> it's safe to argue that the poor general response to COVID is also an indicator of your skill at science This isn’t safe to argue at all. In fact, it’s compl

> it's safe to argue that the poor general response to COVID is also an indicator of your skill at science This isn’t safe to argue at all. In fact, it’s completely wrong. We know that the poor UK response is almost exclusively due to politicking and government corruption. The scientific advisory panel of the government (SAGE) hasn’t always been right in their assessment but they very quickly produced rigorous working models and solid recommendations, most of which have mirrored (and continue to mirror) the international consensus. Furthermore, public research in the UK has, sometimes against the active opposition of the government, done stellar work to ramp up testing and genetic sequencing. For instance, several institutes (incl. the Crick Institute in London and the University of Cambridge) had extensive testing capabilities set up in record time, but their offers to official channels were ignored for weeks, if not months (the Crick in particular simply ignored this and already provided testing internally and externally, at a time when basically no country had widespread testing yet). Likewise, a collaboration of different institutes quickly set up genome sequencing pipelines for COVID-19 samples, and as far as I know the Sanger Institute is sequencing more COVID-19 samples than any other individual entity in the world: https://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/who-we-are/sanger-institute/tackling-covid-19-at-the-sanger-institute/ https://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/who-we-are/sanger-institute/t...