PANDA is a group of actuaries, lawyers, economists and other professionals pushing for accountability from scientists who are behind the Covid-19 models used by the government as the rationale for depriving South Africans of their rights. As Shayne Krige, a lawyer, tells BizNews founder Alec Hogg: the strict lockdown has wiped out freedoms in addition to throttling the economy. PANDA has criticised modellers from the University of Cape Town and elsewhere for forecasting overly pessimistic death rates. This approach worked well in getting the state to provide for HIV-Aids, but it has backfired with the need to curb a highly contagious, fast-acting virus-like Covid-19. Modellers, including Professor Boulle of UCT, have attempted to shut down debate on the numbers. They have complained to the Press Council of SA about PANDA articles and tried to impose a BizNews ban on publishing the views of PANDA. In these two interviews, PANDA picks up on questions about Covid-19 and what they are trying to achieve with their hard-hitting, sometimes controversial, messages. – Editor
PANDA lawyer Shayne Krige answers questions for BizNews community members:
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AH: We’re going to be talking to Shane Krige, good to have you with us. You are a member of PANDA, who got us into trouble this last week. We were reported to the Press Council by a Professor Boulle, who is objecting to the fact that we published, on BizNews, articles that you sent us. To start off with, he said, we took them off Twitter, which is nonsense.
The PANDA people sent them, in fact, I think specifically wrote them for us and then distributed them elsewhere. Then secondly, he’s saying that we should not be publishing anything from you guys because and have no legitimacy. Let’s understand a little bit about this. We did ask Professor Boulle, talk to us. This is now he wants to go to the press council first. He says that that he doesn’t want us even to be talking with you. He says that we should not be publishing anything that you produce. But who is PANDA?
SK: PANDA is a group of concerned individuals. It started right at the beginning, before the lockdown, where a couple of us had been communicating with each other about the risks that Covid-19 posed. This paper came out on the Diamond Princess, if you remember it was a cruise ship where there was an infection that was running rife and they couldn’t find any way to dock. It just it seemed like that was the perfect petri dish for this virus to play itself out.
When we saw the results of what had happened on that boat, a couple of us who were talking said, okay, well, this isn’t a problem. Then somewhere between 10% and 20% of the people who were on the ship constantly being exposed to the virus and actually got it, and old people aside, it seemed to have a relatively muted effect. We said, okay, well, then everything’s all right. Let’s carry on with our days.
Then we started talking about lockdown in South Africa and there were models being put out. The first one was 350,000 people in South Africa were going to die. That at the time was more than the total number of people who had died in the world.
We put PANDA together, and our first objective at that time was to say, there’s a trade-off for every policy that you add and it doesn’t seem like anyone is talking about what the impact to block down is. How can you say that lockdown is good policy unless you understand what the effect of that policy is?
My job as the lawyer in the group was to try and keep everyone onside, which I seem to partially not succeeded in. We’ve got a couple of doctors and some actuaries, some engineers, some specialists data scientists and a bunch of people who are helping out on Admin and running websites. This is all happening in our spare time, all of us have day jobs. That’s who PANDA is.
What’s your agenda in the complaint to the Press Council, Professor Boulle says that we are following your agenda or an agenda.
Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Whenever an organisation is criticised, should see what they’re being criticised for. The complaint is about an article which raises a number of specific issues with what was said that, for example, the rationale for the drop-down in deaths in the Western Cape.
Why is Professor Boulle saying those things? He doesn’t respond to any of those, he starts saying, well, you’re not qualified, your mean, these kinds of things. That’s perhaps the most interesting thing about this process, is just this lack of focus on the substance and focus on other bits of how we say things rather than what we’re saying.
The tone is difficult to manage in these things. I think what’s important to understand is that these models are right at the fulcrum of lockdown. The other day we’re watching the president, I was sitting there watching the president and he’s telling me how with immediate effect, a whole bunch of my rights are going to be removed.
There’s going to be a military curfew, you can’t visit your family. A whole bunch of businesses can’t ply their trade. All of these really draconian things are being enforced on us with immediate effect. I grew up with stories of my great aunt Molly, who was locked up in lockdown in her house from time to time by the apartheid government. That was not something that I signed up for in 1994, that those rights could be removed arbitrarily.
Hours before it happened and how this is being justified? There’s a figure that’s flashing across the bottom of the screen and 50,000 deaths, which is what our president is relying on.
