This is genuinely fascinating to read Dominic. This stuff doesn’t get a lot of traction in the media, cos people don’t understand how Whitehall operates – there’s never really been an insider who has so openly laid out the system’s dysfunction in such detail. People know the government doesn’t work – but they don’t have the specific knowledge of how it doesn’t work.
Please keep writing about it!
A young(ish) person like me (28 now) who is not in government but has an interest in politics will find this to be a real education. And then these young people can start to carry these ideas forward and maybe affect a real change in how the system operates (eventually).
Ok, so I’m not about to blow smoke up your arse... Allen Ginsberg is categorically NOT the man. Yes, we can all sit in City Lights and have a local quote Howl to us. It is just that though- hysterical. This, this (I thought) is not the Hill that I want to die on. Though he sounds awfully pretty. Wander down Height-Ashbury, smell the Mary Jane and choose to wake up. That’s my personal take on SF.
Having assessed the technical part of one "small" procurement, I must agree with the above. It wasted days of my time, going through unnecessary details. The time of 5+ Civil Servants to get one consulting firm to do a simple job.
I would also point out that having teams that only do procurement incentivises them to build a further wasteful system as it secures their further employment and importance. Moving procurement to an ad hoc basis of the people needing the service would incentivise them to limit the workload.
-The bureaucracy needs to expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
Dominic, yes it was pretty clear at that time the data from the NHS was a mess.
The big question is what happened 23rd March onwards.
As I understand it SAGE and the government were expecting peak fatality date to be end of April early May
Why did no one question when it turned out to be the 8th April?
Just two weeks after the start of lockdown 1
Anyone using the data would have concluded that they missed peak infection date by over 3 weeks
Yet the NHS wasn't overwhelmed
Isn't the logic that London and the South East saw the full force of covid 19 fatalities in March and April the peak infection date had already passed and therefore the NHS was never at risk?
This needs very serious consideration.
Arguments that people were already taking precautions are not valid as people were still moving around pretty much as normal using public transport etc
I don't think it needs Sherlock Holmes to figure it out?
No - SAGE and DHSC were expecting deaths to peak in JUNE.
And these 'time to peak' graphs blunted urgency
Even after curves were updated by some, including in No10, to show peak in April, much of the system kept using the old graphs.
People were starting to lock themselves down before we said 'stay home' on 23rd.
Remember the NHS buckled - more died in mid-April cos of overstretch in lots of hospitals.
But if the combo of voluntary fearful action + gvt action had come 3-5 days later, the NHS wd have seen ~x2 the demand in mid-April and tens of 1000s more dead without medical care...
It says everything about the people who leaked this email that they thought it would damage you and undermine your fundamental point about the need for state reform!
The mentality such an act reveals underlines the need FOR major reform of how government works
To any sane individual, the q 'should we ensure this group of data scientists doing critical work benefitting key decision makers, media types, and publics across the world can continue to do their work?' only has one answer - yes.
Makes you wonder if the system attract people who think procedures are an end in themselves (even in the midst of a genuine world crisis), or does its incentives skew the values and mindsets of hitherto normal people? I suspect bit of both, but mainly latter
Given that vast majority of MPs care more about their daily media coverage than solving long term problems, it seems a good plan to get media to focus on the way Whitehall is set up to completely fail during a crisis to hopefully get MPs to start talking about it. However, how can get media to do this when media itself thrives on soundbites and new stories every 5 minutes and not examining long standing complex problems? Eg Your 'fu****** useless' blogpost was front page news, this post has hardly been mentioned in MSM presumably as it doesn't have the same 'bombshell headline'.
Yup -- one of the most interesting things re media coverage is how impervious it has been to covid disaster. It just carries on in the same awful way. Zero coverage of procurement Green Paper after a year in which procurement was a massive issue AND scandalously killed people! But media only interested in if it can be turned into a story re 'corruption'. The much more important angles are almost totally ignored... The assumption of a democratic system is that if a party is rubbish at something the other one will act to take advantage. This theory does not apply to many issues including procurement and civil service problems generally - all the parties want to ignore it, and the sort of people who now go into politics generally don't understand/care...
