 Out of the streets and back in the clubs, Boris Johnson has announced full steam ahead for ending coronavirus restrictions on July the 19th despite cases rising to their highest level since January of this year. Welcome to Tisgy Sour. I'm Ash Sarka covering for Michael Walker. Don't worry, he will actually be back next week. And tonight we'll be talking about Boris Johnson's COVID announcements, the culture war on masks and whether the ocean being literally on fire might actually be a good thing. And I am joined by the illuminating, the luminescent, Zalia Gabriel. Zalia, thank you so much for joining me. Oh, it's a pleasure. I can't believe we haven't done this before. Also, you look fucking incredible. So congrats to you. Why we don't do this together? Because otherwise we've just been like, no, you look great. No, you really look great. I look like a sea monster. That's why they don't let us do this together. Well, as always, you can let us know your thoughts, particularly on how Dalia is looking tonight by tweeting on the hashtag Tisgy Sour. Don't just do it about Dalia's looks. Also tweet about political issues. That's what we're here for. So do you think that we've waited long enough for a return to normal sea or is the government simply falling victim to the same complacency that got us in so much trouble back in March and December of 2020? That's really the big question for tonight. And if you're new, make sure you hit that subscribe button. While the Prime Minister's commitment to the July 19th date has been met with celebration and adulation from the lockdown hawks in his cabinet, the scientific community are a bit less keen, warning that the lifting of all COVID-19 restrictions is like building new variant factories. Well, Kisthama did just tell us all to buy British. Johnson explained the government's position on COVID restrictions at this current point of the pandemic. So as we come to the fourth step, we have to balance the risks. The risks of the disease, which the vaccines have reduced but very far from eliminated, and the risks of continuing with legally enforced restrictions that inevitably take their toll on people's lives and livelihoods on people's health and mental health. And we must be honest with ourselves that if we can't reopen our society in the next few weeks, when we will be helped by the arrival of summer and by the school holidays, then we must ask ourselves, when will we be able to return to normal? And to those who say we should delay again, the alternative to that is to open up in winter when the virus will have an advantage, or not at all this year. So the big takeaway from the presser today is that Johnson said that people will be allowed to make their own decisions about what's safe rather than their behavior being dictated by laws. So I'm just going to race through them here are some of the changes that Johnson announced today to be implemented from July the 19th. So the big changes are second doses for under 40s will be accelerated. They'll be happening after eight weeks instead of 12. All businesses will be able to reopen, including the aforementioned nightclubs. COVID status certificates will not be required by the government to access venues, but the businesses can choose to use them. Also, all limits on indoor and outdoor meetings will be scrapped. The legal obligation to wear a face covering will go and instead guidance will be issued on when people are advised to wear them. People will no longer be told to work from home and the one meter rule on social distancing will go. Test and trace will continue, but the government wants to replace isolation with daily testing instead. There will be plans to replace bubbles for school pupils and they'll be announced tomorrow and they'll be plans to replace isolation for fully vaccinated people returning from amber list countries and that will be announced later this week. These changes are almost certainly coming into effect on July 19th, but there is an absolute final decision next Monday the 12th where ministers and scientific advisors will check back in again to see if the tests have been met. So let's take a look at the current data coming in on cases, hospitalizations and deaths. So this is the first graph that Patrick Vallance showed at the press conference today and what this shows is that cases are going up and the doubling time for cases is roughly every nine days. That's mostly young people, but it is creeping up the age brackets. The second slide that Patrick Vallance showed was this one and this is hospitalizations. So as you can see, even though case numbers are increasing steeply, the increase in hospitalizations is nowhere near as steep as it was earlier in the winter or last spring, but the doubling time while it's slower is still going up. The vaccines according to Vallance have weakened the link between cases and hospitalizations, but it's a weakened link. It's not a broken one. Now here is the third slide and what this shows is the number of deaths. So you can see that we had those terrible numbers last spring and last winter, but the increase in deaths is nowhere near as high or as steep as it was in winter or in spring. That's a really good thing. So there is a low number of deaths that is still a rise. Now as for the questions which were answered by Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, the key takeaways are according to Chris Whitty, the data is not all that clear about vaccines preventing long COVID. So if you're vaccinated and then you're unlucky enough to get COVID, we don't know what the impact is going to be on the likelihood of you getting long COVID, but because vaccines are generally suppressing community transmission, they obviously have a role in reducing the number of people overall with long COVID. The other big theme of today, as I mentioned before, has been masks. So ministers doing the broadcast around have been asked whether they'll still be wearing masks even after the mandate is lifted. Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State for Housing Communities and Local Government said he wouldn't be wearing masks when there is no longer a legal obligation to do so. And Care Minister Helen Wotley, well, she was a firm, maybe. But here's what the Prime Minister said when asked by the BBC's Vicki Young if he'll personally be wearing a mask after July 19th. As I said earlier on, it will depend on the circumstances. And I think that what we're trying to do is move from a universal government dictate to relying on people's personal responsibility. And clearly, there's a big difference between traveling on a crowded tube train and sitting late at night in a virtually empty carriage on the main railway line. So what we want to do is for people to exercise their personal responsibility, but to remember the value of face coverings, both in protecting themselves and others. So that was some real first album, Boris Johnson. He's playing some of his favorite tunes, being lightly disdainful of being told what to do by the state and emphasizing individual discretion. But the tone and the emphasis from his Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, was rather different. I would wear a mask under three situations. And I would do so particularly at this point when the epidemic is clearly significant and rising. And the first is in any situation, which was indoors and crowded or indoors with close proximity to other people. And that is because masks help protect other people. This is a thing we do to protect other people as it's by far its principle aim. The second situation I do it is if I was required to by any competent authority, I would have no hesitation about doing that. And I would consider that was a reasonable and sensible thing if they had good reasons to do that. And the third reason is if someone else was uncomfortable if I did not wear a mask, as a point of common courtesy, of course I would wear a mask. So under all those circumstances, I would do so. Yeah, I'm not really not got much to add. I'm exactly the same in terms of mask wearing and just a reminder, mask the most effective at preventing somebody else catching the disease from you. They have some effect to prevent you catching it as well. And the situation you're most likely to catch COVID in is indoors, crowded spaces. So that's the obvious place where mask wearing becomes an advantage. So you can see there there was a real difference in emphasis and tone between what Boris Johnson was saying and what Chris Whitty and Patrick Valance was saying. Boris Johnson was very much about individual discretion, you making your choice based on the information available to you. What Chris Whitty and Patrick Valance were saying was that your decision exists within a network of collective obligations. So it's not just about your judgment of your own safety but the safety of people around you. And I also thought there was kind of a sweet touch where Chris Whitty was talking about the common courtesy owed to people around you. I thought that was a bit of a subtle rebuke to those images that we've seen going viral on Twitter of people boasting about being on maskless carriages on the tube and so on and so forth. But we've heard from the experts, we've heard from the Prime Minister, how do the public feel? Let's have a look at this polling from YouGov. So the question being asked here is whether British people think face masks should continue to be mandatory on both public transport in shops and on public transport and in shops after most restrictions are lifted. 