyed in references to ‘the science’. ‘The science’ is another of these frequently used buzz terms. It exists in a family-group with the ‘following’ and ‘driven’ ones and is homogenised as single and indivisible and having a kind of absolute authority. Such usages disregard the range of professional expertises involved and not only the differences and sometimes clashes between them but also divergences within particular scientific networks.

In the Covid-19 pandemic context, while there has been public attention rightfully given to political decision-making and its frequent ineptitude, there has been surprisingly little critical reflection upon what is claimed or simply assumed to be scientific expertise, including its use by politicians to justify political expediency. So far as can be discerned from the relatively few public-facing sociological responses currently visible, this includes its absence from sociological attention too, although this may change. It is all the more refreshing then that some political journalists are now turning their gaze in the direction of ‘the science‘ and the political work it is doing.

The Coronavirus News is an online part of the BBC’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with a magazine format, one aspect of which is ‘The Coronavirus Newscast’ series of podcasts. The high-profile journalists involved are Adam Fleming and Laura Kuenssberg, Fergus Walsh and Chris Mason. On 21 May, the podcast of an interview by Fleming and Kuenssberg with Sir Ian Boyd, a zoologist and polar scientist who was chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from 2012-19, was published on the Newscast webpage. Boyd is presently a member of the Sage advisory group, which combines high-level members of the scientific community with government politicians, and it is in this capacity he was interviewed.

Interviewers Fleming and Kuenssberg asked Ian Boyd thoughtful questions about vaccine development, ‘test, track and trace’, and in particular ‘the science‘ comments that UK government politicians have frequently made in justifying their decisions and policies. The point was made that divergences and uncertainties and not uniform certainty exist within the scientific community, which anyway is not one and indivisible. However, politicians nonetheless lay claim to ‘the science‘ as justification for decisions that actually include many other factors too. This was an amiable discussion and raised interesting points but did not pursue them in any great depth. Given the practical importance of ‘the science‘, perhaps the interviewers felt they could not push this further, but clearly wider issues about the character of science, its political uses and notions of expertise more generally were hovering, but were not picked up.

At the point this might have been pursued, the interview format gave way to addressing questions from listeners and largely lost its Fleming and Kuenssberg provided critical edge. The questions covered included why taste and smell took so long to be included as indications of COVID-19, when more detail would be given about a ‘social bubble’ approach, shielding, and with hindsight what political actions Boyd wished had been taken earlier. On this latter, however, the journalists did press him harder. Responding rightly that hindsight knowledge is easy but acting at the time in unfolding circumstances is not, Boyd discussed in a careful way whether lockdown policies could have been introduced earlier. In this respect, Fleming mentioned a 17 February official document recognising that infections were even then increasing rapidly, but only significantly later did the political landscape change.

Not named by Boyd nor Fleming or Kuenssberg, at this juncture the mind leapt to earlier ideas about ‘herd immunity’ and permitting deaths to increase to a level where the majority of the population would become immune, for that at that stage scientific and political ideas seemed to combine to see an increase in deaths as not entirely undesirable. It appears to have been the unanticipated scale of the deaths and rapidity of the increase, rather than ‘the science’, that changed the political landscape. Or was something different going on behind-the-scenes?

The podcast is well worth listening to as seriously questioning ‘the science‘ and its political uses; it can be accessed online via the BBC’s The Coronavirus News pages. For those interested specifically in the Ian Boyd segment, this started at 10:42 minutes in and finished at 33:16. The interview was also reported on the BBC news app on 22 May, ‘Coronavirus: acting earlier would have save lives, says Sage member’.

But what of ‘the science‘ and what might the social sciences and in particular sociology be doing regarding it? Or do we just throw our hands up and leave it to perspicacious journalists to offer an analysis?

There is a wealth of excellent sociological theory and research concerned with science, scientific networks and practices. Time for its proponents and other sociologists influenced by this work to step forward. Which kinds of scientists are proposing ‘the facts‘, what variations are there, and how are these changing over time? are there divergences and fault-lines that are not appearing in the public domain? what networks exist to enable such work to be picked up and used by policymakers at all levels of governance? how is ‘science’ being characterised? These and related questions are important for understanding not only to how policy-makers operate, but also how the general run of people respond to unfolding events. If nothing else, the hordes of British people over the last few days crowding onto sunlit beaches and into country beauty-spots indicates that there is widespread doubt about or even straightforward rejection of both political pronouncements and invocations of ‘the science‘ regarding social distancing, indeed regarding the coronavirus as such.

How to explain this? At the least it opens up the ground beneath hallowed science as providing ‘the facts’ that everyone can be expected to act on, and shows that assessments of ‘risk‘ are part of individual/group decision-making. And here another set of sociological thinking and research comes into frame, the interactional sociologies and taking seriously that people are proficient theorisers of their own lives and therefore the how and why of what they do need to be taken seriously in understanding why social life turns out as it does.

Sociological work of these and related kinds need to be embarked upon now, if not already underway; and to appear widely in public fora as circumstances are unfolding, not just three or four years down the line in funded research projects of the kind being badged as ‘opportunities‘ (an ethically dubious term given the scale of deaths worldwide) on numerous sociology websites. Sociology asks complicated questions about why things are as they are and people do as they do, using the lively curiosity about ‘the facts’ of social life that characterises the sociological imagination and its concern with biography, time and social structure. This needs putting into practice now in a new way, given present circumstances, in thinking hard about the changes occurring and the likely reverberations over time.

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