Another excellent insight, the more I read the more incompetent the situation sounds, I imagine it was infuriating in the midst of crisis! You went above and beyond and acted in completely the right manner! I will certainly share and message my MP as suggested. It is clear an urgent inquiry is needed now! Let’s make it happen and stop the re writing of history!
DC - thanks, again, for lifting the lid on the festering pit of incompetence that was the UKGov Covid policy. It is truly breathtaking. The way that ministers and their media apparatchiks are squirming to evade even the slightest blame by pumping out BS non-stories like this one is truly pathetic. The decisions made in the early weeks of the pandemic have already led to the largest increase in excess mortality since the founding of the NHS and the consequences of their actions will last for years to come, vaccine or no vaccine. I can't imagine the horror and frustration you must have faced when trying to collate crucial data absolutely required to make life or death decisions only to find that it *didn't exist*. As someone who realised in March 2020 that we were being gaslighted by No 10, and started building my own stochastic models of our situation to try and be able to make decisions for myself and family, the lack of any reliable data source was mind-boggling. How much worse for those tasked with making decisions on public policy.
I would like to see a greater discussion on the outrageous degree of *actual corruption* during this time. Producers of ventilators pushed out of the way as contracts were handed out to folk who had never made a ventilator before, PPE contracts going to shady individuals based in Florida, the connections between contracts and Tory party donors etc. etc. etc. Heads should roll.
Finally, although not directly related to this particular post, let me again lament that many credible voices in the Indy SAGE team (and elsewhere) were not given a hearing by official SAGE, and the basic, tried and tested track, trace and supported isolation plans they produced were never given a hearing by the Govt. The policy of lockdown and release, with no follow up was really a very poor way to try and handle a novel virus outbreak.
I don't really know much re the corruption angle. I strongly suspect there's £100 or £1000 of incompetence for every £1 of corruption among ministers/officials
Dominic, the information you provide in that email of 25th March shows basic data management errors that any BI practitioner would immediately recognise: non-canonical data; inconsistent periodicity; poor data definitions; retrospective updates; lack of data integrity... etc. Given those circumstances, it is a wonder that any reliable COVID intelligence emerged.
That's why I sent it to 2 very able people, one of whom an expert data scientist, so they cd see what I was thinking and turn it into something sensible!
Every pharmaceutical company has a database stuffed full of case data; data extraction tools that generate both detailed listings and summary tabulations; and many have data visualisation tools eg dashboards. Most of these companies have global footprint and a single system into which data is entered via company-wide standard processes. Most pharma companies are used to 7-day reporting of certain cases, and many have 1-day reporting to their business partners. This tech, and accompanying processes, have been around for 15-20 years. Why is a nationwide health service so far behind on this? Intuitively, the NHS would be the ideal organisation for such standardised processes and technology. (Mis) management and current procurement have a lot to do with this.
Good point. But we've had nearly 73 years to make it a single, cohesive, "national" organisation. Begs the question why this has never been tackled, given the ruinous cost of NHS IT programmes. As a national shibboleth, any attempt to bring order and standardisation seems doomed to fail.
They’ve tried. But “they” always give the work to the same capita-serco gang who get paid regardless of the enormity of their failures. And then paid to “sort it” and so on.
A particular favourite of mine is NHS procurement which is the equivalent of every John Lewis buying/sourcing its own products 🙈
That's government corruption, right there. Dom gets a slagging for trying to shortcut the system in an emergency (Hancock corruption notwithstanding) but no one questions the system's "preferred providers". Or the methods by which they acquire such status.
Yeah. It's grown from the ground up for 70 years - no wonder it's a nightmare to fix top-down. I think a better strategy will be to embrace that nature, incentivise individual services and trusts to innovate - and then publicise with others copying piecemeal. Even if that was a 20 year programme it would be an impressive shift within the overall lifespan of the NHS.