71% said yes, face masks should continue to be mandatory on public transport for a further period of time. 21% said they wouldn't like it to be mandatory and 8% said don't know. And then according to shops, once most restrictions are lifted, 66% said face masks should continue to be mandatory. 27% said no, they shouldn't be mandatory and 6% said don't know. So what this data is telling us is that once again, Boris Johnson is out of step with the public when it comes to pandering to the comment pages of the telegraph and also a number of MPs on his back benches. And let's just have a quick look at a Savannah comrades poll which shows how people say they will act going forward. 76% of people said they will keep social distancing while queuing. 74% will continue to wear a mask on busy public transport. 71% will wear one in busy shops. And 52% say they will only socialise indoors with no more than five other people. Now, my personal view on this is that I think that masks are a minor inconvenience, really. But if they facilitate the return of other freedoms, then I'm comfortable with that mandate remaining in place. We're currently seeing a doubling of infections every nine days and that's with restrictions and mask wearing in place. So I would rather have smudged lipstick and maybe a little bit of mask acne rather than a further acceleration in hospitalisations. Deep-D, good to sunny. Deep-D, thank you so much for joining us. You are an epidemiologist and a senior lecturer in machine learning at Queen Mary University of London. And every time I read a title like that, I go, fuck me, I did English Lit, man. I spent a lot of money learning what imaginary people were thinking and what motivated their actions. And you did something really useful. That's why you're talking to us about coronavirus. Oh, that's very unfair. English Lit is extremely useful. It is. I didn't just bring you here to resurrect my self-esteem. You are here to talk us through in a little bit more detail the implications of Boris Johnson's announcement. So one of the things that he was really clear on is that it's now or never. So if you don't lift the restrictions right now, or July 19th, that we're either going to have to wait till winter when the virus is at something of an advantage, or we have to wait till next year. Do you buy that argument? I mean, I think you said it exactly right. And that's exactly what I was going to say. That's completely false framing. How can it be now or never? And what is the meaning of saying that we're in a better position of doing this now when only 50% of our population is vaccinated versus doing it at a later point in time when many more will be protected? So essentially what we're saying is it's okay to expose a large number of people to mass infection when they could get vaccinated in the next few weeks. And like you said, you know, mass learning is a, it's not a huge restriction, but it could allow us a level of control over this, particularly given 50% of our population is either partially or not protected at all, many of whom will go on to develop not just infection, but long COVID in the future. And how is this argument now or never? I mean, surely it's not that we're asking people to continue with restrictions indefinitely. It's essentially government policies that lead to, for example, new variants emerging that might escape vaccines that could actually lead to that outcome. The way to prevent that outcome is actually to contain transmission now and allow more people to get vaccinated in the coming four to six weeks before actually taking steps. We're essentially opening up in the middle of what's a raging pandemic. And yes, hospitalizations are low, but they are rising. And they are rising not that slowly, and we'll put significant pressure on the NHS, even if we don't reach January levels. And even the millions of people waiting for routine care, we can't afford to have any more COVID cases. We don't need 2000 or 3000 cases a day to overwhelm the NHS at this point in time. I mean, just to jump in right there, because there is risk and there is reward. And that's how it's been presented by Chris Whitty, Patrick Valance and Boris Johnson. There is the risk of greater infections versus the reward of lifting restrictions. So is there such a thing as a reasonable number of COVID hospitalizations? Because that seems to me to be the assumption that they're working on. The problem is this is an exponentially growing pandemic. So they're not going to remain static. And if you reach enough cases, and we've never actually had unmitigated spread of this pandemic, we've always jumped in at some point and stopped it because we were looking at hospitalizations and them overwhelming the NHS. The dangers now are because of the level of vaccination and the government strategy of waiting till the NHS is overwhelmed. You could have hundreds of thousands of cases happening every day before they act. And of course, you can ask, is there a level of acceptable hospitalization? And I would say the NHS was overwhelmed in 2019 before this pandemic started. We were hearing about patients in corridors. So any amount of extra pressure on the NHS without resourcing is obviously going to lead to more people waiting for routine care. But it's not just about hospitalizations. We have 400,000 people in this country who've been living with the effects of long COVID for more than one year. These are people who are chronically disabled because of COVID-19. This is not the flu. It leaves hundreds of thousands of people disabled. And there's one million people living with long COVID now, two-thirds of whom have limitation of their day-to-day activities, predominantly people who are young and were healthy when they started. So what is this going to look like as we expose 50% of our population who's not vaccinated fully to mass infection? How many hundreds of thousands more people are we going to end up having long COVID, whose long-term impacts we don't understand, who have chronic disability? I mean, we know the survivors that actually invades the brain and has long-term impacts that you can see on MRI. So on brain imaging in people who even had mild infection to start with, even people in their 40s. We don't know what happens to younger people, but we haven't studied it. And that doesn't mean we're not going to see the same effects or similar effects on them in the coming year. So why are we so comfortable taking this step when just waiting a few more weeks could mean many, many more people protected? I mean, so just to pick up on that point a little bit, I suppose there's two different ways of seeing Boris Johnson's announcement. The first way is that the vaccine is a complete game changer. So even though you see rising case numbers, it doesn't mean anything because most of the vulnerable people and elderly people are sufficiently protected. And there's another way of looking at it, which is the vaccine isn't really a game changer, that this is the same government sleepwalking in disaster, high of its own complacency. And then there's something in the middle, which is, okay, the vaccine does have a significant impact. We're not in the exact same position as we were in the winter. And so I just wanted to ask you a bit more about this, about the impact of the vaccine on the severity of the cases and the condition of people going into hospitals. What is the vaccine impact on the severity of the disease for those who've gotten the jab are part of the unlucky minority to get infected with the virus anyway, and then go into hospitals? Yes. So first of all, I want to say there's an inherent contradiction in the messaging of government