The BBC have run an analysis ‘Unvaccinated’. It is available for eleven months.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0019g27/unvaccinated

‘Covid-19 is on the rise again in the UK. After multiple lockdowns and more than 197,000 deaths, experts are warning we’re now entering a fifth wave of the pandemic. So why are around four million adults in the UK still yet to receive a single dose of the vaccine? In this timely, eye-opening investigation Professor Hannah Fry seeks to understand why so many remain unvaccinated against Covid-19.

To fully explore this complex and deeply divisive debate, Hannah brings seven unvaccinated participants together under one roof to unpack long-held opinions, beliefs and fears that have prevented them from getting the vaccine. Together, they meet leading experts, confront the latest science and statistics to emerge in the field, and dissect how misinformation spreads on social media. At the end of the experiment, each contributor is asked if what they have learned has changed their mind, and whether they will now take up the vaccine.‘

If this is the same Professor Hannah Fry as in the Mathematics of Cities at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, then it seems to Coco that she brings the regimen of mathematics into disrepute. The study, which is designed to fully explore the complex and deeply divisive debate over whether to submit to vaccination or not, is hardly a scientific study, even by the standards of the least rigorous of the psycho-social , so-called, scientific disciplines. There is no parallel study to explore the opinions, beliefs and fears of those who have submitted to vaccination; no meeting of the vaccinated to discuss the contrary evidence and no question put to each of them whether with their greater knowledge they now understand the issues better and in the light of that would have refused the vaccination.

Whilst the setting, if the headline picture is of the location for the event, is quite pleasant, and certainly appears to be less ‘clinical’ than other centres used for similar, but quite different and putatively malicious, purposes, the description provided above suggests that this is nothing less than an attempt at re-education. It is an entirely one-sided, one-way effort to persuade individuals to change their views.

Coco is disappointed, but not astonished nor surprised by the BBC but disappointed, and astonished at UCL.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, this is not in itself a discussion of the reasons for and against vaccination. As mentioned above, the issues are complex; the science, such as it is, behind the modern vaccines is young; the language used to code biological systems is only partly and inadequately understood. There are many uncertainties. There are also complex social issues around our responses to threats, especially where there is a mixture of real, only perceived, and illusory threats some of which are propagated by those with special interests which are not fully aligned with the interests of the actual or potential patients.

E&OE