The Covid Inquiry is Instantiating Lies That Make it Worse Than No Inquiry At All
The first WhatsApp message was a link; the second, a warning that “you will be too angry to get through this. It’s their take on the Covid Inquiry.”
The link took me to The Rest is Politics, the Jurassic Park of current affairs podcasts, where palaeontologists can observe the extinction of a flawed consensus in real time. My friend altruistically listens to this and the News Agents so I don’t have to.
“I better leave it altogether. I’d have to spend the rest of the weekend in a padded cell,” I concurred. “Let me guess, though – we should have locked down sooner?”
“Yep, Rory Stewart argued for it behind the scenes but was silenced.”
Which Cabinet heavyweights managed to defy such a silverback, I wondered.
For Stewart and his technocratic ilk, the answer to the failures of state-knows-best paternalism is always more stringent state-knows-best paternalism. The tough love of a father that isn’t shy about imprisoning you in your home, like, say, Josef Fritzl. The possibility that paternalistic technocracy might be the problem is beyond the scope of their imagination.
Shortly after this, a clip appeared in my feed of a member of the public harassing Matt Hancock on the tube, a regular daydream for many of us during the dystopia of 2020-21.
While I’m not endorsing vigilantism, this is what happens when justice becomes unavailable through legitimate channels. It’s what happens when you add to the injury of a ruinous policy the insult of having to pay for an inquiry that was pre-ordained to ratify that ruinous policy.
Of course, the conclusion of this module was no surprise to us Granny Killers. When the idea of an inquiry was first floated, I knew that proper redress for the calamity of lockdowns would be precluded by the scale, not of the predictable damage to life and livelihood, but of the complicity. Given the near universal acquiescence of arse-covering politicians, a mainstream print and broadcast media that eschewed journalism for state propaganda, and a gullible public that bought the foundational myth of a biblical plague, is it any wonder that there is no appetite to acknowledge that the whole thing was a self-inflicted wound? It is too easy to tell yourself you were right just because you were in the overwhelming majority.
The only question for an establishment marking its own homework was how fast, long and hard should we have locked down. Never the itchier question – should we have done it at all?
With its deliberately narrow framing, the inquiry had simply transplanted the Overton Window of the daily press conferences. Who can forget the pantomime of three officials standing at lecterns with their wildly imaginative graphs, pretending they could monitor and control an invisible airborne virus, in front of a gaggle of group-thinkers pretending to be journalists?
Senior politician/public health apparatchik :
We will be boarding everyone into their homes, euthanising pets, installing CCTV in each room to ensure that masks are being worn at all times, then eventually mandating a medical treatment with no long-term safety data, in direct violation of the Nuremberg Code. It’s for your own good. You’re welcome. Now, questions. Yes, Laura Kuenssberg, BBC…
LK : With cases SOARING/SURGING/<Insert fear-inducing hyperbole>, do you really think this goes far enough? You don’t seem to be taking this seriously.
Followed by identical accusations from the nasal passage of Beth Rigby and the jerky diaphragm of Robert Peston.
Not once did any of the assembled regime hacks ask why we were jettisoning decades of conventional wisdom on managing viral epidemics. Thus, the quarantine of the healthy – a radical and reckless experiment – was rebadged as the conventional option while the focused protection of the vulnerable, as codified in the Great Barrington Declaration, was demonised as a radical and reckless experiment. An auspicious start to a decade that has been characterised by the total inversion of reality.
Anyone in 2025 who still thinks that the Covid response was an operational failure – if we had locked down a week earlier, had more PPE equipment, blah blah – is the Japanese soldier on an island still fighting the war. It was a policy failure, plain and simple. One that would rank as the most lopsided cost-benefit calculation in history if ministers had ever bothered to do a cost-benefit calculation.
Six years into this clown show, I’m too fatigued to keep litigating the specific moral and practical arguments. I shouldn’t really have to. The truth has been drip-fed into the mainstream over time, albeit without the fanfare of the lies (infection fatality rate, asymptomatic transmission, natural immunity, masks, hospitalisation figures, mortality statistics, lab origin, off-patent pharmaceuticals, safe and effective, social distancing, diagnostic tests etc.) For the sake of brevity and sanity, it is tempting to utter a single word riposte to the lockdown enthusiasts: Sweden.
I won’t bother, for example, interrogating the junk modelling behind the ‘23,000 deaths would have been prevented by locking down earlier’ headline. But it’s safe to assume that the obliging mathematicians have a bright future in the lucrative field of climate catastrophism, another fraudulent narrative engineered to immiserate, impoverish and enslave us.
The bien pensant will cite this figure to vindicate their mindless obedience, always sufficiently informed to regurgitate what their tribe is saying, and insufficiently sceptical to work out that it’s bollocks. Perhaps one day they will realise that there was nothing virtuous about their priggish compliance, but let’s not hold our breath.
If nothing else (and, for a lot of the bad faith actors involved, this is probably all it was ever about), it is a cudgel to flog the Tory government of Boris Johnson, whose swashbuckling libertarianism never quite transferred from the skinless games of Oxford Union debating and facetious punditry to the grownup world of consequence. In truth, his instinctive aversion to Nannyism was not the problem. It was that he lacked the spine to follow his instinct when it mattered most.
But the inquiry came to the opposite, erroneous conclusion, as we always knew it would. A conclusion that only makes the repetition of this cretinous act of self-harm more likely, and cruelly tantalises bereaved families with a counterfactual fantasy.
An inquiry that instantiates a lie is worse than no inquiry at all.
