Huge decisions, made in private, with no oversight

Request for transparency denied again

I’d almost forgotten about this request I filed, but I reconnected with it today, and think it’s worth publishing a link so readers can read it in full.

UK Research and Innovation are a wing of the UK Government. They deal with science and research, funding it in various forms, and act as a bridge between the science industry and government. As such, they were involved in the pandemic response efforts. One thing they were involved in was UK-CTAP, the UK Covid Therapeutics Advisory Panel. It was a bureaucracy tasked with looking for promising drug candidates for the fight against Covid-19.

Here’s how it worked; a ‘panel’ and various ‘sub-group panels’ would together make a decision on whether to push promising drugs into government-funded trials that would help us to definitively know if the drug worked or not. Ivermectin was the perfect candidate for UK-CTAP, as there were literally dozens of studies showing it worked and some countries had already started using the drug and were reporting successes. That sounds pretty promising to me. And yet, Ivermectin was waved under the nose of the ‘subgroup panels’ of CTAP, but they rejected it. They didn’t even want to investigate if it worked. That strikes me as very odd.

As my series on Ivermectin shows, a key member of that UK-CTAP bureaucracy was aware of the evidence base for Ivermectin. He had very likely helped to compile part of that evidence base himself. A paper he had been involved with literally said “Ivermectin should be validated in larger appropriately controlled randomized trials.” And then, when that exact opportunity came up, the organisation he was a part of did the exact opposite. If you read the full series I’ve written on the matter, you’ll see that this person had many conflicts of interest which might explain the irrational nature of that decision.

Given that I’d identified at least one conflict of interest within UK-CTAP, I was curious to know if there were more. But UKRI didn’t publish conflicts of interest, the whole process they used to reach their decisions was rather opaque. As I identified in this post, there was a substantial part of the decision-making process that basically happened in secret. The public wasn’t informed of who was involved in the decision-making process and UKRI themselves even acknowledged that there were likely conflicts of interest, but they ‘managed them appropriately’.

If UKRI appropriately managed conflicts of interest, they should have them written down somewhere. So, buoyed by their competence, I requested details from UKRI on exactly that. Who was involved in those decisions over which drugs to investigate and which to reject, and what conflicts of interest did they have? Subscribers to The Digger will know, that the request was denied.

I challenged the decision expecting no response whatsoever. To my surprise, UKRI did respond in a letter that’s worth reading for those with acute interest. To paraphrase, they essentially said, yes we have that information, yes it’s legitimate to want it, yes there’s a public interest, yes the government has published information like this before, but no, the panel members’ privacy outweighs the public interest in releasing the information.

Remarkable.

Put simply, they want us to accept that they can hire any panel they like, allow them to create critical advice for the government, and not publish any of their conflicts of interest because of ‘privacy’. You can read the entire tedious response here. The entire exchange we’ve had over the issue is here. If you have the patience to read it, the next request I make to UKRI on this issue should become obvious.

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