Publishing SAGE advice led to abuse of scientists, Covid inquiry told

Publishing advice and meeting minutes from the government’s scientific advisers during the coronavirus crisis led to greater abuse of scientists working on a pandemic response, the UK’s Covid inquiry has heard.

Giving evidence to the second module of the independent inquiry, Stuart Wainwright – who was director between 2019 and 2023 of the Government Office for Science, which runs the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) – said it was right to make SAGE papers public, but that publishing only this advice and no other advice being given to the government was problematic.

SAGE papers concerning subjects such as pandemic modelling, the spread of the disease, the effectiveness of different interventions and concerns about at-risk groups were published weekly on the government website and pored over by journalists.

The publication led to greater abuse of scientists and academics who were working with SAGE, many of whom were contributing as unpaid volunteers, Wainwright told the inquiry. He said it also created an imbalanced understanding of debate in Parliament and the media, who were not seeing the economics, operational or policy advice being given to the government by other bodies.

Well-being support, counselling, communications and security advice had to be put in place to support members dealing with online abuse, said Wainwright, who added that the government should think about how to offer this support to consulting experts in the future.

“I’m very sorry to all of our SAGE participants who received abuse. It affected a lot of them to a very large extent,” he told the inquiry. “I worry that this situation may put off other academics from coming forward to help the government in future.”

Under previous governments, minutes from SAGE meetings would be published when a crisis had concluded and not actually during an emergency, said Wainwright. By contrast, even in the earliest months of the pandemic in the UK, a batch of SAGE papers was published on 20 March and 30 March, followed by meeting minutes on 29 May 2020.

Making SAGE advice public on its own had a “negative effect on the protective space in which our scientists could operate”, Wainwright said. It also raised occasional issues for some SAGE contributors who received little feedback from the Cabinet Office in the early stages of the pandemic.

“You're left in a situation where your advice is public and then a different decision is made [by government],” he said. “They are left thinking, why? They're not able to see that because nothing else is published.”

Wainwright stressed that, despite the problems caused, the Cabinet Office and Number 10’s decision to publish SAGE materials was right and had been done on the recommendation of the chief scientific adviser and Wainwright’s own Government Office for Science. Transparency during such a wide-reaching event was crucial, he said.

‘Chaotic’ commissioning

The process of commissioning scientific advice on the pandemic from SAGE by central government was initially “chaotic”, said Wainwright, but improved from autumn 2020 onwards. He agreed when quizzed by Dermot Keating KC, for the inquiry, that the questions from central government seeking advice from SAGE were sometimes “poorly formulated” in the early stages of the pandemic, but said the scale of the crisis “meant it was hard for people to formulate the question”.

“I’m not sure there were enough people in the Cabinet Office with scientific skills at this point who understood how to frame the questions,” he said.

Long-term objectives for SAGE in relation to the pandemic were “absent for quite some time” and early attempts to set a long-term strategy “seemed to disappear”, he added.

When asked whether the government was slow to seek scientific advice from SAGE, Wainwright said the question should be whether SAGE advice was what was needed. Other government bodies, such as Public Health England and experts within the Department of Health and Social Care, could have been called upon instead, but their capacity in terms of academic capability or understanding of science and policy was lacking, he said.

“SAGE had to grow into something that it was never meant to be to fill some of the gaps that were there going into the pandemic,” he said. “We [the UK] didn’t have a lot of standing public health capacity on the scale that we needed going into the pandemic so a mixture of academic volunteers and a small number of officials filled that gap.”

SAGE had to scale up out of necessity, because of the size of the pandemic but also owing to this lack of capacity, said Wainwright.

Between January 2020 and February 2022, SAGE met 105 times and was active for the longest continual period since its inception, the inquiry was told, producing more than 1,200 papers by April 2022. To meet the needs of the pandemic, SAGE grew from 60 to 80 people working around the clock by April 2020 and involved almost 200 academics, scientists and other government scientific agencies in a voluntary capacity.

‘Follow the science’

A December 2020 Institute for Government report was cited during the evidence session, raising the repeated use of the words ‘follow the science’ by the government in its communications. The IOG report suggests the phrase undermined “the protective space in which scientists advising the government could operate” and blurred the line between the scientific advice and policy decisions.

Wainwright said he did raise concerns with the government about the use of the phrase, which his Cabinet Office counterparts understood. Eventually the phrase did stop being used, he said.

In a 2021 study by Nature of 321 scientists, 15% of respondents said they had received death threats and 22% had been threatened with physical or sexual violence as a result of talking publicly about the pandemic.