Put Indie Sage on the BBC

Indie Sage is a group of scientists who are shadowing the work of SAGE the governments scientific advisory panel. The group was formed by Sir David KIng who was the governments Chief Scientific Advisor from 2000 to 2007. Unlike SAGE whose transactions are not public (minutes are provided several weeks after they have met) they hold a weekly briefing and discussion, summarising the latest data about Covid19, and taking questions from jounalists and the public. Many of the more obvious policy errors made by the government during the pandemic were flagged up well in advance by Indie Sage and might have been avoided had the quality of public debate been better informed. The quality of the information and the debate in the briefings is extremely high; the content is interesting, and of immediate relevance for all of us, and it is therefore strange that the BBC do not carry it as a matter of course. Much of the coverage given to Covid on the BBC features discussion between presenters, jounalists, politicians and others who at best display a patchy understanding of the issues. Some remain woefully ignorant while others are wilfully distorting the science from political considerations. The BBC has as part of its charter a duty to inform and it is hard to imagine how this could be better met in the current pandemic than by giving airtime to Independent Sage.