because the government is saying that because we have this level of vaccination and vaccines are very strong, we can go ahead and open up. At the same time, they're saying that we need to open up now but not in winter. Because if you open up in winter, there'll be a hospitalization surging at a point in time, you know, where there are other viruses circulating. And the fact that even more people being vaccinated is not going to make that go away. And to me, there's an inherent contradiction there. It doesn't make any sense. So in terms of vaccines, they protect even against the Delta variant, it looks like they protect highly against severe disease in the range of about 90% protection. So, you know, you're less likely to get far less likely to get hospitalized or died. But the infection, the protection of infection doesn't seem as high, at least from the data we're seeing coming in from other countries now. So it might be as low as 60 to 70%. And that makes a huge difference because when we talk about reaching herd immunity or herd immunity thresholds, what we mean is how many people need to be vaccinated for us to reach a point where the pandemic starts shrinking by itself without any restrictions in place. And to reach that, what you need is high effectiveness, not just in preventing severe disease, but in preventing transmission. Because ultimately the goal is you want to protect even people who can't get vaccinated because you're not eligible or don't mount a good response to vaccines because they're clinically vulnerable, or just haven't had the vaccine. And it's very concerning with the Delta variant that we might not actually reach that point, even if we did vaccinate everyone. And at the very least, we would have to vaccinate children as well, we are certainly not going to reach that point just by vaccinating our adult population. And we're nowhere near that point at this point in time, because for a highly transmissible variant, you need at least I think 85 to 86 percent of the population to be immune to the virus, so that particular variant to protect other people. I mean, there was one last thing that I really wanted to ask you, because there was that strange bit in the press conference when Johnson said that the government would continue its program of test, trace and isolate, but in a way that was proportionate to the scale of the problem. Does that set off any alarm bells for you, either in terms of the government potentially scaling back its monitoring program for seeing whether there are outbreaks, who's getting sick, or even weakening the instruction to isolate instead saying, well, you can test, that's fair enough. I mean, it's extremely alarming. Sage has said that test, trace and isolate has already made a marginal difference because, well, because of all its failures. And I don't see how they can possibly be scaling back. I mean, we are essentially looking at reaching possibly 90,000 infections by 19th of July. I mean, I know Boris Johnson said about 50,000, but independent sage modeling suggests with a doubling time of nine, that could be 90,000. And it's very likely we'll let this infection spread much, much further because it's not impacting hospitalizations as much. And the aim of government is only to look at hospitalizations, which means, actually, we need to be scaling up rather than scaling down. So I don't really understand what they mean by this. It just looks, and you know, this whole thing they've said about not publishing figures daily, it all looks like if we don't see it, we don't really have to worry about it in the public, don't worry about it. And it's okay. Di, go to Sani. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. It's always good to get a real stem person on, you know, like Robin, just as artsy-fartsy, like I did. Oh, I love artsy-fartsy. For artsy-fartsy, anytime, it's what's helping me survive this. You know what, maybe another show we can get you on and we can talk Hilary Mantell or something like that. Thank you so much for joining us. So Dahlia, I want to invite you in here, were there any surprises for you with this press conference? Or did this seem baked in the minute Matt Hancock got kicked out for snogging on camera? Yeah, I mean, first of all, all I heard there was daily testing and I was like, oh my God, RIP, my nasal cavity, I can't handle that. But, you know, I think we all found that timing of Matt Hancock's departure kind of suspicious, right? Like, he's kind of bulged up the entire pandemic, he's been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and, you know, his particular role, and that has been quite clear for quite a long time. So the question was really, you know, why now? You know, why now is there suddenly this extensive briefing against him that sort of culminated in, you know, his departure? But what this indicates to me is that, you know, the removal of Matt Hancock was at this particular point, was in order to sort of replace his, you know, dithering approach with a more assertive anti-restrictions approach. So, you know, we heard from insiders once Sajid Javid became Health Secretary. We knew that he was much more solidly locked down specific than Matt Hancock, who, you know, was, which is, you know, terrifying, because Matt Hancock was not exactly sensible. He, you know, repeatedly locked down far too late and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. But he wasn't as ideologically against lockdowns or restrictions in the way that Sajid Javid is. But Javid, you know, as I mentioned, he is even more obstinately against restrictions of any kind, even when it clearly makes sense to have, you know, mild, you know, somewhat mildly inconvenient restrictions in order for long-term sustainable collective health. And this kind of leads to this like Darwinian approach where it's like, let the body's pile high in order to sort of secure the investments and business of a tiny group of people. Because let's not forget, when we're told, oh, you know, Sajid Javid, he prioritizes the economy and we need to... I just want to pose you there because we're going to have a really big Sajid Javid deep dive a little bit later on. But just to go back to, you know, my original question, was there anything that surprised you? Because for me, I suppose the thing that maybe shocked me a bit was this business of a proportionate test-trace and isolated system. So I was always under the assumption that if you're going to have this big unlocking, what you would do and make sense is to really scale that up. So you would want to make it much easier for people to isolate. You would want it to be very clear that that's what they're supposed to do. And you would want to have as robust a monitoring system as possible. So that for me was a surprising thing. Well, I think to me, it wasn't entirely surprising because I think this has sort of been the government's approach in the entire time. It's been this kind of laissez-faire, as I mentioned, let the body's pile high kind of Darwinian approach, whereby especially at a time when the people that were affected by this were people who had underlying conditions, people who were considered sort of disposable according to the Boris Johnson view of the world. But I also think that throughout the lockdowns and throughout the pandemic, we have seen a repeated squandering of opportunities to really build up that test and trace and that contact tracing infrastructure, which we know from the examples of other countries, not only in the COVID pandemic, but in previous pandemics is the most effective way to deal with highly infectious viruses. So I think it's not entirely, it's not entirely surprising because I think that this is a government that is driven by a this very sort of individualist idea of freedom, which I think we're going to kind of talk about later on in the show. But also by this, by this kind of optics driven approach of, you know, we announced that it was going to be Freedom Day and we were going to go back to sort of normal, i.e. back to 2019, and just sort of live in this delusion that the virus doesn't exist anymore. In order to serve this broader optics of, you know, we're going back to Freedom Day, that's what we said we were going to do. So it doesn't matter what happens, we just can't be seen to go back on our word, which is ironic because they always end up having to go back on their word anyway, because that the sort of ideology that's driving them is so incomprehensible and is so sort of makes such little sense. I mean, it does very much feel that Boris Johnson is pandering to an audience of wealthy