If there are models who are participating in the creation of these inflated numbers, not numbers that are truthful, then they are right at the centre of the lockdown being imposed and the lockdown being maintained.
A lot of the scientists and data analysts and people who work with PANDA get very upset about that. The idea that this article is the entire iceberg is wrong. This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of our engagement with the models and our attempts to get them to respond to us and to give us some rational reasons for why they there. So it boiled up, but I think that we’re justified in saying that this is an important issue.
Freedoms are being denied to South Africans that were hard fought for on the basis of these models, and they need to be justified.
Part of the annoyance from academics, i.e. Andrew Boulle with PANDA, is that the scientific community have invited them to join the consortium on modelling and they’ve rejected joining the national consortium. They have tried to engage in PANDA have turned their backs.
I’m not aware of us being asked to. We participated in the initial consortium, in the initial meeting. At that meeting, we said these are constants and could somebody respond to them?
I’m not aware of any offer being made since then. The one interesting criticism we’ve had is, well, why don’t you also model because, you know, modelling is difficult? If you don’t put your own model out there and admit that it’s difficult, then you shouldn’t be saying anything at all.
I don’t see an issue with saying, for example, a complex theory of gravity doesn’t tie in with what I see when I throw a stone out the window. If somebody comes along to me and says, this is what gravity is about of, but every time I throw a stone out, the window hits the ground.
That is effectively what PANDA was saying. We were saying, we understand your SCIR models and all of these things but if we look at what’s happening in all of the other countries who have been through this peak, and down the other side, and we apply that data to South Africa, so taking into account the differences in our age, for example, just age, then we can’t see how you can justify a figure of anything more than about 10,000, give or take 20%. I don’t see why the answer to that is, well, unless you go and develop a SCIR model, then you’re wrong.
Michael Levitt, who is a Nobel prize-winning scientist has a very similar way of going about this to what PANDA has, in fact, the same way of going about this. Why don’t you just take his model and refuted? No, we certainly haven’t been invited to be part of the modelling discussion. We’ve brought application after application to get access to those models, and certainly, if we’re being brought into the fold of the modelling consortium, we wouldn’t have needed to do that.
It does sound a little strange. Certainly, every time I’ve spoken with your colleagues, Peter Castleden or Nick Hudson, they’ve said they really just want to engage and they want to find out what the models are. Professor Michael Levitt, is a South African Nobel prize winner, as you say, our only living scientist ,and we have interviewed him on BizNews before.
I was looking forward to interviewing him again, but he’s now so famous and the rest of the world is taking up so much of his time. He says he’s doing no more interviews, but he will talk to us again in due course. I look forward to that opportunity. Timothy Cornish says, Has anything changed in PANDA modelling that predicts only 10,000 deaths?
We didn’t.
We haven’t predicted 10,000 deaths as such.
We put out references to the models, that same kind of model that Levitt has suggested. No, we haven’t changed anything in that forecast since it was first put out in May, I think. Interestingly, because the models that we’re criticising have moved from a figure of 351,000 down to, some of them are 50,000, others are at 25,000 to 30,000. Those are significant moves.
David Shapiro, I’d love to get your view from an economic perspective or certainly from someone who’s watching the real economy. If you start off with a pandemic that’s going to have 350,000 deaths, then as a government or someone who’s making decisions, that’s going to presumably shape you, shape your calls.
Then if it goes down to 50,000, it will also shape your calls, if it’s actually going to end up around 10,000, which PANDA is suggesting and certainly, Shayne is telling us now, then there’d be a very different approach, one would think.
I think at this stage we’re probably positioned for 350,000 deaths, the way that we’ve closed down the economy and the way that we are carrying on. You have no idea what’s happened. Don’t look at the stock market. The stock market has distorted. The stock market is forecasting what’s happened to Prosus and Naspers, what’s happening in Europe, technology, what’s also happening in the mining markets, which are reflecting the Chinese economy, not the local economy.
Read also: UPDATE: Prof Boulle complaint to Press Council is ‘unpublished’ – PANDA Covid-19 debate
If you go down to the local economy, it’s appalling. The results that we’re getting out are pointing in that way and I don’t see any change. If anything, I see things getting worse. Anecdotally, if you walk around the malls, I went through to Melrose Arch yesterday, it’s dead.
