It’s not often that one witnesses grown-ups playing pass the parcel in public. But this is what is happening in the UK: experts and politicians are rapidly passing the ‘blame parcel’ back and forth, driven by the mounting fear of ending up holding it when the music stops.

Sir Adrian Smith, a statistician and the incoming president of the Royal Society, this week demanded that the government should stop passing the buck and stop saying they “are simply doing what scientists tell us” over coronavirus. He insisted that they be more open about the advice they have received. His concern is that the scientists will be blamed for any shortfalls, especially when the devastating health and economic consequences of the lockdown become apparent.

Government ministers responded with an astonishing salvo: Thérèse Coffey, the secretary of state for work and pensions, played the ‘it’s the scientists wot made us do it’ get-out-of-jail card during a Sky News interview by boldly suggesting that: “If the science was wrong, advice at the time was wrong, I'm not surprised if people will then think we then made a wrong decision.”

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This response demonstrates how right Sir Adrian is to raise concerns that trust in science could sour in the pandemic crisis. International science policy experts have raised this too.

Many governments have turned to scientists to try to get a measure of certainty in a crisis marked by enormous uncertainty. But, as Sir Adrian points out, politicians, not scientists, made the decisions that followed.

In the UK, the government has repeated ad nauseum the line that it has been “guided by the science” in its coronavirus response, and ministers have been conspicuously flanked at press conferences by senior scientific advisers.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/489201-uk-scientists-politicians-covid/