Mick Hartley

The papers were all over the Covid Inquiry yesterday, headlining that 23,000 extra dead that Boris Johnson was supposedly guilty of. It’s simplistic nonsense, of course. Does anyone actually remember the pandemic and the lockdown? It was chaos; it was unprecedented. People from all sides were screaming at the government—do this, no do that. Even the science advisers were all over the place. Johnson – quite rightly – was horrified at the idea of a lockdown. How can you possibly shut society down, confine people to their homes? It’s insane. It wasn’t till he was advised that the health service wouldn’t be able to cope, and thousands and thousands would be dying, that he finally acted.

Yes, there was bumbling and there was chaos, and it wasn’t wonderful. But does anyone seriously think that a different government would have done much better? This lot, under Starmer? It was an impossible situation. But we all hate Boris, so let’s blame him – and ignore all the larger questions. It’s all so easy with the benefit of hindsight.

Ross Clark in the Spectator:

The biggest lesson to come out of the first report of the official Covid Inquiry is what a mistake it was to hand to job to lawyers. They have interpreted their job as one of conducting a show trial of politicians, civil servants and advisers who were involved in handling the pandemic. They have obsessed with the processes of decision-making in Downing Street, and with the characters of the people involved. Baroness Hallett’s address to the nation from a large swivel chair was an extraordinary dystopian vision of a Britain in which democracy has been replaced by a kritarchy – rule by judges.

Fraser Nelson in the Times

Did lockdown work? Was it necessary to send police after dog-walkers, to close play parks and borders, to fine women drinking coffee together? Five years after the pandemic, it ought to be possible to take a calm, detached view of all this, given that we now, quite literally, have a world of data to draw from. Instead, we ended up with the £160,000-a-day Hallett inquiry, which is proving to be a prime example of the way science can be bent towards politics.

Had Britain locked down a week earlier, it says, 23,000 lives could have been saved in the first wave, something it says has been “established” by modelling. But this is the flaw. Nothing is, or can be, proven by hypothetical models. They are guesses, hugely sensitive to the inputs. This particular figure is from a deeply controversial paper by Imperial’s Neil Ferguson, whose assumptions were shown in later studies to be stretched. If more widely-accepted inputs were used, the 23,000 figure disappears. And with it, perhaps, the case for lockdown.

It’s as though the central premise of the inquiry was always to show that lockdown was the correct response, and to damn all those who showed the slightest hesitation. Meanwhile, the most important questions were avoided.

The central question is whether all these school closures, mask mandates, stay-at-home orders etc actually worked. We also need to know whether the scientific advisory system that recommended them is fit for purpose. But the inquiry took as its premise Ferguson’s most controversial claim: that lockdown is a super-tool that induces an instant, cliff-edge fall in Covid infections….

The certainty that Baroness Hallett oozes in her report seems to be, to put it politely, not supported by data. Yet overstating the power of lockdowns and erasing the uncertainty around them risks pointing future pandemic responses toward these blunt, costly tools. Her suggestion that next time it’s best to go harder earlier — with tools that fall short of lockdown — would make more sense if she had produced any hard evidence that this would work. World over, it’s still a horribly open question.