‘I heard a SAGE member (and you know who you are if you are listening to me) who said to a friend of mine and then he shared this conversation that, we had asserted that we thought the pandemic was almost over and we were seeing a secondary ripple at the moment which will crest and go away and the reason we thought that was true, was that we had done calculations and looked at the science from other theoretical epidemiologists, like Professor Sunetra Gupta and others, that the percentage of people we estimated had been infected, plus the ones who had prior immunity, equalled close to herd immunity and – lo and behold – the infections turned over and fell and the deaths decay to almost zero by July/August.

So, when I then heard from a SAGE member that said: ‘I couldn’t disagree more with your assumption that we’re near completion. I hope we never get to completion as that would mean hundreds of thousands of deaths. Only 7% had been infected and so what we need to do is keep us locked down for six months until there is a vaccine. We will end the pandemic through mass vaccination.’

That’s someone on SAGE. Don’t you find that frightening? I did.’