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July 18, 2024 - 5:30pm
The Covid inquiry has this afternoon published a full report on its first module, assessing the resilience and preparedness of the UK’s pandemic response. It has so far been met with apparently predetermined headlines of how the UK Government failed its citizens by “preparing for the wrong pandemic”, and that the country was “ill-prepared”. The impact of austerity meant that this was certainly true — but the currently unreported and biggest story in the report is its wholesale attack on the lockdown approach itself.
Baroness Hallett’s full report contains remarkable criticisms of the Government’s preferred lockdown policy, which was also adopted across the world. Far from stating that the UK should have locked down sooner and harder, as many predicted, Hallett’s team has concluded that “the imposition of a lockdown should be a measure of last resort […] indeed, there are those who would argue that a lockdown should never be imposed.”
Strikingly, the initial media reactions have barely anything to say about the report’s conclusions on lockdowns, just as the word “lockdown” was not mentioned once in the WHO’s September 2019 report on non-pharmaceutical interventions in pandemics. This is because, though it’s long been an article of faith in these circles that earlier and harder lockdowns were the solution, this is not the conclusion that the report comes to. Instead, Baroness Hallett has concluded that there were devastating failings in imposing lockdown in the first place.
First, the report highlights the fact that lockdowns were untested as a means for responding to a pandemic. One section notes that former chancellor George Osborne “said that no one had thought that a policy response up to and including lockdowns was possible until China had commenced one in 2020, and so there was no reason for the Treasury to plan for it”. This confirms the initial reports in outlets such as the Washington Post that China’s response was “unprecedented”.
There is also extensive weight given to the evidence of epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University, who is quoted as telling the inquiry that lockdown “was an ad hoc public health intervention contrived in real time in the face of a fast-moving public health emergency. We had not planned to introduce lockdown […] there were no guidelines for when a lockdown should be implemented and no clear expectations as to what it would achieve.”
Even more importantly, the report for the first module emphasises that one of the failures of the “ad hoc” lockdown approach was that its novelty meant there was no time to interrogate its consequences. The inquiry notes that “if countermeasures in the form of non-pharmaceutical interventions are not considered in advance […] their potential side effects will not be subject, in advance, to rigorous scrutiny.” In other words, the imposition of ill-prepared policies meant that there was no chance for politicians and the public to interrogate what the consequences would be, a weakness the UK Government has only acknowledged since the end of the pandemic.
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SubscribeHmm. Interesting and welcome development. I’m glad the curtain is being lifted on the devastating impact of lockdowns, but it doesn’t really jive with the lockdown harder and faster narrative we heard from talking heads testifying at the inquiry.
Why lockdown to an airborne virus anyway? It was pathetic that they took that route but left the Airports open. Talk about being thick headed.
Are you an epidemiologist or you know anything about the transmission of viruses? The people on SAGE were anything but thick. But the key issue was that their remit was to control covid to the exclusion of almost everything else.
Read Mark Woolhouse’s book “The Year The World Went Mad” It is excellent, taking issue with the extremes of “lockdown is the only solution” versus “it’s a scamdemic created so that governments can control people (China manages to do this quite effectively without any pandemic!) that has been so depressing about the response to covid.
Shutting down international travel might have bought vital time, but only IF it been done very early say January 2020 but as Mark Woolhouse himself says, the likelihood that any politician in any party or any section of the public would have supported that at the time is remote.
The politicians got many things wrong but imposing severe restrictions on foreign holidays when there were no cases identified in the country would have been politically almost impossible. By March 2020 the contributions of International travel was negligible because the circulation of the virus was so widespread in the country by. If you know about the rules of exponential growth it’s the earlier introductions that have the most effect.
Later on you could again have justified restrictions on international travel – as was done – because of more contagious variants. But you only have to think about the huge amount of international trade that we are completely dependent on including food, gods and fuel imports much of which driven by lorry drivers to realise that in the long-term the virus was going to get in.
Well gym those people were only giving evidence. I know quite a few people on this forum are now of a completely conspiratorial mindset, but the evidence given by individuals an inquiry isn’t exactly the same thing as the conclusions reached by it.
The WHO’s September 2019 guidelines (not a “report”), based on decades of experience, explicitly say that movement restrictions, closure of schools and travel bans do not work; a small island with perfect control of individuals’ movements might be able to delay a pandemic by a number of weeks, but otherwise, the efforts are futile in terms of limiting the spread and counterproductive as public health measures.
To say that there was “no time to interrogate the consequences” of “lockdown” (not an epidemiological term) is a lie. The state of science in 2019 knew that the measures would not work, and emphatically counselled against applying them.