You were asking for the most basic data set, any junior data analyst should have been able to knock that up for you in a couple of hours in any sane business. That data wasn’t front and centre is a tragedy.
A friend and I (for fun) put together our own covid dashboard in March because the stuff out there was so dreadful. It took us about 2 minutes to realise that someone was manually updating spreadsheets and uploading them to gov.uk and that those people had no clue how to structure a data set. You couldn’t even sum columns.
Well you could use SUM but across multiple columns. It was a spreadsheet designed for a person to look at, not for a person to use. An interesting difference. All they needed was a flat table…
Glad to see you won at the Court of Appeal. That must be a relief.
I'm honestly a bit surprised that the case went against you in the High Court. Since the judge agreed that this was a Regulation 32 situation, in which no actual competition was necessary, it seems odd to say that, even so, the appearance of a competition was necessary!
I completely agree with you that current procurement rules are a menace and a mess, but I would have thought the whole point of Regulation 32 was to mitigate some of their worst excesses in an emergency - the Regulation equivalent of an ambulance being allowed to speed and ignore traffic lights (and disregard other Regulations like 67, which the Court of Appeal amusingly described as "the antithesis of urgency"). COVID was obviously a crisis, so it's a little surprising that this case ever got as far as it did.
Good luck. I suspect the Supreme Court will take it, since it would give them a chance to define the limits of Reg. 32, especially if this is, as you say, an area of 'totally opaque legal miasma'.
I've worked in the utilities sector for over 30yrs and this sector has very similar problems with procurement that you mention here (although I've worked in 'emergency situations' and managed to cut through the red tape). The rules place power in the hands of non-deliverers who are totally obsessed with procedure instead of outcomes - seemingly assuming that value for money trumps everything when people can't begin to define what value is. Over the last 20yrs the procedures have become even more byzantine. The whole protocol needs fundamental reform. I'd be happy to share some thoughts - whilst my experience is private sector (regulated monopoly) the principles apply equally to the public sector.
This is what I like - a detailed breakdown of the events and failings. It's seems the media, other parties or anything/anyone from the establishment will actually never address the failings. They prefer to cover it up or forget it. The system needs a complete overhaul...the rewiring of parties I am looking forward to...take them down from the inside? How best to smash up an old dysfunctional system.
On the OWID issue, there was no need for any delays. Even within the system you can award an accountable grant pretty instantly to a charity if you have delegated authority. A grade 7 should have that ability at that level. Half the issue with the civil service is no one knows how to work within the rules and what needs escalating.
I've worked on large public sector procurements from the supplier side - they can cost millions to bid, and it ties up large teams of talented, expensive people for months. Only companies that can afford to lose (and potentially write off millions in bid costs) will bid, which definitely discriminates against the smaller innovative orgs. It's a crazy system, massively inefficient, creating enormous paper trails to justify the decision making process. It is supposed to deliver value for money. Interesting insights in this article, good to read as a counter to the media narrative.
I have worked on a couple of NHS procurements from the NHS side. My clear take-away was that the process was designed entirely to look like a process, with lots of tick-boxes, and almost no interest in gaining real information. At the same time, it was structured (as you say) to minimise the number of competitors - we only had 3 bidders, and one of them was almost insolvent. Once we appointed the winner, things started to go wrong....all entirely avoidable.
Off-topic to the points about procurement (so delete if you like), but just on this: "Ps. Totally unconnected to the above but very relevant to covid generally. This paper has just been posted by a serious researcher. Very early genomic sequences of covid were *deleted from the NIH archive*."
I read the Biorxiv piece, and came away feeling that it actually *strengthens* the zoonosis hypothesis. Multiple genome sequences from people who were infected showing quite a lot of variation in the virus before *subsequently* it reaches a more consistent, and consistently infectious, form. That's *not* what you'd expect to see from a leak of a single virus. It's more like a zoonosis with multiple nearly-working variants that sputter out until one hits the jackpot. After all, it's not even certain that the first cases were really in Wuhan; it may be one of those "airplanes that survive anti-aircraft fire" things: you identify and sequence the virus in a city that has a viral genome sequencing lab. (HIV was first identified in Los Angeles. That's not its origin.)
