Mick Hartley

Jonathan Sumption’s article in today’s Sunday Times is the best commentary on the Hallett Covid Inquiry that I’ve yet read.

The report has two yawning gaps. One is the inquiry’s failure to address international comparisons. The best way to discover whether lockdowns work is to compare the experience of other countries which did something else. We have a mountain of data on this subject. It consistently suggests that lockdowns make no substantial difference to outcomes. Sweden banned events of more than 50 people and offered guidance about distancing but did not lockdown its population and allowed restaurants, businesses and schools to stay open. It did better than the UK.

Scandinavian countries with comparable conditions which locked down did better than Sweden in the earlier phase and worse in the later phase, but about the same overall. Comparisons between different states of the US which adopted different measures reveal the same pattern. It is difficult to take seriously a report which does not address this.

The other gap is about the collateral damage caused by lockdowns: untold misery, loneliness and mental illness, rising levels of domestic violence, untreated cancers and heart disease, rocketing figures for dementia, lifelong damage to the education of many children, destruction of small businesses, millions dropped out of the workforce who have not come back. And all at staggering cost: £410 billion according to the International Monetary Fund, some 60 per cent of which was attributable not to additional health expenditure but to business support, furlough and other costs of lockdown. Hallett stresses the importance of collateral damage but then ignores it, dishing out criticisms as if the clinical issues were the only ones that mattered.

The main problem seems to be that Hallett relies almost entirely on the evidence of the government’s advisers. They were contemptuous of outside experts who rocked the boat by proposing different approaches. This is the worst possible kind of groupthink. Yet the inquiry uncritically adopts their line. Experts do not like being contradicted and understandably seek to justify the advice they gave at the time. But rather more is expected of an inquiry chairman who is supposed to be taking an independent view of these matters.

A good example is her headline-grabbing figure of 23,000 lives, which modelling has “established” would have been saved if Britain had been locked down a week earlier in March 2020. This figure is derived from Professor Neil Ferguson’s models, with their unrealistic assumption that, unless compelled by law, people would take no steps for their own protection. Yet hard data show that they were doing so well before the first lockdown was ordered. Hallett herself points out that models are hypothetical thought experiments (“scenarios”), and warns against treating them as predictions, but she then does exactly that….

The Covid inquiry is an extremely slow and expensive way of reaching some highly questionable conclusions. It is based on a remarkably limited range of material, much of it lacking in objectivity. Some of its arguments are logically incoherent. And it is riddled with solemn warnings against methodological errors and omissions which the author then proceeds to commit herself.

This is the second “module” of the inquiry. At £200 million and with another eight modules to go, one is bound to question whether the public is getting value for money.

More to come? Oh boy.