I think the Chinese had this apocalyptic response to the outbreak either because knew they were dealing with the lab leak of a virus but they did not know which of the variously lethal viruses had been leaked, or simply because that is the Chinese way of doing things. Regardless, next came the response of the western countries which, out of panic at the highest levels, started to mindlessly ape what the Chinese were doing initially. With a few exceptions, such as Sweden or a few US states, which were savagely criticized but eventually ended up vindicated.
I’m sure that’s a large part of it.
I was initially quite worried myself, since there was a strong indication that the agent could have been a gain-of-function-juiced-up biological warfare weapon. Until I listened to Luc Montagnier (now sadly deceased), who blithely said that viruses-as-weapons development regularly ran into the problem that viruses mutate extremely fast, and in the process of mutation tend to shed any insertions made. Within at most two weeks, all insertions were gone. All of which makes eminent sense, if you believe in natural selection.
By mid-April, when the Diamond Princess data were available, we essentially knew everything we needed to know about the outbreak. Nearly all the idiotic measures were introduced after that date, so there is no real excuse.
You guys and your echo chamber, it’s classic reading tbh.
I’ve previously posted on here that the UK pandemic plan was the ‘wrong’ plan, as it was based on flu and made various assumptions which flowed from that, and turned out to be not valid for covid.
This is generally met with conspiracy logic that the pandemic plan was fine, but ignored so ‘they’ could learn how to control us.
The article above refers to the UK pandemic plan being unsuitable for the pandemic we actually had, which seems to be the aspect most of the media is going with, but instead chooses to focus on lockdown. That the plans weren’t going to work is not even news really, this was known and discussed in the media right at the start of the pandemic. The writers at Unherd sure know how to play for their audience…
That’s not to say lockdown didn’t cause massive harm and given what we know now things would’ve been handled differently. But after the fact knowledge is very different to trying to work things out at the time.
We knew before hand but exercise Cygnus was abandoned. All the things that needed to be done should have been explained daily but weren’t which led to a lot of theories. Such as various versions of =whether PPE was necessary and that Covid is a myth the vaccine is full of microchips etc. And Sir Keir didn’t exactly do to much in the way of giving sound advice, instead thousands of pounds was wasted needlessly
Exercise Cygnus, like the pandemic plan, was based on flu (a treatable disease) and not a hitherto unknown (and untreatable) disease like covid. That’s why it was abandoned like the pandemic plan was.
There was constant coverage of the pandemic in the early days. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict what bonkers nonsense conspiracy theorists are going to come up with. If people want to believe covid is a myth when there’s a covid pandemic going on around them then there’s not a lot you can do. Similarly for vaccines being full of microchips – if people are going to believe such idiocy there’s really not much you can do about it.
As for face masks I assume it’s due to different interpretations of what people mean by ‘it works’. Individuals seem to think it means it works for them as an individual, whereas what is actually meant is that they help reduce transmission, so instead of 10 people being infected by an ill person in the supermarket, only 9 would be.
Covid was definitely not a myth. Soon people who had a bad reaction to the original virus will get auto immune reactions to reinfections. Sad to say amongst the non believers here this Pandemic is not over and it will only get worse, so sayeth the people who have not taken their eye off the ball. For instance what is the latest variant? By the time you have answered it will have mutated into something else. That’s how bad it has become.
How is a public enquiry an ‘echo chamber’?
Robbie – You are on this site so often, I would really hope you’d picked up the purpose by now! Tsk tsk.
You’re supposed to write something constructive or perhaps learn from the wisdom of others to get a fresh insight. You’re welcome to share your wisdom on why lockdowns were imposed worldwide even though all the previous science said that they didn’t work
The cruise ships turned our to be excellent places to look to see how the virus behaved. They were in a sense self contained “lab experiments”. Despite the fact that they contain people who are older than average, the death rates on them were not particularly high, which ought to have alerted us to the fact that the virus was not as bad as had been made out.
A good point Martin. Perhaps their access to Sun topped up their Vitamin D reservoir which protected them from Death.
10 out of 700 died, of those healthy enough to go in a cruise,and elderly enough to afford it.. Thank you fir renembering that.
The UK went into lockdown at the end of March, before mid-April
The Diamond Princess data should have been a primer on how to move forward.
It was ignored at best, suppressed at worst.
The Chinese response was draconian because that’s the way the Communist Party responds to any threat.
That supposedly free countries blindly copied them is a scandal.
The CCP treats people like we treat cattle, and I don’t like the way we treat cattle!
If they thought they could get away with it, they would have culled the population of Wuhan.
