Have Your Say

What this report proves is that 192 million Quid buys an awful lot of utter bollocks!

From the Daily Telegraph:
Lady Hallett’s latest Covid inquiry report should not be cast aside lightly. It should be thrown aside with great force. In wearisome detail, and at the price of £192 million so far, it does nothing but reinforce the conventional wisdom. It alights upon the easy, convenient explanation, as we knew it always would. It shows a complete lack of intellectual curiosity about important elements of the pandemic. And it goes with the flow of the besetting tendency of this country’s governing class, that of closing ranks against criticism and blaming outsiders. 
And so the story it gives is the easy one. Boris Johnson ran a chaotic government, ignored advice, locked down too late, and killed 23,000 people. It will stick, because so many people want to believe it. That doesn’t make it right.
The fundamental question that we still need answered, and which this report does not answer, is whether lockdowns saved lives. Were they the right response to a disease with a fatality rate of between 0.1 per cent and 0.5 per cent? If we don’t learn this then the whole inquiry is a waste of time, because it has given us no guidance as to what to do if it happens again.  
Instead, the point which the report should be interrogating is simply taken as read. It just assumes that lockdowns are necessary and worthwhile, and is far too trusting of modelling that we now know was simply too alarmist. “Modelling has established”, they say, that an earlier lockdown would have saved 23,000 deaths. In fact modelling has established no such thing and it now seems that infection levels were actually falling as we went into that spring 2020 lockdown.  
At the other end of the pandemic, the 2021 “omicron” lockdown that never was, the inquiry’s judgement is similarly skewed. Here, surely, the Government was right to judge that a lockdown was not necessary, since the hospitalisations and deaths never got anywhere near the alarmist predictions of Vallance and Whitty. Yet the inquiry says only, and incredibly, that “the UK government’s approach in this period was, once again, overly optimistic.” What? “If the vaccines had been less effective or the Omicron variant as severe as previous variants … the consequences would have been disastrous.” But it wasn’t. It was clear at the time it wasn’t. It was so obvious to me that I resigned in protest against more measures. Yet the inquiry’s view seems to be we should have locked down anyway just in case. This is nuts. 
Now of course mistakes were made over this period. It would hardly be surprising if they hadn’t. The British government nearly collapsed in March and April 2020 as all the leading players got Covid, a fact which gets remarkably little consideration in this report. But the main mistake was not being too complacent, as the inquiry report seems to think, but being too alarmist.  
During 2020 and 2021 no proper feedback loop was ever established between real world outcomes, as opposed to modelling, and actions. So when crises came, the same things were done again and again. Little attention was paid to other countries’ experiences. There was reluctance to accept obvious facts, for example that the vaccine did not prevent transmission but only mitigated the severity of infection. And measures were taken not on their merits but to scare people: indeed a turning point for me was being in a meeting in mid-2020 which we were told that masks had no meaningful effect but should be required anyway “to remind everyone we were in a pandemic”.  
But the basic problem, never properly addressed, is that if your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like a nail. The inquiry thinks the only tool against the virus was dramatic reductions in social contact, and therefore each time the government refused to rush into taking them, it was culpable. 
Yet lockdowns are a dramatic intrusion into normal human life. They are bound to cause huge collateral harm, in economic life, in other health conditions, in psychological harms. And so they have. The vast cost of paying people to stay at home pushed UK debt up by 20 per cent of GDP in just a couple of years, and has reinforced a collectivist mentality that will continue to cause this country huge damage.  
The inquiry believes that somehow human activity can “control” an airborne virus, a level of hubris about human powers that is entirely unjustified by events. It scoffs at the alternative strategy of the Great Barrington Declaration. It is dismissive of the Swedish parallel, arguing that the Swedes took some measures too. Of course they did. But there is a big difference between the advisory Swedish measures and locking people in their homes by law. And the Swedish outcomes are still better than ours: you can’t argue your way out of that, so the inquiry just ignores it instead.
Shame on you and your inquiry, Lady Hallett. You had all the resources of the state at your disposal and yet you have told us nothing useful. One day the work will need to be done properly. Until that point, we can safely cast aside your conclusions.