The deletion of the data, which seems to have been reposted later in the same year as its deletion, in other papers, looks like China being authoritarian and paranoid; so no change there. Virologists I follow don't think the paper, which is scrupulously fair, moves the needle in either direction on lab leak v zoonosis.
This is genuinely fascinating to read Dominic. This stuff doesn’t get a lot of traction in the media, cos people don’t understand how Whitehall operates – there’s never really been an insider who has so openly laid out the system’s dysfunction in such detail. People know the government doesn’t work – but they don’t have the specific knowledge of how it doesn’t work.
Please keep writing about it!
A young(ish) person like me (28 now) who is not in government but has an interest in politics will find this to be a real education. And then these young people can start to carry these ideas forward and maybe affect a real change in how the system operates (eventually).
👍
Ok, so I’m not about to blow smoke up your arse... Allen Ginsberg is categorically NOT the man. Yes, we can all sit in City Lights and have a local quote Howl to us. It is just that though- hysterical. This, this (I thought) is not the Hill that I want to die on. Though he sounds awfully pretty. Wander down Height-Ashbury, smell the Mary Jane and choose to wake up. That’s my personal take on SF.
Really?
The experience I had with Babcock during the scramble for Manufacturers to help out in Ventilator manufacturing was laughable.
My company has mas made Respirators for Accute Critical Care with full certification.
We could have been anybody applying the the Government's procurement process.
They sent me drawings and designs without fully veting our standards.
Total sham!
I'll reveal and discuss this more
Having assessed the technical part of one "small" procurement, I must agree with the above. It wasted days of my time, going through unnecessary details. The time of 5+ Civil Servants to get one consulting firm to do a simple job.
I would also point out that having teams that only do procurement incentivises them to build a further wasteful system as it secures their further employment and importance. Moving procurement to an ad hoc basis of the people needing the service would incentivise them to limit the workload.
-The bureaucracy needs to expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
Says a LOT about Westminster/Whitehall that they think this makes you look bad! Also that this is the best no 10 have on you is tragic. Keep hammering
Dominic, yes it was pretty clear at that time the data from the NHS was a mess.
The big question is what happened 23rd March onwards.
As I understand it SAGE and the government were expecting peak fatality date to be end of April early May
Why did no one question when it turned out to be the 8th April?
Just two weeks after the start of lockdown 1
Anyone using the data would have concluded that they missed peak infection date by over 3 weeks
Yet the NHS wasn't overwhelmed
Isn't the logic that London and the South East saw the full force of covid 19 fatalities in March and April the peak infection date had already passed and therefore the NHS was never at risk?
This needs very serious consideration.
Arguments that people were already taking precautions are not valid as people were still moving around pretty much as normal using public transport etc
I don't think it needs Sherlock Holmes to figure it out?
No - SAGE and DHSC were expecting deaths to peak in JUNE.
And these 'time to peak' graphs blunted urgency
Even after curves were updated by some, including in No10, to show peak in April, much of the system kept using the old graphs.
People were starting to lock themselves down before we said 'stay home' on 23rd.
Remember the NHS buckled - more died in mid-April cos of overstretch in lots of hospitals.
But if the combo of voluntary fearful action + gvt action had come 3-5 days later, the NHS wd have seen ~x2 the demand in mid-April and tens of 1000s more dead without medical care...
And
It was the moving of hospital patients back into care homes that caused the spike in fatalities over end March early April
If Hancock hadn't started meddling and infected the care homes tens of thousands would not have died
Dominic
Can we do the logic time lines and data / evidence?
3 weeks min infection to death more like 5
Lockdown 1 started 23rd March (yes people were taking precautions but not really as public transport was full as were offices etc)
Ergo peak fatality date was expected to be end April early May and even June as SAGE predicted
Yet peak fatality date was 8th April just 2 weeks after the 23rd March
Did no one question this?
It should have been welcomed as great news that the NHS saw the full force of covid 19 and wasn't overwhelmed
If Lockdown 1 had worked then peak fatality date would have been end of April or after????