In the UK it is the other way around. Cattle in this Country have access to the body reservoir form Calicifidiol (Vitamin D) But The devious MHRA will not sanction this for Humans. This was the form medics used in ICU’s in Many Countries but not the UK. Most survived as it stopped the virus in it’s tracks. You can purchase Calcifidiol in Italy, Spain, France to name a few from Chemists without prescription. The tablet form Cholecalciferol is only available here and takes around two weeks to become a reservoir form after extra hydroxyls are added from the liver. If we had used Calcidifiol in our ICU’s there would have been less deaths. It is through an enzymatic process that it is transformed into Calcitriol in no more than an hour and controls our Immune system.
The one saving grace for the Chinese was that they used a killed whole virus for their vaccine As such they have not suffered the same fate of the West with Stringy white amyloid clots in people’s arteries and .veins, vasculitis ,myocarditis, pericarditis and so on from the mRNA vaccines. Have we gone mad?
The problem with lockdown is that those who imposed it did not experience it. If Matt Hancock had spent a week in a 5th floor flat with two children and a computer and a phone, then been told to work from home and simultaneously home school the children, lockdown would have ended much sooner. Some in charge clearly enjoyed the attention and their power.
Don’t blame Hancock – he was just “following the science”. Pin the blame where it belongs on the expert advice of our new Minister of Science – Lord Vallance of Balham since 5 July 2024
We shouldn’t forget Susan Mitchie, the aristocracy of British Communism. We should expect a communist response once such a bad apple is introduced. In many ways she was a metaphor for the whole of the Conservative’s 14 years. Now she holds office in The WHO which is probably even more to her liking than the so called Conservative Party.
If you have no other option lockdowns certainly restrict the transmission of virus so to badly say that they do not work in any circumstances is untrue. They can’t possibly be imposed for month and years at a time because then the costs of doing so become enormous as has been proved the case. The time dimension is important.
The problem that I have with so many of the covid skeptics (I think skeptic is usually the wrong word; many of them are conspiracists) – they don’t only oppose lockdowns but any measures whatsoever to restrict transmission they often oppose vaccination programs which clearly have had a beneficial effect and they oppose test and trace as well – and individual quarantine!!
“no one had thought that a policy response up to and including lockdowns was possible until China had commenced one in 2020”
Seems like they built the virus, so some could be forgiven for taking their reaction to containment quite seriously….
Again, the WHO’s 2019 guidance says that containment is impossible (once the virus has escaped a small, controllable environment). It has never worked.
Neil Ferguson of Imperial College (he who can’t keep his trousers zipped and was instrumental in creating the 2001 foot-and-mouth debacle) said it appropriately: “Until the Chinese did it, we did not think we could get away with it.”
I’m pleased to hear that the lockdown axiom is finally being critically assessed. That it was a novel approach and therefore the risks were not properly considered in advance, is uncontroversial.
But there was a chance to interrogate the approach on the hoof, when we were in the thick of it. How that chance of a discussion and a change of approach was strangled and the human and financial costs which resulted from ploughing ahead with lockdowns undeterred – I’d like to see that being publicly discussed. It would be enormously cathartic.
Indeed it would, not least since the way in which the msm reported it whilst exhorting for “sooner and harder”, paving the way for the precipitous rise in “woke” journalism that we’ve been faced with ever since, including the iniquitous “fact checking” industry with its inherent biases, well-publicised recently by Unherd. The trends were already in play, but were turbocharged by the pandemic and the way journalists assumed the mantle of rabble-rousers during the daily Downing Street press conferences.
Re “novel approach”…
It was a medical experiment. As such, it breached nine out of the ten Nuremberg Code principles (the tenth did not apply).
I think that time will come when enough years have passed for people to forget how they acted, what they supported, and convince themselves they “always” thought certain things were a bad idea. Nobody really wants to scrutinize it because too many were fully on board with it – so it wouldn’t just mean criticizing those in charge; it would also mean admitting their own mistakes and inherent faults. Not many people are capable of that. They need enough distance for their memories to blur into a more flattering image of themselves.
tragically the word ‘sheeple” is so apposite to many of these kinds of situations – I THINk it was Jung who said that perhaps less than 5% of the population ever seem to develop the ability to question and think for themselves – and therefore HS sapiens are doomed in these situations un til those numbers improve dramatically……………..probably best just to stay at home for a few hundred/thousand ? years !
I agree. A serious and widespread discussion should be had about the role of politicians, scientists and the media in the way measures were or rather weren’t talked about. It’s just as serious an issue as the lockdowns themselves.
And yet Starmer has just ennobled Ballance and made him a government minister.
