Proposal of the vote of thanks for ‘Statistics in times of increasing uncertainty’, Sylvia Richardson's Presidential Address

Abstract

I would like to thank Sylvia for a wonderful Presidential Address tonight. It feels like a different world from my own Presidential address delivered in the first year of my presidency in June 2019. In it, I concluded that the RSS for nearly 200 years has at its heart been about using data for the public good, while developing the statistical science and building the statistical capacity required to do that. My Presidential predecessors had identified many challenges that are still with us. In addition, I opined that we faced important new challenges. These include providing health and social care for people with increasing levels of multimorbidity, coupled with the pensions' crisis as people are living longer lives and also the effects of climate change as two areas where statisticians can make contributions. Those challenges have not gone away but, as Sylvia so eloquently describes, we had no idea of the scale of new challenge that was about to hit us.

Just over 6 months later, the world changed beyond recognition with the advent of SARS-CoV-2. Statisticians, along with many others, tried to get to grips and contribute to a huge range of issues in timelines and in a context that is unprecedented. As President, I was hugely grateful to Sylvia and David Spiegelhalter for agreeing to co-chair the RSS's Covid-19 Task Force, which co-ordinated the Society's response, as well as the group undertaking fearsome amounts of work themselves. Sylvia's magisterial Presidential address documents and reflects on the extraordinary work done under their leadership.

Building on some of Sylvia's themes, I would like to make some personal reflections on how the scientific community, including statisticians, achieved such a lot in such a short time, and to me, the key is a firm grounding of principles and preparedness, coupled with flexibility and agility. Sylvia mentions the REACT studies, and to declare my interests, I was an investigator in those. The reason the team was able to mount those studies so well and so quickly was combination of prior experience in large population studies in other clinical areas, combined with a huge logistical exercise between academic, government and private partners, the scale of which I only now fully appreciate. The pace of data coming in, reports being drafted, headlines feeding into policy arenas, then full reports being put in the public domain within days was in complete contrast to the painstaking ways epidemiologists traditionally work, but gave rise to a huge sense of satisfaction. The Covid19 Task Force generously played a pivotal role at the development stage of the REACT protocols, giving helpful critical feedback to improve the study designs by return that would normally take months through the normal academic grant-giving process.

In my own presidential address, I had presciently flagged up adaptive platform trials, describing them as the evolution of the Rothamsted ‘long-term experiments’. Sylvia highlights the RECOVERY trial, which was a platform trial in hospitalised patients that gave rapid answers on multiple therapies quickly enough that the care of subsequent patients could be improved. There are also two sister adaptive trials, REMAP-CAP in intensive care patients with COVID, and PRINCIPLE in people in the community. I had chaired the Data Monitoring Committee for the latter, which provided me with huge intellectual stimulation on a regular basis, even meeting weekly at the height of the pandemic. These complex trials were also set up in record-breaking time, and this was possible because of extensive prior experience in other clinical areas, REMAP-CAP building on the existing REMAP study in intensive care patients, and PRINCIPLE being developed by essentially the same team that had been responsible for ALICE, an adaptive platform trial in pandemic influenza. These all bought together scientific design, novel statistical approaches and overcoming fearsome logistic challenges, including fast-tracking by ethics and regulatory agencies and use of novel recruitment strategies to improve outcomes for people with Covid. The astonishingly rapid development, testing and deployment of vaccines were also based on extensive scientific and statistical investment prior to the pandemic.

Sylvia's address reflects thoughtfully and wisely on the past 2 years but is also forward looking in ensuring the Society is well-positioned to address other major existing and emerging challenges. Pivotally to our Society, these include strategic engagement with data science. As her Presidential address bears testament, Sylvia has been an extraordinary President for extraordinary times, and it gives me the greatest pleasure to propose the vote of thanks.