Do you understand?
The logic
The 1st wave had already passed it was only ripples after that!
I don't get the logic or that of SAGE and DHSC
If peak fatality was expected in JUNE and it actually occurred on the 8th April 8 weeks / 2 months earlier than forecast
Wouldn't the logic be.. Peak infection date missed by over 3 weeks probably a lot more...
Ergo the NHS was never at risk of being overwhelmed
NOT lockdown 1 saved the NHS
Apologies if I've missed something
But my experience of historical data cause and effect and linking time lines
The evidence and data
Show clearly that lockdown 1 was too late the 1st wave of was over before lockdown 1 even started
Yes people were taking precautions and maybe that had an impact
But nothing answer the basic logic the data and dates are absolutely conclusive
Even Mr Watson would have figured it out
It says everything about the people who leaked this email that they thought it would damage you and undermine your fundamental point about the need for state reform!
The mentality such an act reveals underlines the need FOR major reform of how government works
To any sane individual, the q 'should we ensure this group of data scientists doing critical work benefitting key decision makers, media types, and publics across the world can continue to do their work?' only has one answer - yes.
Makes you wonder if the system attract people who think procedures are an end in themselves (even in the midst of a genuine world crisis), or does its incentives skew the values and mindsets of hitherto normal people? I suspect bit of both, but mainly latter
Bit of both! The more senior people self-select for worse traits, lots of good officials leave earlier cos they can't take the horror
Given that vast majority of MPs care more about their daily media coverage than solving long term problems, it seems a good plan to get media to focus on the way Whitehall is set up to completely fail during a crisis to hopefully get MPs to start talking about it. However, how can get media to do this when media itself thrives on soundbites and new stories every 5 minutes and not examining long standing complex problems? Eg Your 'fu****** useless' blogpost was front page news, this post has hardly been mentioned in MSM presumably as it doesn't have the same 'bombshell headline'.
Yup -- one of the most interesting things re media coverage is how impervious it has been to covid disaster. It just carries on in the same awful way. Zero coverage of procurement Green Paper after a year in which procurement was a massive issue AND scandalously killed people! But media only interested in if it can be turned into a story re 'corruption'. The much more important angles are almost totally ignored... The assumption of a democratic system is that if a party is rubbish at something the other one will act to take advantage. This theory does not apply to many issues including procurement and civil service problems generally - all the parties want to ignore it, and the sort of people who now go into politics generally don't understand/care...
Another excellent insight, the more I read the more incompetent the situation sounds, I imagine it was infuriating in the midst of crisis! You went above and beyond and acted in completely the right manner! I will certainly share and message my MP as suggested. It is clear an urgent inquiry is needed now! Let’s make it happen and stop the re writing of history!
👍 encourage friends and family to do the same!
DC - thanks, again, for lifting the lid on the festering pit of incompetence that was the UKGov Covid policy. It is truly breathtaking. The way that ministers and their media apparatchiks are squirming to evade even the slightest blame by pumping out BS non-stories like this one is truly pathetic. The decisions made in the early weeks of the pandemic have already led to the largest increase in excess mortality since the founding of the NHS and the consequences of their actions will last for years to come, vaccine or no vaccine. I can't imagine the horror and frustration you must have faced when trying to collate crucial data absolutely required to make life or death decisions only to find that it *didn't exist*. As someone who realised in March 2020 that we were being gaslighted by No 10, and started building my own stochastic models of our situation to try and be able to make decisions for myself and family, the lack of any reliable data source was mind-boggling. How much worse for those tasked with making decisions on public policy.
Incidentally, whoever made the "https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/" service was a fucking hero. I use that all the time. Props.
I would like to see a greater discussion on the outrageous degree of *actual corruption* during this time. Producers of ventilators pushed out of the way as contracts were handed out to folk who had never made a ventilator before, PPE contracts going to shady individuals based in Florida, the connections between contracts and Tory party donors etc. etc. etc. Heads should roll.