retirees who will read the telegraph. And on that theme in the comments, Jane Hayward with a £5 Super Chat says that it does feel a bit like 20-somethings are being thrown under the bus yet again. So thinking about that age gap in vaccinations, it does mean that if we're all going back to work, we're also socialising as normal, the people who are most exposed to the virus and potentially then long COVID are younger people. Christopher Bowles tweeting on the hashtag Tiskey Sour says, I truly hope that the Prime Minister's plan works out, but if we have a spike and volumes of long COVID cases as a result, we must have a general election. No, Labour won't be ready, but it's not about politics. It's about the UK's health and safety regime. Benjamin also tweeting on the hashtag twist Tiskey Sour says, Johnson is just trying to be a populist and ensuring he leaves every avenue open to blame others, brackets us when it all goes wrong. So transparent. Yeah, it does feel a bit like that in terms of the flip side of personal responsibility is that well, if it all goes to shit, it's not my fault, isn't it? If you are enjoying tonight's show, you know what you've got to do? You've got to hit the like button, the algorithm likes it and therefore we like it also. With the government set to scrap mandatory mask wearing in England after July 19th, a debate has been reignited over whether masks should be left to personal choice or whether they're even effective. But does the disagreement over masks actually conceal a much deeper, perhaps even nefarious political agenda? Professor Susan Mickey is a professor of health psychology and director of the Center for Behavioral Change. And on Good Morning Britain today, she argued that it would be unwise to abandon social distancing and masks now because cases are already rising exponentially, as we've just discussed. But Good Morning Britain host Richard Maddley questioned whether there was perhaps a political motive to what she was saying. Listen, there's a point I really have to put to you and you'll be aware of this because there's been a lot of commentary about this in the British media about you. And it's to do with your politics. And you know I'm going to ask you. You've been a member of the Communist Party for about 40 years now. You're still a member. And we know that communism is basically statist. We look at communist countries around the world and we see that they are tremendously top down dominant and controlled societies that they rule over. And I just wonder, and I'm putting this question on behalf of those who wonder about your politics, if your politics actually informs your sense of control, it's not just the medical arguments, but you have a kind of a political bent to want the state to tell people what to do. I've come on your programme as a scientist. As do all people who come onto your programme as scientists. They come on to talk about the evidence, relevant theories, how we approach scientific disciplines. And you don't ask other scientists about politics. So I'm very happy to speak about science, which is what my job is, and to limit it to that. So you're saying that your politics doesn't inform your opinion on this subject? I'm saying that I agree to come on this programme as a scientist. And I'm very happy to talk to you about the issues that you're raising as a scientist, which is the same for other scientists that you invite onto the programme. That's a perfectly fair answer. Thank you for that. Okay. So what Richard was saying is that because communism is a statist ideology and Susan is allegedly a member of a communist party, that she's come to her view because she is ideologically wedded to the idea of the state controlling individuals. Now, I think it's a pretty big claim to make on the integrity of a scientist that they'd be led by political biases and not their interpretation of the data, the evidence in front of them. Susan Mickey pushed back on this pretty hard, as you can imagine, arguing that she's there in her capacity as a scientist and that no other scientists on Good Morning Britain have been asked about their political beliefs. And as far as I can tell, this is true. I just can't remember any of them else being asked about their voting history or party membership on the show before. But maybe Richard badly has a point. Are communists more likely to be in favour of maintaining strict lockdowns or indeed preserving mask mandates? Well, the problem for Richard badly is that mask mandates don't really correlate all that strongly with communism. So China has significantly relaxed its mask mandates saying people don't need to wear them anymore when they're outdoors at public gatherings or when they're in places which have got good air circulation. Meanwhile, in capitalist Singapore, it's mandatory for everyone aged six years old or above to wear a mask when leaving the home. Indoor and outdoor masks are mandatory in Cuba, sure, but that's also the case in Italy, South Korea, and communist, communist Greece. So it doesn't seem to be a huge amount of evidence that communism makes you a mask fanatic. Countries adopted them quickest where they were already used to wearing them, like in East Asia, and kept them longest where infection rates have been slowest to fall, like in Europe. So here's what I think. I think that if Susan Mickey was saying that collectivising agriculture was key to controlling the virus, then sure, you might have a point in saying your membership for the Communist Party is relevant to what you're saying. But in this instance, there is simply no connection between these only means of production and everybody wear a mask other than in Richard Maddley's fevered imagination. So Dalia, what do you think about this line of questioning on GMB? Do you think it's fair enough or an attempt at a smear? I mean, I'm not sure if it's an attempted smear just because I don't think it's really personal to Susan Mickey. I think it's rather an attempt to turn what should be like a fairly simple conversation into the most lucrative media format, which is, you know, the culture war masked as a debate. And, you know, sort of making this into some kind of red scare, like part of the red scare, it gets people riled up, it creates this like polarizing, shareable, punch and Judy style debate over things that aren't really a debate, you know, like the fact that sort of general compliance with mask wearing is has a really significant impact on reducing the transmission of the virus. But like this is really, really irresponsible broadcasting because, you know, and producers of major broadcasts like GMB, you know, they have to understand that being able to set the terms and the format of discussions, especially on key issues like this, that has that is a massive form of power. And with that power comes, you know, it has to be wielded responsibly, right? And to turn something that should be a form of public health education and information into a sort of irrelevant, red scare based culture war, just because it might get you more clicks is really a violation of that responsibility. And anyone like you and I with a trained eye in the hell scape that is the culture war, and has some familiarity with its sort of main characters that frequently pop up will notice that the person who's put in opposition to Susan Mickey is Dominique Samuels, who is a political commentator, who is was at least at one point part of a very right wing think tank, turning point UK, whose entire existence is basically to kind of stoke up these types of framings. And so the fact that, you know, Susan Mickey, that Dominique Dominique Samuels political agenda is, you know, not questioned, and therefore it's invisibilized. So she's able to, you know, come across as a sort of neutral observer of a world, you know, the world happening around her. Yet the political position of the scientist is being, you know, in a tight and entirely unprovoked way, brought into the conversation. It's entirely inappropriate. And it's really misleading as to kind of what is as to actually communicating to the public what is actually going on here. And you know, we've all experienced it when we're introduced as you know, part of left wing of our media, but people who are coming on as part of the telegraph or turning point UK or GB news, aren't introduced in that way. And it sort of, it creates a particular effect that is trying to discredit us, whilst legitimizing, you know, the opponent, but also while being able to play to say, Well, we're inviting both people on. So we're doing our job as balanced broadcasters. I mean, you're right. There's