Bollocks, large amounts of inquiry time have been dedicated to SAGE and other non-politician parts of government/government advisors, especially in the last week or so when members of the SAGE modelling subgroup and behavioural subgroup have been giving evidence.
SAGE put out consensus statements, there is no claim that the individuals on SAGE were unified in their views, and this has been discussed in the last week or so.
The 'SAGE minutes' were never detailed minutes, and this has also come up multiple times in the inquiry recently because it means those minutes dont offer substantial info about individual members beliefs at different moments in time.
'Terrifying the public' stuff means different things to different people, largely dependant on their own views of other pandemic detail. For example if someone is a shithead who didnt think we should ever have locked down, then they probably did not like the results of epidemic modelling, and might consider all of that to be part of 'project fear'. And since a lot of modelling went through SAGE, and plenty of SAGE members were well qualified to talk about epidemic reality, exponential growth etc, SAGE would be associated with that stuff.
We certainly saw evidence this week of Hancock saying stupid things about employing fear in a crude way when the Alpha variant arrived. We also heard from behavioural scientists who gave evidence that they did not recommend the ratcheting up of fear, they recommended consistent messaging and trying to help the public get a proper sense of personal risk. They also pointed out that they werent the source of crap March 9th & March 12th 2020 Chris Whitty comments about not acting early because people will get fatigued, a claim that was not supported by evidence or preexisting beliefs of behavioural scientists.
Its also worth noting that SAGE was not the only source of advice. There was at least one other team of behavioural 'experts', within government. We've seen some evidence from the non-SAGE behavioural group but havent heard from them directly yet, though I expect we will later. And the inquiry has also heard how SAGE was placed in the front line, because their consensus output was made public while other sources of advice and policy did not have their stuff published, so were not visible in the same way, were not blamed by the right-wing anti-lockdown press in the same way.
If what yopu consider to be 'terrifying the public' was all the stuff I've always referred to as changing mood music during the pandemic, then it is ridiculous to attribute all of that to SAGE. It was all the usual mechanisms at work - the messaging people within government, how that stuff interfaces with the media, all the usual forms of propaganda etc etc. SAGE were just the source of certain data and advice that these other entities might have seized upon. It wasnt SAGE that told all the media that 'this is the week to really start show people seriously ill in hospital', to give a very crude example, and none of their advice involved the ratcheting up and down of the mood music in the way that actually happened during the pandemic. And its also worth noting that even the anti-lockdown press fell into line at the very worst moments of the pandemic, whoever was directing that sort of messaging could still rely on those media entities playing their part in statecraft during the height of the national emergency. If there is an obvious area that this inquiry isnt looking into, its the media and certain sensitive state propaganda techniques.
We've also heard how SAGE was not the source of the other stuff, such as economic advice, which should be weighed up by decision makers when trying to strike the right balance. Views vary as to whether that component should have been included in SAGE itself or been left to other entities to provide that side of the advice. But its also been discussed that SAGE was made to do far more in this pandemic than such a structure was really intended for. In many countries what you normally have is a decent public health authority which would be the source for a lot stuff. But what we had was the hollowed out, weak and unscalable Public Health England, so SAGE ended up having to do loads of stuff that they should have done if PHE had been larger and better funded before the pandemic. And PHE was replaced with the UKHSA during the pandemic, which will do a lot of that stuff more effectively going forwards (so long as it isnt severely weakened by future budget cuts).
We also heard from the modellers as to what their models were actually meant to show, and the disgusting way this was misused by sections of the press to support their distorted agendas, for example their desire to discredit modelled scenario outputs in order to try to avoid the second lockdown. The inquiry hears much about the tens of thousands of avoidable deaths that happened as a result of this and other causes of late responses to the pandemic, and shitheads who think the pandemic response was an overreaction wont find the inquiry to be on their side, because thats not where the evidence points. Rather, the standard picture emerges where those who wanted to avoid the downsides of strong and long lockdowns actually needed to support early action of other forms as the only way to possibly avoid the heavier and longer stuff, and to minimise its impact. The inquiry is interested in the downsides of lockdown, and what could have been avoided, but as usual the evidence they actually find doesnt support the fuckwits, it supports the 'act early and dont half-arse things' brigade.
And I'm sure "lessons will be learned" of course at the end.
