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Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

In the UK, "maths" is a very broad category. It includes my field of theoretical particle physics, as well as mathematical disease modelling. All of us would be called mathematicians.

Yes, not everybody signing is a specialist in epidemiology, but so what? The point is that a good number are -- there is no clear consensus among UK experts for the UK government's position. And among global experts, there is a clear consensus against their position.

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>there is no clear consensus among UK experts for the UK government's position

Well there is a huge government drive to portray that this is the case right now.

Whenever that happens, it always arouses suspicion that something is not quite right.

As a group, it's hard to imagine that UK experts in Epidemiology and related fields deviates significantly from their peers globally.

Keep signing petitions from ivory towers. That's not where political pressure on decision makers comes from.

Just in case you were not aware, in the UK any official petition with more than 100,000 signatures gets discussed in parliament [0].

0: https://petition.parliament.uk/help

The plan is supposed to be based on science, not politics, yet here you are telling me this isn't the case?

On a more serious note, petitions and other methods by experts to publicly state a position isn't just about influencing government policy. It's also a political tool in the aftermath of failed policy. Just like the current panel of experts is a political tool employed by the government to justify the biases in its policy.

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