something really weird about having a scientist debate a political pundit who has been a part of partisan political organizations like turning point UK. And it's the scientists who's questioned on the politics and the pundit is just sitting there staying PIM throughout. So as we mentioned, the segment on Good Morning Britain was set up as a debate between Dominique Samuels and Susan Mickey. And here's what Dominique had to say about mask effectiveness. Well, I'm afraid that the evidence of face masks is not completely conclusive. And that's because most people that wear face masks are wearing the surgical masks and the traditional facial facial coverings. The surgical mask do not protect you from smaller airborne particles. And that's from a new research done by Cambridge University Hospitals that has recommended an upgrade for healthcare workers due to respiratory masks being 47 times more likely to protect healthcare workers from infection. So the face coverings that people actually generally do wear don't actually protect you that much from the virus, because most people either aren't wearing the mask or wearing the mask. And that is why it's based upon personal addition to wear a face. Okay, I am going to get into it into it here because Dominique cited research by the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust claiming that it showed that the kind of masks most people are wearing aren't effective and that FFP3 respirators are up to 47 times better at filtering out small aerosol particles. That's not quite what the research says. Let's go through what it does say. It's true that the research found that the type of mask healthcare workers wore made a big difference to their risk of coronavirus infection. What the study found was that staff caring for COVID patients on red wards faced a risk that was up to 47 times higher than those on green or non-COVID wards, and that the number of staff infections on red wards fell to the same level as staff infections on green wards when they then introduced these much more effective, tighter fitting FFP3 respirators. So just to reiterate, red wards are the wards with coronavirus patients, green wards are the normal wards and when you gave everyone on the red wards the bad boy FFP3 masks, the levels of staff infections fell to the same rate as normal wards. And so the study concludes that cases attributed to ward-based exposure fell significantly with FFP3 respirators providing 31 to 100% protection and most likely 100% against infection from patients with COVID-19. So here's what the study shows. The study shows that in an environment with lots of infections, wearing an FFP3 respirator means that your risk falls to that of being in an environment with few or no infections. It is real-world evidence that respirators are a lot more effective than wearing a surgical mask when it comes to preventing transmission of the virus, which means it's kind of weird that Dominique is citing it to make the argument that wearing masks is, in her words, not completely conclusive because it's pretty conclusive that the study is saying high quality masks are good at protecting people in high risk environments. So really she should be citing the study as saying, look, if we're all going to wear masks, it should be the FFP3 bad boy respirators. And also this should go without saying this can't you can't just apply a study which has been carried out in a coronavirus ward and say that's the same for anybody working anywhere because most of us don't work on coronavirus wards. So citing a study about healthcare workers coming into close contact with COVID patients literally all day to talk about mask effectiveness for all of us in the wider population just isn't really appropriate. So off the back of that what I would suggest is that perhaps Dominique has got more of an ideological rather than an evidence-based objection to masks. Here's the disagreement between Susan and Dominique on what masks are for in the first place. Just handing over everything's personal responsibility. Now if we look at other areas of our lives that's not the case. We don't say to people you can drive on any side of the road you fancy at any speed you fancy. We actually have rules that protect other people or for example it's up to you whether you use a hard hat on a building site or whether you have a helmet on a motorbike. We have rules for these things to protect people themselves but also importantly to protect other people and one of the issues about a viral transmission such as COVID is that your behaviour doesn't just affect you it affects other people and so you can be transmitting the virus not knowing it often that's one of the problems about COVID is so much is transmitted when people don't have symptoms. Yeah just quickly some of the points that Susan raised there the examples that you gave was more so about a more immediate risk and the issue with COVID is it's not an immediate risk and that's why people who wear masks and people who have been double vaccinated in rare cases do catch COVID still because in life you're always going to be exposed to an element of risk that doesn't mean that the government has the right to micromanage what you choose to wear on your face whether you choose to operate your business and whether you can see a loving a dying loved one that's a very important. Personally for me I will not be wearing your face covering I don't think it's necessary but if people by their own choice want to do it because they make them feel safe because it doesn't actually make you more safe it makes them feel safe and that's up to them. Okay so I think what this segment highlights is that the culture war framing in UK broadcasting really does impoverish the discussion of something like COVID because this is no shade no disrespect to Dominique as a pundit but we are talking about very different levels of expertise and familiarity with the field of health psychology and what we're talking about is health psychology. So Dominique's point is that masks don't actually make you more safe they make you feel safe and therefore it's up to you whether you need one it's a personal choice based on your personal feelings like whether or not you're into astrology or taking contraceptives no yeah these things aren't the same at all and look we've already talked about the quite wobbly evidential footing that Dominique is on so I don't want to go into it but it seems to me that she doesn't really accept that in a pandemic the choices you make the choices that you make they affect people who aren't literally just you so there's this bizarre line that COVID isn't an immediate risk but we make rules about non-immediate risks all the time right you don't literally have to be decapitated at the moment you come into danger for the government to go maybe we should regulate this a bit so for instance passive smoking isn't an immediate risk to anybody but we still have laws about where you can smoke and not doing things like exhaling smoke from a cigarette into a cradle with a baby in it just because it's not an immediate risk doesn't mean that we can't legislate against this kind of thing and that's because there is a recognition in the law that yes there are personal choices but there are also collective responsibilities and leaving certain things up to personal choice when people aren't necessarily always cognizant of that collective responsibility is quite a bad idea sometimes it can lead to people doing really dumb shit like exhaling smoke into the cradle of a baby um Dalia I want to I want to bring you in on this because it seemed to me that the way this conversation was set up was fundamentally about ideology and not evidence I don't know whether you've got that vibe why do you think that is yeah I mean I think that it's because that is how this kind of tiny group of people you know whether it's telegraph columnists or you know turning point UK commentators are being able to dictate the terms on which these discussions are happening and when we talk about you know what is the political agenda here what is the ideological framework that's being pushed here and we've heard it throughout this pandemic we also I think the smoking ban is a really good example of that because at the time there was also it was also kind of being turned into this culture war in a very similar way but now that it's been in effect we've realized that you know not smoking indoors is not this cataclysmic infringement on people's freedom but it's actually kind of just a sensible thing to do to kind of protect ourselves and each other but it also just