Finally, although not directly related to this particular post, let me again lament that many credible voices in the Indy SAGE team (and elsewhere) were not given a hearing by official SAGE, and the basic, tried and tested track, trace and supported isolation plans they produced were never given a hearing by the Govt. The policy of lockdown and release, with no follow up was really a very poor way to try and handle a novel virus outbreak.
I don't really know much re the corruption angle. I strongly suspect there's £100 or £1000 of incompetence for every £1 of corruption among ministers/officials
Government and Local Government incompetence is legendary.
In this covid Mania believe it's Idiocy and vote face saving not Conspiracy
I meant this website, of course "https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/developers-guide"
Dominic, the information you provide in that email of 25th March shows basic data management errors that any BI practitioner would immediately recognise: non-canonical data; inconsistent periodicity; poor data definitions; retrospective updates; lack of data integrity... etc. Given those circumstances, it is a wonder that any reliable COVID intelligence emerged.
That's why I sent it to 2 very able people, one of whom an expert data scientist, so they cd see what I was thinking and turn it into something sensible!
Every pharmaceutical company has a database stuffed full of case data; data extraction tools that generate both detailed listings and summary tabulations; and many have data visualisation tools eg dashboards. Most of these companies have global footprint and a single system into which data is entered via company-wide standard processes. Most pharma companies are used to 7-day reporting of certain cases, and many have 1-day reporting to their business partners. This tech, and accompanying processes, have been around for 15-20 years. Why is a nationwide health service so far behind on this? Intuitively, the NHS would be the ideal organisation for such standardised processes and technology. (Mis) management and current procurement have a lot to do with this.
1/ Hard to overstate how bad lots of gvt is on data
2/ NHS-Digital is a baaaad organisation, repeated failure, no accountability (as usual)
3/ Data laws like GDPR tie people in knots
4/ Whitehall not set up to act fast even in crisis
Some things on data are improving but hard to know what will happen now my team and its daily pressure has mostly left No10
Nhs is not single organisation, but loose collective of facilities ......
it is a concept more than real organisation. Hence why no coordination.
Good point. But we've had nearly 73 years to make it a single, cohesive, "national" organisation. Begs the question why this has never been tackled, given the ruinous cost of NHS IT programmes. As a national shibboleth, any attempt to bring order and standardisation seems doomed to fail.
They’ve tried. But “they” always give the work to the same capita-serco gang who get paid regardless of the enormity of their failures. And then paid to “sort it” and so on.
A particular favourite of mine is NHS procurement which is the equivalent of every John Lewis buying/sourcing its own products 🙈
That's government corruption, right there. Dom gets a slagging for trying to shortcut the system in an emergency (Hancock corruption notwithstanding) but no one questions the system's "preferred providers". Or the methods by which they acquire such status.
Shibboleth may not be the right term. Sacred cow might be closer. Apologies.
Shibboleth was exactly right IMO!
Yeah. It's grown from the ground up for 70 years - no wonder it's a nightmare to fix top-down. I think a better strategy will be to embrace that nature, incentivise individual services and trusts to innovate - and then publicise with others copying piecemeal. Even if that was a 20 year programme it would be an impressive shift within the overall lifespan of the NHS.
You were asking for the most basic data set, any junior data analyst should have been able to knock that up for you in a couple of hours in any sane business. That data wasn’t front and centre is a tragedy.
A friend and I (for fun) put together our own covid dashboard in March because the stuff out there was so dreadful. It took us about 2 minutes to realise that someone was manually updating spreadsheets and uploading them to gov.uk and that those people had no clue how to structure a data set. You couldn’t even sum columns.
When you say “you couldn’t even sum columns”, what do you mean? Did the data layout make it impossible to use SUM(…)?
Well you could use SUM but across multiple columns. It was a spreadsheet designed for a person to look at, not for a person to use. An interesting difference. All they needed was a flat table…
That sounds like a very weird spreadsheet! Oof...
Glad to see you won at the Court of Appeal. That must be a relief.
