Britain’s Public Inquiries – Unaffordable and Unscientific

There’s a certain species of decayed gentry who, having spaffed the family fortune along with loans from friends, continue acting rich despite being insolvent. Their vanity and self-importance require it, however futile the expenditure. IOUs are signed for fripperies. A gambling win, another loan, an inheritance or a Netflix contract will make it all come right, they kid themselves. But it never does. Finally the bailiffs arrive. 

That is Britannia’s unhappy position today. She’s a grand old dame turned seedy and saturated with debt. Yet she confidently waves a credit card, fancying herself as rich and important as in 1900.

Consider how money is blown on public inquiries which, ostrich-like, deliberately avoid inconvenient facts. We’ve had Lady Thirlwall’s into the infant deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital. This was predicated upon Lucy Letby’s guilt and closed its ears to the growing clamour of voices pointing out that Letby’s convictions are unsafe, with the deaths more likely due to medical errors in a badly run unit with a dangerous microflora. Troublesome witnesses, likely to insist on Letby’s innocence, were excluded. This farrago has cost £16 million so far with its report delayed.

Much worse is the UK Covid Inquiry. So far this has consumed around £200 million and is unlikely to issue its final report until 2027 or ’28. By then, barring a visit to Westminster by the IMF’s bailiffs, it will have devoured much more. Other countries concluded their inquiries long ago and far less expensively.

Given what a gravy train this is for Lady Hallett and the lawyers, they might be wise to keep quiet, pocket their fees and convert these into gold sovereigns. Instead they remind us of their wasteful existence by, periodically producing interim reports. The latest of these has just dropped, running to 800 pages.

Its central assertion is that if only we’d locked down earlier some 23,000 lives could have been saved. You won’t be surprised to learn that this is a modelled number from Neil Ferguson projections, not one derived by reviewing recorded deaths and assessing mistakes made.  

It is all complete nonsense, as illustrated in figure 1 showing deaths per million population through the pandemic’s early stages for the UK, France, Sweden and Czechia. France and the UK instituted lockdowns in March 2020 once the virus was already disseminating, Czechia did so before there was significant local spread. Sweden only ever had much lighter voluntary restrictions with most schools and restaurants remaining open and folk left to judge risk for themselves.

If you only read the graph through to the summer, Czechia’s early lockdown appears to be successful. Deaths are minimal compared with the UK, Sweden and France. The Czechs thought so too, having a large party on Prague’s Charles Bridge to “Say goodbye to the virus”. But any notion of success was dispelled come the autumn. Czechia, like most of eastern Europe, then had a far larger death wave than any of the countries in the West. At best the early lockdown delayed deaths; at worst it displaced the pandemic into the winter when people, with less sunlight and lower vitamin D levels, are more vulnerable to respiratory viruses. Across the main period of the pandemic, from early 2020 to early 2023, Czechia recorded one of the highest excess death rates in Europe, while Sweden had among the lowest.

This is where Lady Hallett’s earlier lockdown likely would have led us, had it succeeded in reducing the first wave of infections. Not to 23,000 lives saved but to an unknowably larger death spike in the winter of 2020/21.

Before we leave figure 1 there is one more message to distil: that the spring 2020 death curves are remarkably similar in France, which had a very strict lockdown; the UK, which had a less strict one and Sweden, which had no lockdown at all. What’s more, around half of the deaths, in all three countries were in care homes. The central failures were in keeping Covid out of these establishments and in denying proper care to infected residents.

Next, for anyone who still believes in lockdowns, consider China. Lockdowns began in China in the spring of 2020. Cases declined and the decline was attributed to the lockdowns, though spring doubtless also worked its magic. Come the autumn, China developed a model of extensive testing followed by local lockdowns of any factory or apartment block where a case was detected. Closures were of the extreme sort with doors sealed and guarded. If cases were detected in your factory then, hard lines, that’s where you hunkered down until they subsided.

The approach was pursued for almost three years, with the Government boasting of success as late as October 2022. Then it all fell apart, very quickly. The virus became more transmissible, as variant succeeded variant. Costs multiplied. The population grew restive. Outbreaks became harder to contain until the game became unplayable. Just two months after the boast China abandoned lockdowns. A massive spike of cases ensued (figure 2). China being China counts are uncertain but both crematorium data and a spate of elderly scholars’ obituaries point to a sizeable death spike.   

Lady Hallett’s Inquiry pays scant attention to these international comparisons. She does not understand that science works by comparing test and control or, in this case, different lockdown strategies. Sweden receives the briefest of dismissive mentions and China’s testing of lockdowns to destruction receives no discussion. She does not grasp the simple evolutionary fact that if you seek to constrain a highly mutable RNA virus that is already disseminated, you select for more transmissible variants until you lose. Or that if you temporarily ‘win’ it’s only because you have kicked the problem and the deaths a little way into the future. She does not perceive that once a transmissible respiratory virus has disseminated globally, as SARS-CoV-2 already had by the spring of 2020, there is no way out until an immune equilibrium develops in the population. A ‘good’ vaccine would help but those that were developed have only brief efficacy irrespective of safety concerns.

Even worse, just as Lady Thirlwall cannot or will not publicly entertain evidence that points to Letby’s innocence, Lady Hallett cannot or will not entertain the likelihood that all the collateral harm of lockdowns was for nothing. Indeed, the damage to education, to businesses, to the economy, to the work ethic, to mental health and to families receives little emphasis, as does the major role of pandemic spending in raising national debt from 80% to 100% of GDP.  

Any honest inquiry would begin from this damage and ask: “Do lockdowns work and were they worth it?” Answering that should not cost £200 million. There is ample evidence that the answers are both “No”.

David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.