Truth

Standing up against a consensus

The Sheldonian Series at the University of Oxford focused on the subject of Truth. Panellist Fraser Nelson, journalist at The Times and former editor of The Spectator, was responding to a question on how to encourage a greater focus on truth.

Transcript: Fraser Nelson:

“I'll tell you where I think the university could do a lot more.

I mean during lockdown, for example, there was a period where science was very

much up where this lockdown theory came out of nowhere. How coherent was it. Who was going to challenge it?

Now it was very difficult in those days to challenge anything because if you did you'd be described as a nutter. If you're an academic you'd have your reputation come after you.

And it was two Oxford academics, Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta who went into query went into challenge. They took more bullets than any politician, I think, during that because they were academics who cared about the truth.

…

So I think that we're in an era now where standing up against a consensus can be very very difficult. It can be very bad for your career. It can be, especially in public health, and I think having if the university especially a tenured professor like Carl Heneghan who is willing, to give, and he was run to Oxford Centre for evidence-based medicine a fantastic apparatus, to apply a force like that to a debate, is to me a classic example of why public debate needs universities to have expertise to have the courage and the eloquence to take on established pieties and quite often government orthodoxy. Even if orthodoxy is backed by 90% it can still be wrong.”

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