During 2020, governments faced questions about how they should work to reduce the spread of COVID-19. How should they first impose the lockdown and later manage its gradual ending? How could they protect public health while planning the slow return to ‘normal’ life? How could they best guide the public to cope with differences between preand post-pandemic views of what is ‘normal’ and healthy?

The UK government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, SAGE, consisted mainly of scientific advisers to government departments, virologists, epidemiologists, statisticians and medical experts with risk management and ‘nudge’ behavioural scientists. Their expert advice varied, and was widely criticised. Just as COVID-19 starkly revealed many problems in our present unequal society, it has highlighted limitations in scientific expertise and its relations to policymaking.

Among innumerable policy decisions, just one example was prisons. There had long been campaigns to close many prisons. England and Wales had the largest prison population in Western Europe in April 2020, when there were plans for the early release of up to 4,000 of the 82,500 prisoners. Prison governors advised that thousands more prisoners should be released early. The aims were to reduce prison overcrowding and thereby reduce COVID-19 infection rates and deaths among prisoners and staff as well as in the communities around the prisons.

Instead, only 33 prisoners were released, and in a double confinement the rest were locked up in their cells for over 23 hours a day. A prison ship and 500 shipping containers were ordered to provide extra cells. The policy increased physical and mental illness and suicide rates among already severely disadvantaged social groups.