kind of it boils down to this like stigmatization of any kind of collectivism and it's just like the most boring understanding of freedom that you can imagine it's this idea that you know your freedom to not wear a mask for you know 15 minutes on the tube which I'm at the point where like even if there was no pandemic I think people should wear masks on the tube so that your breath is not stinking up the carrot because it's always the man with the stinkiest breath that are the anti-maskers but um it's like it's also you know it's the idea of that that sort of like tiny piece that that individual freedom takes precedence over the freedom of like I don't know people who work in jobs where they aren't able to self-isolate if they test positive or if one of their colleagues tests positives or they don't have a second home that they can flee to you know in in the case of a lockdown but this idea of like collectively looking after each other as being something that actually does engender freedom is is something that is completely absent from our understandings of what it means to you know care about freedom and to care about personal to care about the choices that people are able to make because you know it and also I think there's something about the fact that masks also represent this really particular way of relating to each other that has been very discouraged over the past sort of 40 years of you know neoliberal there is no society culture and it's a way of relating with each other where it's like we're being encouraged to make decisions that might not immediately protect us but are designed to protect other people and because you know wearing a mask doesn't actually massively reduce your chance of being infected what it does is it reduces the chance of you unwittingly infecting someone else and that is what overall protects us because it reduces the overall transmission but that rubs against that grain of neoliberal ideology where it's you know self above all else and that inconveniencing yourself if it doesn't directly benefit you or immediately benefit you that it's therefore not worth doing and I think you know that understanding of freedom as a collective issue and an issue that is also shaped by inequality it's totally missing from this sort of Anne Rand you know hyper individualist idea of freedom which is not only littered but it's very boring and you know deeply unglamorous so yeah out with that. Well you know speaking of Anne Rand fans and deeply unglamorous people you have just signaled where we're going next because I do want to stress that we're not just talking about this because we want to dunk on somebody who we think has been silly on TV the stuff about personal responsibility and the framing of choice is really significant because it does paint a picture of what kinds of ideas might be influencing a new health secretary but before we go there I just want to say thank you to call me cool chrisify who has given a £10 super chat donation we will call you cool we will call you cool because it was a cool thing to do if you want to be cool as well you can go to navaramedia.com forward slash support you can be a monthly subscriber and donate the equivalent of one hour of your wage per month and that enables us to keep working around the clock to give you the kinds of news analysis and comment that you're just not going to find anywhere else it has been just one week since saja javid took over the job of health secretary after his predecessor matt hancock was caught on cctv doing a big old smooch and even in that short period of time javid has already made it clear that he'll have a very different attitude to managing the pandemic in a departure from hancock's mantra of data not dates javid has said that he considers july the 19th a hard deadline for ending the coronavirus restrictions writing in the mail on sunday javid said we are on track for july 19th and we have to be honest with people about the fact we cannot eliminate covid we also need to be clear that cases are going to rise significantly i know many people will be cautious about the easing of restrictions that's completely understandable but no date we choose will ever come without risk so we have to take a broad and balanced view we are going to have to learn to accept the existence of covid and find ways to cope with it just as we already do with the flu so javid is looking at where we are now with infections up 66.9 percent on the previous seven days hospitalizations up 24.2 percent and says that that is a reasonable risk when compared to the burden of continuing restrictions and bear in mind absolutely everybody chris witty patrick valence thinks that in the next few weeks infections are going to increase even further so dahlia one of the things that javid argues in this piece is that there is a healthcare case for ending coronavirus restrictions so there is a backlog of elective procedures people's mental health is worsening rates of domestic violence are going up do you have much sympathy with this argument i mean i have huge amounts of sympathy for the argument because obviously lockdowns are horrible right like and it's it's true that there's a backlog of elective procedures that there's a mental health crisis but scrapping masks and scrapping all these restrictions and you know preventative infrastructures like contact tracing like even when there's a clear risk that the infection is still so high it's possibly the most counterproductive way that you could actually deal with it because it's precisely those sort of small but sustainable over the long-term changes like mask wearing etc and you know providing furlough to isolate as well you know i think those measures are kind of sometimes missing from the conversation that's what prevents us from having to go into these very extreme lockdowns for such a long period of time so if you what you actually cared about was you know preventing the harmful effects of very you know restrictive lockdowns then firstly you know you wouldn't sort of batter the possibility of mental health provision and you know safe shelters for violence victims through years of austerity but you would also in the more immediate term support those kind of everyday long-term sustainable restrictions that means we don't have to let things get so bad that you know we have no choice but to enter into the most restrictive lockdowns and that's kind of been the character of how the UK has responded to the pandemic and it's why we're going to have so many knock-on effects in this way so I think that this is really Javid covering up for his real motive here which is sort of saving you know the economic interests of big business in you know especially in the hospitality and the service sector which kind of makes up a huge part of the UK economy with sort of quite a disingenuous concern for what are actually real issues because those issues are not things that Tori's seen particularly concerned about in any other context but I think also you know what disturbs me so much about this is how you know learning to live with the virus which is a sensible and important policy is being weaponized in such a misleading and anti-science way because of course we need to learn to live with the virus like it's a really resilient virus and you know no one believes that constantly locking down is sort of a sustainable or desirable way to live you know no one wants that but living with the virus cannot mean just going back to 2019 or sort of being deluded that we're living without it it has to be sort of adapting our you know social expectations our norms you know things like checking in on contact tracing before you go into a restaurant things like wearing masks on public transport you know these kind of low effort low inconvenience but incredibly high return on safety measures that you know there is no reason why as I mentioned before like wearing masks on public transport shouldn't be a long-term thing and yet these are the measures that we are that the government are scrapping for those as I mentioned before those sort of cheap optics of you know being able to announce freedom day even though ironically it's these policies that mean that we're going to be much more likely to have to go into restrictive lockdowns again but I also think you know and I'm going to end it here kind of the the crucial thing to note here is you know the data shows that you know hospitalizations are low that you know and that's obviously great but dipty mentioned this earlier in the show the long-term adverse effects of catching coronavirus can't only be measured by hospitalizations