Now, I am not a scientist (biology ‘o’ level 1977 was my peak) though I have worked with scientists and doctors for decades and have to be able to at least get the sense of data from charts etc.
I knew there was something dodgy with this chart prepared by Public Health England and shown by Yvonne Doyle yesterday. Now, we all now get that these charts are bollocks and pure propaganda, but this one disturbed me for some reason. I have now tracked it down.
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In this context it doesn’t really matter which line represents which country. Look at the scale on the left. Unless you know how to read a graph you probably (and quite fairly) wouldn’t even look at this, the lines tell the story, you would think. But the scale massively distorts the distance between the lines and the relative performance of the different countries. Japan’s deaths per million is 3, Germany’s is 77 and Belgium’s is 655. Yet this chart makes it look like Germany is closer to Belgium than it is to Japan. Why? I can only assume because it makes us look slightly better. If I presented data on a drug like this I would be kicked out and fined. I suspect you would fail in a public examination if you drew a similar scale to illustrate something. Yet our ‘top’ public health doctors think it’s ok to present stuff to the public, which relies on them to be honest brokers, in this way. At the very least Doyle should have referred to the scale when she presented the data. These experts have been colonised by the politicians.
if you are interested the countries at the top - us, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, would be way way higher than the US, Germany and Japan if the scale were accurate and even - it would be a very tall graph indeed, and rather embarrassing. Out of interest Sweden would be a bit above the US, but way lower than the rest.
Really quite cross.