A very peculiar interpretation from the author.
Park for a moment if you can whether lockdowns were ‘good or bad’, what came out of the report today was most likely the complete opposite – which was that interventions came too slow and too late and containment measures should be implemented hard and fast, such as the approach that was taken by South Korea.
I suspect future policy will be based on such comparisons.
A brief analysis from a more neutral source:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2440207-why-the-uk-was-so-ill-prepared-for-the-covid-19-pandemic/
Nothing in the article you linked to is contrary to what this essay states. It emphasizes different things. The sense I got about South Korea is that it was more successful at testing and tracing.
Yes, and containment. It’s fanciful to suggest that future policy will be anything other than decisive mitigation, if taking notice of this report.
The reason that South Korea ultimately had fewer deaths was because the populace is fitter, weighs less and has a healthier diet. Few countries are as unhealthy as the US and UK. In South Africa there was only a veneer of a lockdown in the middle and upper classes. For the majority it was business as usual because it had to be. Wake up to your elitist sneering.
Intriguing notions. They don’t seem to be present in this report. Perhaps you just, well, made it all up?
Containment of course doesn’t necessarily imply general lockdowns. If you test and trace properly, you can theoretically avoid general lockdowns.
True
There’s the rub. The test was a complete farce – the PCR process is not an appropriate methodology for a test, none of the tests were ever validated, and there was a huge discrepancy in such crucial issues as number of cycles, and to make it worse kept on changing. Basically, the whole “Covid Testing” boondoggle was pure theatre, without any scientific value or validity whatsoever.
Tracing is an effective tool when the mode of transmission is clearly understood and traceable. It works especially with venereal diseases.
With upper respiratory tract infections, transmitted by aerosols, such as those caused by influenza, RSV, and coronaviruses, contact tracing is a hiding to nothing.
Again, all this was laid out in the WHO’s 2019 guidance.
Never forget, never forgive.
Gareth Southgate?
Well, we’ve just let in (I’m hesitant to say elected, as turn out was so low) a party that wanted to lockdown even harder, so I guess we have already forgotton.
Those parts of the report are very positive – surprisingly so, given what we heard people telling the enquiry.
Unfortunately, the report’s overall conclusions do not appear to endorse the plan that the UK had up to 2019 – it does not say “Keep calm and carry on”, and instead says that a lot of effort should go into planning for future pandemics.
I’m not sure if a Coronavirus epidemic really differs from an Influenza epidemic very much, but that’s one of the reasons why they claim the old plan wasn’t the right one.
The danger is that ministers, civil servants and ‘expert modellers’ might use the planning exercises to propose draconian powers for themselves, and to set a very low bar for the imposition of those powers.
But refuse to close flights from the centre of Covid.
The difference between flu and covid was that, at the start of the pandemic, we had some treatments for flu (it being a very familiar disease) but not covid (it being new). That’s why it was abandoned.
Here’s a tale from a well respected Oncologist and virologist Prof Angus Dalgleish. He treats people with melanoma cancers. He treats them using a mycobacteria vaccine. So these people whose immune systems were poor is tremendously boosted by this bacterium, During the initial Covid none of his patients went down with the disease or Flu, while Doctors and Consultants around them were dropping like flies. Prof Dalgleish tried to get approval for this vaccine for Covid but was turned down by the MHRA. From all of the patients he treated there was Zero adverse reactions. This is what we are up against.
Is that the vaccine manufactured by the company he has shares in?
“…the best candidate for vaccine development was the Norwegian Biovacc-19. Also that Dalgleish had been given stock options in the company Immunor which held the patents for this vaccine due to his significant involvement in the research behind its development”
Johnson caved in to pressure on so many fronts from Covidites, not just once but several times. He was a weak leader that should have stuck to the original pandemic plan, instead he buckled. God alone knows what would happen under a Labour government, but it would be even more severe and authoritarian.
I agree with your comments about Johnson but not necessarily about a Labour government.
“Baroness Hallett has concluded that there were devastating failings in imposing lockdown in the first place.”
Here’s what the report says in para. 4.22
“The Inquiry accepts that the imposition of a lockdown (the features and consequences of which are being addressed in detail in Module 2) should be a measure of last resort. Indeed, there are those who would argue that a lockdown should never be imposed. However, for as long as they remain a possibility, lockdowns should be considered properly in advance of a novel infectious disease outbreak. There should be consideration of the interventions that can and should be deployed to prevent a lockdown but also of the circumstances in which a lockdown may become necessary. There should be adequate planning as to which aspects of legal coercion to protect the public may be used and transparency about what the government intends to do in the event of a health emergency. This is a subject the Inquiry is examining in subsequent modules”
I was in China in a city of over 4 million people which locked down for just 22 days from 1st February 2020. I have posted here about my experience and will do so again because that period of 22 days was a real time experiment about which the report by The Rt Hon the Baroness Hallett DBE, Chair of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry is completely silent.
