Marvel at the openness!

The Tory government has continually resorted to the manta that they were simply "following the science" to explain away their decision to ignore the established global pandemic protocol of Test - Trace - Quarantine in favour of letting the virus spread like wildfire through the population for weeks, and abjectly failing to provide proper protective gear to NHS and care home staff, and other essential workers.

However when asked about the scientific advice they've supposedly been relying on to develop this consensus-defying strategy, they've desperately tried to maintain a shroud of secrecy.

They wanted to keep the identities of the scientific advisory group secret, and we found out why when the attendees were leaked. They'd deliberately politicised the science by letting Johnson's henchman Dominic Cummings sit in and influence the meetings, as well as the brother of the dodgy Vote Leave linked data company that's been gobbling up lucrative government contracts ever since Johnson and Cummings got their hands on the nation's public finances.

And now the government has released a heavily redacted version of the SAGE advice.

Scientists at the meeting say that the redacted text is where the experts criticised government policy, with one saying "the impression I'm getting is this government doesn't want any criticism" and another saying "You want trust? You need to be open with people. This isn't open. It is reminiscent of Stalinist Russia".

But the Tories and their minions in the corporate media will keep on saying "following the science" because it is another easily memorable little sound bite like "get Brexit done" for the mindless and the gullible to rote learn and repeat.

It takes a lot more cognitive work to understand that the Tories were actually ignoring the science in favour of corrupted behaviourist pseudo-scientific junk driven by Johnson and Cummings' insistence that protecting capital was more important than saving lives.

And it takes a decent awareness of reality to understand that the concept of just "get Brexit done" was always utterly misleading, especially given that the Withdrawal Agreement was just the first stage in the process, and the fact that Brexit ramifications will echo down the ages, meaning people will never stop talking about it.

But we live in a facts don't matter society, where huge numbers of people simply believe what they want to believe, without any critical thought or fact checking.  So if they find glib pro-government sound bites soothing and easily understandable, that's what they'll believe, despite the very clear evidence that the Tories are literally desperate for the public not to know what the scientific advice actually was.

So even when the actual scientists who the Tories claim to have been listening to say that they think the government is behaving like Stalinist Russia, the Boris Bots and unthinking Tory propaganda drones will continue parroting the lie that they were "following the science" because it's what they want to believe to be true.

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