You're listening to Intelligence Squared. Today we're hearing from David Spiegelhalter,

the status-dition, academic, and newspaper columnist based at Cambridge University,

whose grasp of big numbers earned him a knighthood for his services to statistics in 2014.

Virologist and host of the Naked Scientist podcast, Dr. Chris Smith, speaks to David on the show

today about his new book, Analyzing the COVID-19 Pandemic. Here's Chris with more.

COVID has of course reshaped the world and all of our lives, each day fresh studies and

new numbers come along that give us new perspective on the virus. Making sense of that constantly

shifting mountain of data, though, can be a big challenge. So who better than David Spiegelhalter,

the renowned statistician and expert on risk and uncertainty to tell us what those figures really

mean? David's new book, COVID by Numbers written with Auntie Masters seeks to do just that.

It's also pertinent that actually as we welcome David to the programme, it marks the publication

of a report that scrutinises how the UK government has handled the COVID pandemic crisis,

and also the rise to prominence of the now famous phrase, we are following the science.

So David, have we followed the science?

I hope not. I don't like that phrase at all. It was used a lot at the beginning of the lockdown,

and this report that came out today from the Select Committee,

so it sort of suggests that at the beginning there was a kind of unity between what the politicians

and the scientists were saying, but science doesn't tell us what to do, it never can.

And so this following the science seems like an attempt to shift responsibility onto the

scientists, and they should, I think, refuse to take that on.

I mean, that was the case. Many scientists did begin to object because they said this is coming

across as political ask covering, and we do not want to be associated with policy.

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