If Covid had come along in 2000 rather than 2020 there would have been no lockdowns, social distancing etc. because those measures rely on near-universal access to a well developed internet. In 2020, shops would have needed to stay open or go bust, office workers would have needed to go to work, use the trains and buses, go to cafes and canteens for lunch, have a pint while waiting for their train home, etc. etc. etc. The Government would have had to focus on managing the hospitals on an emergency basis while encouraging the rest of us to carry on as normally as possible.
But governments are bound to be under pressure from the media and the public to do everything they can feasibly do to protect people, and given that the internet had massively increased our ability to take protective steps (e.g. through WFH) it was inevitable that there would be demands for those measures once people realised they were possible. And once a lockdown had been imposed the polarity of normal life had been reversed, and the Government had to justify reopening things rather than vice versa. In that sense we were the victims of our technology.
Where does this leave Labour’s Science Minister ?
The truly annoying thing about all of this was that it was all said at the time and suppressed. The first advisory reports from the Imperial College advised against trying for mass suppression (although it was quickly required to reverse its position), and leading Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis publicly worried in March 2020 that lockdowns could be a terrible mistake. He also was quickly silenced. For some time Google searches of his name made no mention of his medical standing. He was a mere “Greek writer.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-worsened-america-rage-virus-for-which-theres-no-vaccine-lockdown-vaccine-mandates-ron-desantis-stanford-masking-2670cd39?st=xtzcmwb75vcsms2&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
No one needs to admit lockdowns were wrong. After “15 days to flatten the curve” (such a profoundly arbitrary number, it was false on its face), it was clear as Windex that lockdowns were unnecessary. They WERE the test of how far government could push the lemmings.
The one good thing about lockdowns is that it forced many of us to open our eyes.
I was convinced that in first world countries things and procedures were entirely different from how is done in 3rd world countries like my native Venezuela.
I no longer think that. They were just better at hiding the dirt in 1st world countries. The lockdowns showed me that and changed forever my attitude toward government anywhere.
What amazes me is these people have selective hearing. Yes we did not know what was coming then but it transpires the virus which was concocted in a Wuhan Lab had a patent on it dating back to 2016. When the Australian Nikolai Petrovsky done computer modelling on the new Virus and searched for the animal reservoir. he found it to be human as in human cells genetically enhanced in Mice. When he reported his findings he was attacked by his own Scientific community. Hallet is barking up the wrong tree.
This whole pandemic is slowly unwinding with its key figures Billionaire Bill and the disastrous Fauci enforcing the Gene Vaccines which have caused the innumerous damage to people way above the damage from the AZ vaccine.
These people need to be brought to account. Personally I have signed up to the Hope accord as a concerned citizen. Take a look at its objectives and you’ll see where we have gone wrong
https://thehopeaccord.org/
The MSM here certainly won’t report honestly on Hallett. It was clear to me from the end of January 2020 that a pandemic was coming (I said to my wife on a flight home from abroad on 26th January 2020 that we would have to cancel all our plans for 2020 and that we might never fly again) but I never even considered the possibility of a lockdown (although I did consider the possibility that either or both of us might die). I can understand why the first lockdown took place (the first three words in “pandemic” are “pan” as in “panic”) but not after that. Govts. today lack the courage to tell (middle class) people, as they would have in the past, that life and death must go on, even in a pandemic. Had Trump and Johnson not been non-persons the issue might have been considered rationally. Govts. in future must learn how to stand up to public health doctors, who have a legitimate point of view but it is only one point of view.
If the lockdown was a mistake, it was a necessary mistake.
It couldn’t be a mistake if it was necessary. It is possible to argue that the first lockdown was necessary but none after that.
There were many, many voices, that UnHerd followed, stating the collateral damage of ‘lockdowns’, that they should at all costs be avoided, including those three signatories to The Great Barrington Declaration, all interviewed many times on UnHerd. The ‘lockdowns’ gave us inflation – broken public services and many other societal issues, that wealth could navigate. It was a perfect example of the Solomon Asch experiment of the 50’s where the individual cannot walk away from a majority group dynamic. The synopsis ? that around 75% of people will agree with majority opinion, at least once, knowing it to be wrong. And people means politicians, their advisors and us. I asked Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya at an UnHerd event if either thought this relevant – they both readily agreed.