Left-wing Shadow SAGE members predictably used their Activist SAGE platform to politicise the pandemic yesterday. Guido has trawled through the stream of the meeting to bring you the political campaigning highlights of what purported to be a scientific discussion…

Socialist Health Association President Allyson Pollock used her appearance to promote an NHS privatisation conspiracy, accuse the Government of ‘decimating’ public services, and of using the death toll as a ‘propaganda tool’.

• “The government needs to wake up and realise the value and importance of public services and public ownership and public control. Sorry I am going on about this, we are in this position…the lockdown has been necessitated because we actually decimated our public services.”
• “I do think it’s a great pity that the government uses the daily death toll, you know, the death counts and the testing counts as a propaganda tool… We don’t need this daily death toll. It is being used as a propaganda tool.”
• “We know we were told we were to protect the NHS, but all of my life I’ve been told the NHS was there to protect me… And of course, the reason why we’re in this position is because for 30 years, we’ve had a decimation of public services, and especially the NHS with marketisation, privatisation”

Communist Party member and funder Susan Michie used her appearance to talk about the ‘kind of society’ Britain will be after the pandemic, and claim that infrastructure had been ‘lost’ under the Conservative Government.

• “An already unequal society has become more unequal… So I’m raising this not just in relation to maximizing the rate at which we can stop transmission and drive the pandemic out, but also in the context of what kind of society will we be left with as we come out of the pandemic?”
• “…much more bottom up community orientated strategy, which requires rebuilding quite a bit of the infrastructure that has been lost over the last 10 years.”

Scientists For EU board member and Labour activist Martin McKee used his appearance to highlight his previous criticism of the ‘impact of austerity’.

• “I may have personal views on many of the issues that Allyson raised. But I think it’s really important to remember, we are a scientific advisory group. And we have a problem now. There are many things that are wrong with society that we may, that we obviously will need to look at in the future, and you know, my own work, my own work, certainly, shone a light on the impact of austerity”

McKee was so close to being self aware there…