There is only one thing the nation wants to know about the pandemic, only one question the UK Covid Inquiry should be asking. Did the lockdowns work? Were the enormities we suffered – the ruined educations, the bankruptcies, the missed cancer screenings, the mental illnesses – justified by a significantly reduced death rate? Did the policy of confining people to their homes save more people than it killed? And if so, how many more?
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Before the first evidence session last week, the lawyers and officials running the inquiry had already worked their leisurely way through around £100 million. By way of contrast, during the 18 months since Baroness Hallett was first appointed as chair, Sweden opened and concluded its official investigations, digested the results and moved on.
The inefficiency of the British process vis-à-vis the Swedish one is telling. The pandemic made two things pitilessly clear about this country. First, our standing bureaucracies are useless; second, however badly officials perform, politicians always get the blame. Recall, for example, how the repeated failures of NHS procurement and Public Health England were attributed, with a neat semantic sidestep, to “the government”.
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It already seems clear that the inquiry, which finally creaked and rattled into life on Tuesday, is taking a similar approach. That, though, is not the worst of it. The worst of it is that, by framing the investigation as, in effect, “did these useless politicians prepare properly?” Lady Hallett and her team are missing the far bigger issue of whether non-pharmaceutical interventions were the right policy tool.
This matters because, sooner or later, there will be another pandemic, and the conclusions of this inquiry will shape our response to it. Just as, after the Iraq war, the Civil Service became obsessed with being Chilcott-compliant, now it will fret about being Hallett-compliant.
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There is an urgent need to cross-examine the idea of lockdown and its associated restrictions. How did the models on which the closures were based compare to real-world data? Did skewed incentives push officials into excessive authoritarianism? Did scientists’ predictions match the actual development of the disease? Did facemasks work? Did closing schools make a difference? Were we right to insist on vaccinating young people who had already acquired natural immunity?
All these questions need to be properly tested. I have my hunches, as I’m sure you do. But one thing I learned writing columns about Covid is that, on many of the above questions, it is possible to find respectable, good-faith academic studies coming to diametrically opposed conclusions.
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That is why we need proper hearings, where the SAGE advisors and leading epidemiologists are closely questioned. Otherwise, we risk going into the next panic with a policy whose efficacy has been assumed rather than demonstrated.
Sadly, the opportunity looks like it will be lost. That much became apparent when the first batch of questions – several of them polemical rather than interrogative – was sent to ministers.
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Why were facemasks not mandated from the start? Were social distancing rules strict enough? Why did Boris Johnson meet Evgeny Lebedev? (I’m going to take a wild guess here and go with “because there was an pandemic on, and he was a newspaper proprietor.”) Did the PM really use the phrase “let the bodies pile high”?
These are questions one expects from Piers Morgan or Beth Rigby, not from a former Court of Appeal judge. It appears that the inquiry is going to turn into a prolonged version of one of those imbecilic Downing Street briefings when, instead of asking about the nature of the disease or the efficacy of the responses, broadcasters lined up with babyish gotchas along the lines of “Aha! But haven’t you just contradicted your Minister for Widgets?”
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We learned last week that witnesses to the inquiry, as well as staff, will be required to take lateral flow tests. At first, I thought the report was a spoof. Covid-19 is an endemic disease, for heaven’s sake. Testing for it makes no more sense than testing for measles. Yet the inquiry solemnly tells us: “Though the UK government no longer requires people to self-isolate if they test positive for Covid-19, we are asking those who test positive to stay away from the hearings.”
There is a reason the UK Government, along with every other government in the world, dropped the self-isolation rule. The coronavirus has spread through the population, becoming milder in the process. It will come back every winter, along with the Spanish Flu virus, the Asian Flu virus, and hundreds of other rhinoviruses, adenoviruses and, indeed, coronaviruses that we now call “colds”.
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Yet the people running the inquiry believe – or at least affect to believe – that it must be treated differently from other diseases. Such people, I put it to you, are unlikely to spend much time exploring the possibility that the restrictions were excessive.
Sure enough, proceedings on the first day were farcical. The counsel representing the bereaved families wondered whether NHS underfunding had contributed to the crisis (never mind that spending on the NHS had been rising). The inquiry’s chief lawyer, Hugo Keith KC, seemed to suggest that ministers’ focus on Brexit had distracted them from working out a pandemic strategy.
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Never mind the evidence that things would have been worse without no-deal contingency planning. The fact is that we had a pandemic strategy. That strategy had been worked out in detail in cooler-headed times, and was based on a controlled spread of such a virus until enough of us had acquired natural immunity. The real question is why we were panicked out of following it.
Sweden, which borrowed Britain’s pandemic plan and then stuck to it, ended up with one of the lowest excess-mortality rates – according to an extrapolation from OECD data, the lowest rate – in the developed world in 2020 and 2021.
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Naturally, the inquiry has thus far displayed not the slightest interest in Sweden. Instead, it asks Johnson whether he had considered “taking more stringent measures in response to Covid-19 such as those seen in, for example, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand etc?” I think we can all see where this is headed.
Regular readers will know that I always thought the closures unjustified. I loathed the way the burden of proof was reversed, so that those of us who opposed the unprecedented policy of house arrest were expected to show that our approach wasn’t dangerous. Nothing I have learned since has changed my mind.
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Then again, maybe I am missing something. Maybe the alternatives would have been worse. Maybe letting exams go ahead, or letting people sit on park benches, or taking the padlocks off playgrounds, would have had some monstrous impact. If so, then let’s hear why – because we sure as hell never heard any serious argument for these policies at the time.
The experts need to prove their case. Brandishing their credentials doesn’t work any more. We heard them contradict themselves over herd immunity, then over facemasks. We watched Neil Ferguson, whose work was so influential in encouraging ministers to impose lockdown on the rest of us, break the rules to pursue an affair. We read the letter by 1,288 epidemiologists and public health officials saying that, although everyone must stay home, it was different if they felt like going out to join a Black Lives Matter protest.
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Boris Johnson called the Privileges Committee a kangaroo court. I won’t say the same of the UK Covid Inquiry, not least because it lacks the two very real advantages of that type of tribunal, namely speed and economy. But it does look horribly as if it has reached its verdict before the cross-examinations begin.