you know I know many people personally who were never hospitalized from COVID but they are still suffering from the long-term effects of long COVID for coming up to nine months and that's the data that is routinely forgotten even though it actually represents the experiences of a lot of people especially people who are working in those hospitality industries working in those industries that are at really high risk of COVID and who aren't double vaccinated yet and that is partly because you know society doesn't know how to reckon with or accommodate for things like chronic illness we think about sickness is something that you just sort of you get sick and then you get cured and it's all fine so simply saying well you know hospitalizations are low so it's all good it's deliberately excluding a huge part of the story of COVID basically I mean I've just got one last question for you before we move on to the next section do you think that Javad's previous role as chancellor is relevant to the story because it means that he's not simply making the case for health in cabinet meetings we've essentially got two soon acts making the same arguments for unlocking faster in order to stimulate the economy oh a hundred percent but I think it's so important that we cut through that to say because when people hear oh you know Sajjavad's priority is the economy that sounds super benevolent we all benefit you know this idea is we all benefit from you know a good economy and that you know that's just as important to our health as you know these other kind of public health measures we have to remember that in Sunak and Javad's books the economy is about protecting the interests and the profits of a tiny group of business owners and you know business elites it's not actually about you know stimulating the economic benefit and the economic welfare of the country as a whole and that is encapsulated by the fact that as part of the scrapping of these measures we are going to see a rollback on furlough which is an essential economic measure to help everyday working class people take you know protect themselves and also you know to make sure that they aren't really severely financially hit by having to self isolate so it is true yes that this idea of prioritising the economy is part of that the the kind of agenda but we mustn't mistake prioritising the economy with looking after the economic well-being of everyday people it means something really really specific. Dahlia you're coming through with those Michael Marmot bars do you know what I mean? You know kind of social epidemiology shit. A comment from Kieran Buckley in the chat he has donated very kindly a fiver. Saja Javad is about to make us miss Hancock in the worst way possible and I assume that means that you're talking about even though he dithered he eventually came down on the side of lockdowns it meant that we didn't leave it even later have even more tens of thousands of deaths rather than the whole office snogging thing so I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt there Kieran and now for something lighter the climate crisis last week heat records were obliterated across much of Canada and the United States so temperatures reached 47.9 degrees Celsius in British Columbia dozens have died of heat stress with roads buckling and power cables melting and in Oregon the statewide total of heat related deaths climbed to 94 on Friday with the homeless people with underlying health conditions and those without access to air conditioning being the worst affected and then the cherry on top over the weekend this really quite terrifying footage went super viral so it's a gas leak from an underwater oil pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico and it literally set the ocean ablaze so you can see the fire on the surface flames leaping out the water rather serially you can see the little fire extinguisher boats putting out the fire with what looks like more water there so the fire took about five hours to put out having begun in an underwater pipeline that connects to a platform at Pemex's flagship coomalube zap oil development and Pemex is the mexican state oil owned oil company and it's got a particularly awful record for industrial accidents let me just rattle through the grim story here in 1992 the company was found to be at fault for a series of 10 explosions that occurred in guadalajara caused by gasoline in the city sewers the explosions claimed the lives of about 252 people though one study claims that the death count was actually as high as 1000 fatalities in 2012 an explosion at one of the company's gas plants in reinoza killed 30 people and injured 46 in 2013 there was an explosion at the company's offices in mexico city the cause of which has never been confirmed at least 37 people were killed and 126 injured that in 2016 there were two separate incidents explosions and fires at the company's plants and oil tankers that resulted in the deaths of 28 people and in 2019 80 people died in an explosion after hundreds of people tried to get fuel via an illegal pipeline drain at a Pemex pipeline in Hidalgo and the response of the mexican state was really quite disgusting really callous in a statement that was released to the public officials said that the explosion was an example for fuel thieves across the country so not just uncaring but gloating and the ocean fire over the weekend thankfully didn't kill anyone but i think when footage from actual reality starts to resemble some CGI monstrosity from pacific rim maybe it's time to acknowledge that as a species we done fucked up somewhere along the road dahlia what what did you think of this footage when you saw it i mean you know it makes sense to me somehow that having to watch footage of matt hancock gripping us and the ocean being on fire would sort of happen at the same time it's kind of the same era of immoral chaos but you know it all seriousness like you know there's a term that that comes to mind when i watch this um it's apocalyptic infrastructure and it's a term that was coined by lala chelili and it describes the construction of these kinds of massive endemic scaled up infrastructures that you know scaled up either through a single project or by you know scaled up through making lots of little projects um done as rapidly as possible um with the purpose of basically generating rapid returns right with no kind of accountability or responsibility for social and ecological consequences there is you know very little oversight very little accountability and it results in these exact kind of spectacles in sort of cataclysmic destructive failure that once it's sort of set in motion can't really be contained and you know the destruction that it causes can't really be contained it's the kind of thing that connects you know grenfell to you know the water crises of flint michigan and beirut to these scenes that we are seeing in the gulf of mexico and at the heart of this um you know what lies at the heart of this is is why despite having all of the the knowledge and the understanding of what it would take to get out of the ecological breakdown it feels like not only are we not doing anything but we are actually continuing to march down the path to ecological destruction and destruction that will be that is going to become irreversible at some point and that includes you know most recently through the granting of a license to build a new fossil fuel project um a deep coal mine in cumbria and so it's kind of happening in our own government as well and it's sort of the end point of this sort of unfettered involvement of the fossil fuel industry in policy making and it's the breaking of that contract is absolutely essential to putting a stop to this it's not actually a scientific problem we know the science we know the science of how we got here we know the science of how we get out um the solution is actually to address the political economy of this crisis because that is the reason why despite everything that we know we can still switch on our TVs or you know switch on our news feeds and see these kinds of scenes of the ocean literally being on fire i mean i'm so glad that you mentioned the deep coal project here in the uk because one of the common responses both in the uk and in other european countries when people talk about the climate crisis is to say well look we're actually really good at reducing our emissions we found plastic straws it's the big dirty polluters in the global south that are the problem but here's the thing while the uk is decelerating its emissions domestically they're not fast enough to actually meet