A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The fifth post of a series, which is looking increasingly like a regular thing, inspired by Jonathan Rothwell.

At the start of this week, I spent time on a number of calls about Storm Malik and Storm Corrie which battered much of the North East. Nevertheless, I didn’t expect to see this near home:

There was a piece in The Guardian this week in which “scientists admit their covid mistakes” in an effort to demonstrate that changing one’s mind is important in science. I’m not a scientist, but my life as a doctor protecting people from serious communicable diseases has been dominated by covid for more than two years now, so this article has been playing on my mind.

Most of the “mistakes” are nothing of the sort: we all have to make decisions on the evidence and information available to us at the time, and the fact that we might make different choices in retrospect with more information available does not make the initial act a “mistake” in my book. By the same token, making a decision against the evidence and proving to be correct doesn’t equate to having miraculous foresight.

But nevertheless, we do all make mistakes, every day.

One of my mistakes was to be unduly pessimistic about the probability of a covid vaccine. I’m not well read on vaccine development, and it isn’t an area I keep up to date on: it’s a little removed from my work. And so when asked early in the pandemic about the likelihood of a vaccine being developed, I drew a conclusion based not on the evidence, but on my background knowledge. Coronaviruses circulate widely, many attempts have been made to create vaccines against them, none have been successful, therefore vaccine development in this pandemic scenario is unlikely.

I didn’t test my thinking, I didn’t consult experts, I didn’t dig into the available evidence on relatively recent breakthroughs in RNA vaccines. Had I done so, I would probably have had a different view on the likelihood of development, and how the pandemic was therefore likely to play out.

I haven’t finished a book in over a fortnight, and not because I’m reading anything especially long. This is a sure sign that I’m worn out.