A zoom panel discussion organised by Lindau, which included two other Nobel-prize winning scientists, provided Stanford biophysicist and Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt with a platform to vent his fury over the global scientific community’s flawed response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as he saw it.

In particular, he condemned Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson for failing to respond to his emails at the height of the crisis. He said that a flawed response had caused hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of suffering and damage, that had disproportionately affected a younger generation, and which would not substantially alter the ultimate death toll.

Levitt began by saying (at 11.41 in the video below):

One thing that strikes me is that once the virus moved from the China-Korea phase is how totally inadequate science structure is for real time science. People are insisting on refereed reports. No one wants to share anything. The scientists are more panicked and scared by reality than anybody else. The august organisations like Lindau, The Royal Society, The National Academy of Science, have been totally silent … As a group, scientists have failed the younger generation.

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