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I am coming to believe that a new disorder should be defined: Governmental Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (GMSbP). The hallmark trait is a national government’s behaviour of inducing illness in the general populace, or convincing the populace that it has the illness, and then claiming to have unique skill to detect, control and cure the illness. The government may have developed this compulsion because they feel unworthy, unloved, traumatically rejected by an electorate and now need to feel important and be the centre of attention and tax collection. The disorder may be linked to Mencken’s Imaginary Hobgoblins.
The COVID Disaster only had one benefit – it confirmed that all politicians are liars.
It had another benefit – a greatly increased analysis and dissection of scientific and medical research.
Excellent point.
No, there were two. The one you have identified …. and the fact that a minority weren’t fooled at the time and resisted, and since then a great many more have woken up.
About 30% resisted the coercion and refused to participate in the mRNA experiment.
Cover up.
Inquiry set up by the establishment, for the establishment, to exonerate the establishment from accountability for The Pandemic That Never Was.
There was no pandemic, it was the State that killed Granny…
…No hiding from all-cause mortality data.
Of course it’s worse than no inquiry at all – that’s the whole idea and the whole point. The inquiry is part of the whole pantomime.
“Policy failure” – not really, if you see it as an exercise in seeing how much the state could get away with in a “liberal democracy” by fabricating some “emergency”. The answer was a great deal – but only for a while. They overreached and the whole thing had run out of steam. But much will have been learned. They have normalised the idea of “pandemics” and “lockdowns” and of course “MRNA Vaccines” (that don’t work).
An enquiry is only necessary when there is considerable doubt. This in itself removes all certainty that the coup was correct and justified. It was a diabolical act against the public which must never be repeated. This cannot be said enough and protesting that it wasn’t sufficiently severe is a figleaf to hide the perpetrators’ shame.
If only they had even the faintest clue about transmission of ” disease”.
And here was i thinking politics and bad medicine couldn’t get any worse.
Please delete/change the picture of that waste of space who happened to be in charge, the man who would have done differently if he had a) the intelligence, b) the balls c) the brains or d) the appetite to do so, when instead he pretended to nearly die and get everyone’s sympathy and forever after would do what ever that crook Whitty told him to do.
The Netherlands actually did do a cost-benefit analysis, in March 2020, where they estimated that lockdown would cost about 65 billion euros in economic losses and non-covidian health damage, against a supposed benefit of 8 billion euros in lives saved from covish (presumably based on the Imperial College model) — then opted for lockdown anyway because of the “optics” of dying grannies on TV.
What never gets included in the “cost” is the cost of lost life quality – millions of people locked up, not working, not socialising, not living, for a long time. Priceless, as they say.
It was unbelievable how lacking in curiosity mainstream journalists were during the the plandemic. No analysis, no scepticism, no questions, just meek acceptance that there was no alternative. Were they paid not to do their job? Were they stupid? Were they suffering from Stockholm syndrome? And even today no apology or real understanding of their role in helping to create the worst public health disaster in living memory.
The itchiest question of all – was there a pandemic involving a sudden-spreading novel illness – is ignored even by most sceptics (daily or otherwise).
I see no indications whatsoever that the establishment is troubled by this or any inquiry, as long as the core lies are being protected.
The daily press conference with all the prepared “gotcha” questions implying nobody was actually listening to the presentation. I don’t remember anyone asking “Can you go back to slide 5, that didn’t seem to make sense”
As I have noted before, my own evidence to Hallett has never appeared in the public domain on the Inquiry website. This is apparently because there has been so much input that putting up stuff from those not called in person would overload the system, though I cannot see why myself. I have been pushing for this to be reversed, because if you choose the wrong people to appear you will get the wrong answers. After my latest attempt I was told that my submission had been passed to the “relevant team”. I have now made an FOI request for the names and qualifications of the members of this team and will report back.
The Establishment wants the power to do it all again. So it was NEVER going to find that the Tyranny was a mistake and completely destructive.
Instead of inviting intelligent international scientific expert to testify at the xovid inquiry, why on earth would you ask Boris Johnson or Matt what’s his name or the three gov’t medical advisors to explain what they did in 2020, ‘21, ‘22. We already know. It is on record.
instead why not invite scientists such as Professor Retsef Levi, MIT, Professor John Ioannidis, Stanford, Dr. Harvey Risch, Harvard, Dr. Jay Battacharya, Stanford, Dr, Scott Atlas, Stanford for their input, and expert knowledge and findings.
Why would anyone keep asking the same UK politicians and gov’t medical advisors, the same questions. Does anyone think any of them will own up to their mistakes? What an obscene waste of taxpayers money.
Why keep asking politicians and Govt advisers, instead of scientists? Because it’s a political investigation, not a scientific one, that’s why.
I sat on exactly such a corrupt government inquiry for ten years (not the expected four months, that it was supposed to last!) and it was precisely the same. I was one of the only two lone ‘lay’ members (in fact the only members with actual experience of the incident) very reluctantly allowed to participate, when the voluntary offer of help from the REAL world expert was disdainfully rejected.
So, inevitably, the Committee came to the entirely necessary (i.e. politically correct) conclusion. Politics is the only justifiable way to spend the taxpayers’ money — that’s what inquiries are for.
Looking forward to getting the weapons promised to defend the uk against an ‘enemy’ who won’t bother to waste the time attacking us, in order instead to defend my fellow citizens against those who Paxman questioned along the lines of “why is this lying bastard lying to me”. From Covid to climate change to net zero the gaslighting has been relentless and when the rot runs so deep complete excision is the only cure.