![]() It may not be popular to say it, but if we’re serious about learning lessons, which would mean fewer unnecessary deaths in the future, then this has to be a dispassionate, even-handed, analytical examination of the events of March 2020 onwards. Will any attention be given to the media – especially the broadcast media – and their complicity in pushing for the suspension of liberties and creating a wider climate of sensationalism?Ĭrucially, will the inquiry major on “lockdown theology” – debates about whether we locked down too late, or unlocked too soon – at the expense of broader questions like whether lockdown was worth it in the first place? And even if the inquiry were to conclude that indiscriminate lockdowns were damaging, and closing schools a grave mistake, would our policy response be any different should another Covid-like virus materialise over the next few years? ![]() What of the lack of examination of the likely collateral costs of lockdown, and the manner in which Parliament was quickly shut down, and for months barely performed a rubber stamp role? What was the purpose of the UK’s lockdown strategy after the initial flattening of the curve? For much of 2020, many policy-makers knew that outdoor mixing wasn’t driving transmission. Questions such as why the UK’s previous pandemic planning, emphasising advice rather than coercive measures, was so quickly jettisoned in 2020. An alarming 17 current and former members of the pro-lockdown pressure group Independent Sage have been asked to give evidence so far apparently compared to only a couple of voices on the opposing side.Īs such, many burning questions may not even be asked. There are no obvious potential lockdown critics among the inquiry’s “core participants”, who are drawn mainly from Covid support networks, special-interest groups, trade unions, health and governmental authorities. But given the make-up of witnesses, and its unfolding agenda, any serious reckoning looks unlikely. ![]() The inquiry must be willing to challenge such orthodoxies and question why sceptical voices were so often excluded from the debate. Certainly, the fallout from Partygate suggested that lockdown was widely seen as fundamentally correct it was only the personal conduct of politicians that was at fault. The idea that the biggest suppression of individual and corporate freedom in living memory represents a case of “too little too late” has become a widespread mantra in public health thinking and public discourse. This development epitomises concerns about the inquiry’s scope, focus and direction. In asserting that Covid remains a far more serious threat than virtually any other public body currently believes it to be, the inquiry betrayed a subtle bias before the hearings had even begun. A small thing, perhaps, but the implications are obvious. But not so the official Covid inquiry, which is reportedly requesting that hearing attendees take lateral flow tests – more than a year after the Government scrapped free testing and mandatory self-isolation. Think of all those ghost signs to wartime air-raid shelters in our cities or even the abiding flim-flam of the Covid-19 pandemic gratuitous hand-wash dispensers in public places, faded instructions to maintain social distance on pavements.įor most of us, these seem equally outmoded indeed, you’d think someone was odd if they insisted on sleeping in an Anderson Shelter every night, just in case the Luftwaffe were up to their old tricks again. We are used to the paraphernalia of “fears past” in our lives. ![]() Amid editions of The Spectator dating back to the Iraq War and a copy of Ace Magazine with Pete Sampras on the cover, I discovered a stash of Cold War-era “Protect and Survive” pamphlets. ![]() My mother’s recent absence on holiday provided the perfect opportunity to embark on a seemingly impossible task – clearing out the Augean stables of a hoarder’s study. ![]()
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