our own legally binding net zero targets we're actually the biggest net importer of carbon dioxide emissions per capita in the g7 outstripping both the us and japan because we keep buying goods which have been manufactured abroad so we're basically just outsourcing our carbon emissions to other poorer countries and at the same time british banks are still busy financing dirty fossil fuel projects with barclays hsbc net west Lloyd's and standard chartered investing a combined 40.4 billion pounds into the coal industry between 2018 and 2020 so we might be putting up a few more wind turbines we might be wearing you know rocking those like woven tote bags everywhere to the shops but we're still leading the way indirectly in polluting the planet so darlia what do you think it will take to jolt the government out of its lethargy when it comes to dealing with this country's impact on the climate crisis well you know as i mentioned before the science is there you know the the evidence is there it's not a problem of deficit of science or deficit of solutions or deficit of awareness it's a deficit of political will right um so this alone these images alone are not going to jolt the government into action especially because you know we are already in the grips of the climate crisis we have witnessed this kind of catastrophe uh many times over past several years we're already at that stage so the primary thing that we need to do is to basically force that political will right and this is especially important for us in the UK because COP which is sort of the major global climate negotiations are taking place in Glasgow this year so you know right on our doorstep and you know in that in these negotiations our government will try and posture as sort of climate leaders for all the reasons that you've outlined um but you know for so many reasons we cannot we have to basically not allow them to take that position when they don't have the actual action to back it up and so i think there are kind of the major priorities for how we politically organize around these issues is firstly to um resist false solutions right so that includes these kind of hypothetical like techno futurist solutions that you know this idea that we can pollute and pollute and pollute as much as we want um because sort of the linear development of technology means that by the time it becomes a problem which it already is by the way um we will just sort of have the technology we will have naturally developed the technology to to reverse it you know that kind of belongs more in like science fiction world than you know in any kind of serious engagement with climate breakdowns um but that also means the kind of more benevolent false solutions that are sort of put forward by particularly you know governments in the global north who hold the most responsibility for the crisis um that they try to kind of put out there to sort of greenwash their own responsibility um it's things like you know carbon offsetting which sort of doesn't address the core issue of emissions and but it actually just kind of focuses on creating this false economy of carbon carbon credits and carbon debits but it also involves you know i think it's really important that you mention you know the involvement of the british government in importing um that the importing system being upholding sort of fossil fuel economies but also the city of london is absolutely instrumental in financing and ensuring fossil fuel projects you know the fossil fuel economy would not exist without the financial and insurance infrastructure of the city of london so we can't allow the government to get away with saying oh it's fine because you know we're not building new fossil fuel projects which they actually are um whilst that is still whilst the the the city is still so instrumental in actually the survival the continuing artificial survival um of this of this economy but we also need to really focus on breaking those political and financial bonds between you know the policy making process the political process the governments and the fossil fuel industries you know for the years now the the the global climate negotiations the terms of those negotiations have been set by fossil fuel industries by the very industry that got us in the position that we're in you know the the 2015 COP negotiations is often you know declared to be the sort of watershed moment in global cooperation around climate change but none of those none of none of the actual terms agreed upon in those discussions are legally binding why do you think that is because of the restrictions placed by the fossil fuel industry who are given way too much power in these negotiations and at the same time the people who are most impacted by the crisis are shut out of the political process often through violent repression so breaking that political bond um has to be the first and most urgent step in actually getting real not only getting real solutions on the table but actually getting those real solutions in motion i mean you'd think that at some point we'd stop letting the leopards into our first campaign organizing meeting for the stop leopards eating my face party you know at some point we'd be like hang on a minute something tells me you're not hearing good faith is afoot there's a guy over there with a curly mustache and like an evil coat why is he here what's he doing here that guy wearing the drill baby drill t-shirt isn't that committed to decarbonizing the economy what do you say guys i mean you think but it looks like we need to get more involved in making that happen because if we leave it up to these idiots you know we're never gonna get there hold their feet to the fire hold their feet to the fire that's currently blazing in the ocean um a lovely comment from tatters can't well with 15 euros great job on tiskey on covet it strikes me from across the pond the british government has stopped gloating about the eu being behind on the vaccine as they fail to stop the delta variant spread i don't know man like i'm just gonna say nothing can stop this british government from bragging doesn't matter how many people die we will still be completely high off the smell of our own farts and for those of you watching the show live right now we asked you a question in the live chat via a poll which ever 900 of you voted in that's democracy baby the question was will you continue to wear a mask on public transport after it is not mandatory to do so 84 percent of you said yes and 15 percent of you said no and we have also got a very kind donation from nick hook with a tenor who says a real treat have you both in the same show tonight navara's perspective and analysis remains a welcome break from the daily twattery of shows that have britain in their name uh that is a bad time for us to announce our new morning show good morning britain's twats um sorry to double the point you nick and we have got another tenor from um dicken spain is that how i say it um i am so sorry if i pronounced that wrong it's 2021 but we still have cruise ships and container ships burning bunker fuel subsidized aircraft fuel car manufacturers in super slow motion phase out of internal combustion suicidal insanity yeah i mean i kind of feel like i'm on a nihilistic planet that's burning to death and all they've got to entertain me is love island you know um kind of sucks and a tenor from jamie perkins so glad to hear you two talk some sense so depressed with the current political fast this gives me some hope for the future thanks guys well thank you for tuning in um we wouldn't have a show if it wasn't for our viewers and we also wouldn't have a show if it wasn't for my lovely co-host dahlia thank you thank you i also think that i think that this is a great advert for what communism does for your skin because we are both radiant today so you know it's a secret to good skincare is redistributing the wealth let's be real it's communism and melanin right there's only so much to do but i gotta have a life of institutional racism to look this good so i'm not even sure if you want it um although maybe you guys want it i don't know maybe that should be our next poll in the live chat um just so you know fox uh dahlia you will be back on wednesday with aran bastani so that is well double dose right you make sure you subscribe so you don't forget dahlia and everyone who's watching hit subscribe on the channel so you don't miss it either uh thank you all for joining us thank you so much for your super chats and your comments and your tweets and all that good shit you've been watching tisky sour on the vahra media good night