I'm honestly a bit surprised that the case went against you in the High Court. Since the judge agreed that this was a Regulation 32 situation, in which no actual competition was necessary, it seems odd to say that, even so, the appearance of a competition was necessary!
I completely agree with you that current procurement rules are a menace and a mess, but I would have thought the whole point of Regulation 32 was to mitigate some of their worst excesses in an emergency - the Regulation equivalent of an ambulance being allowed to speed and ignore traffic lights (and disregard other Regulations like 67, which the Court of Appeal amusingly described as "the antithesis of urgency"). COVID was obviously a crisis, so it's a little surprising that this case ever got as far as it did.
Ah, I see they are going to appeal: https://goodlawproject.org/update/we-plan-to-ask-the-supreme-court-to-hear-an-appeal/
Good luck. I suspect the Supreme Court will take it, since it would give them a chance to define the limits of Reg. 32, especially if this is, as you say, an area of 'totally opaque legal miasma'.
I've worked in the utilities sector for over 30yrs and this sector has very similar problems with procurement that you mention here (although I've worked in 'emergency situations' and managed to cut through the red tape). The rules place power in the hands of non-deliverers who are totally obsessed with procedure instead of outcomes - seemingly assuming that value for money trumps everything when people can't begin to define what value is. Over the last 20yrs the procedures have become even more byzantine. The whole protocol needs fundamental reform. I'd be happy to share some thoughts - whilst my experience is private sector (regulated monopoly) the principles apply equally to the public sector.
This is what I like - a detailed breakdown of the events and failings. It's seems the media, other parties or anything/anyone from the establishment will actually never address the failings. They prefer to cover it up or forget it. The system needs a complete overhaul...the rewiring of parties I am looking forward to...take them down from the inside? How best to smash up an old dysfunctional system.
On the OWID issue, there was no need for any delays. Even within the system you can award an accountable grant pretty instantly to a charity if you have delegated authority. A grade 7 should have that ability at that level. Half the issue with the civil service is no one knows how to work within the rules and what needs escalating.
I've worked on large public sector procurements from the supplier side - they can cost millions to bid, and it ties up large teams of talented, expensive people for months. Only companies that can afford to lose (and potentially write off millions in bid costs) will bid, which definitely discriminates against the smaller innovative orgs. It's a crazy system, massively inefficient, creating enormous paper trails to justify the decision making process. It is supposed to deliver value for money. Interesting insights in this article, good to read as a counter to the media narrative.
I have worked on a couple of NHS procurements from the NHS side. My clear take-away was that the process was designed entirely to look like a process, with lots of tick-boxes, and almost no interest in gaining real information. At the same time, it was structured (as you say) to minimise the number of competitors - we only had 3 bidders, and one of them was almost insolvent. Once we appointed the winner, things started to go wrong....all entirely avoidable.
Off-topic to the points about procurement (so delete if you like), but just on this: "Ps. Totally unconnected to the above but very relevant to covid generally. This paper has just been posted by a serious researcher. Very early genomic sequences of covid were *deleted from the NIH archive*."
I read the Biorxiv piece, and came away feeling that it actually *strengthens* the zoonosis hypothesis. Multiple genome sequences from people who were infected showing quite a lot of variation in the virus before *subsequently* it reaches a more consistent, and consistently infectious, form. That's *not* what you'd expect to see from a leak of a single virus. It's more like a zoonosis with multiple nearly-working variants that sputter out until one hits the jackpot. After all, it's not even certain that the first cases were really in Wuhan; it may be one of those "airplanes that survive anti-aircraft fire" things: you identify and sequence the virus in a city that has a viral genome sequencing lab. (HIV was first identified in Los Angeles. That's not its origin.)
The deletion of the data, which seems to have been reposted later in the same year as its deletion, in other papers, looks like China being authoritarian and paranoid; so no change there. Virologists I follow don't think the paper, which is scrupulously fair, moves the needle in either direction on lab leak v zoonosis.
You cd well be right, I'm unable to follow the argument - I agree that a/ China is covering up and b/ it was not a lab leak - cd both be true...