This will not come back. When we’re not, say it won’t come back, the restaurants that are closed will be down for a long time. The landlords who own those premises are going to be even harder hit. The businesses likewise are going to find it very difficult. We are positioned for a very, very poor situation and if things were going to turn out differently, of course, I think confidence would return and so we would see spending return.
At the moment, people are holding onto their savings. Whatever money they have got, very nervous to let go. In my mind, we are positioned for a far worse outcome than PANDA are talking about.
Thanks for giving us that, David. Shayne, clearly then, from what David is saying, we somehow need to restructure or rethink or reset if this economy is not going to be completely decimated. The numbers that we saw from other researchers said that South Africa will lose three million jobs, already one of the highest unemployment rates in the world means we’re going to get even worse. How are you guys getting your message through?
Look, the first thing that we need to do is to end this lockdown. That’s important. There are a bunch of messages that we’re trying to get through at the same time. We’ve shifted to try and end this fear, is to give people facts so that you don’t have to be scared. Looking at the school closures, for example, which is an important part of opening up the economy.
People have no where to leave their kids.
They can’t go back to work, especially the poorer ones. Plus, there’s an impact there on education. What has happened consistently in South Africa is that we widen this gap between rich and poor through these policies. The rich kids are going to continue being educated by Zoom, the poor kids are not going to go to school. In order to end that, we have to persuade people that it’s safe to send your children to school. We’re trying to get those facts out.
We said that the first 21 days of lockdown would cause 30 times the number of life years to be lost that lockdown would cause and that was right at the beginning. That’s significantly worse now and, as I say, the first step is to end the lockdown.
The important thing longer term will be to make sure that this lockdown concept is taken off the table as a tool that government uses when these things happen because, for sure, there are more pandemics coming along.
If you look at the Disaster Management Act, it was designed to deal with climate events and those are coming as well. It’s important that, that option is taken off the table for one reason and one reason alone, and that is that the lockdown itself has a massive impact.
In the past, it was always good for academics to put out big numbers. When it was HIV, if the government was given a number that was larger than what was actually going to happen. All it meant is that they went out and spent more money than they necessarily wanted to spend, but the net impact was a better health care system than the government perhaps would have wanted. It didn’t have a negative impact.
I’m not sure that that paradigm of being in a situation where a big number that you put out could actually cost lives is one that they’ve necessarily adapted to. I think that’s the long term our goal.
Could PANDA please comment on whether the estimates include the excess mortality rates, i.e., it is believed that we are significantly under capturing actual Covid infections deaths?
There’s a paper that we put out on our website on Saturday that answers the question of the excess death. The best would be to go and read that but be careful about how some of the reporting is done. For example, in South Africa, our population registers kept by Home Affairs.
When somebody dies, a member of the family goes and reports the death, either at Home Affairs or at Saps and ultimately whatever data is captured once it works its way back to Home Affairs, who then updates the register.
If you can’t go to those places because you are locked down, you can’t report the death. If you look at our diseases during the lockdown, and mortality dropped below what was expected, there were fewer people dying of diseases during the lockdown. Now, that’s not possible, the people who had HIV didn’t stop dying just because it was lockdown.
Read also: PANDA: SA govt Covid-19 model continues to ‘grossly overestimate’ deaths
What was happening is they weren’t able to report those deaths to Home Affairs, and Home Affairs wasn’t able to record them.
What you must expect in that situation is that, when you ease the lockdown, all of those people who died during the lockdown, those deaths are going to be reported and they’re recorded at the time that they were reported. Suddenly you have a spike now in excess deaths.
In order to work it out, is a much more complex calculation that will be required. I read that we’re going to have excess deaths here, but the excess deaths are being caused by lockdown and the policies of lockdown, not by Covid-19. Some of them will say Covid-19 caused the lockdown therefore those deaths are also Covid deaths, but I think that’s not a correct analysis.
The lockdown wasn’t a necessity, it was an option, which was sold to us on the basis of preparing our healthcare system.
Shayne Krige, a director of Werksmans and a member of PANDA. PANDA has got some pretty smart minds, as you heard from Shayne today, andare having a different approach, a different look at the system.
Also listen to PANDA actuary Nick Hudson, who speaks to BizNews founder Alec Hogg about the Covid-19 data determining SA’s fate
Read also: SA’s Nobel prizewinning scientist Prof Michael Levitt: Lockdowns are “a huge mistake”
