The current investigation isn’t doing its job. We need a faster, cheaper rival to actually get to the truth.
In his excellent 2014 book Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed begins with the story of an airline pilot, Martin Bromiley, whose wife died because of mistakes made by anaesthetists during a routine operation. He set out to reform medical safety in the same way that air safety had been spectacularly reformed: by investigating, learning and sharing, rather than either seeking to apportion blame or brushing failure under the carpet.
The same lesson needs to apply to Covid. As the letter from over 50 scientists to the Telegraph LAST week argued, the official public inquiry is going about it all wrong: assuming it knows what went wrong – that we locked down too late – and playing Gotcha with witnesses. Rather than abolish this costly Titanic of an inquiry, somebody should shame it by founding a rival, cheaper, faster and more airline-like one. If we did that, I would like to see the rival inquiry try to answer six crucial questions.
First, was it a mistake to deliberately spread panic? “We must frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain,” wrote Matt Hancock in December 2020. “Ramping up messaging—the fear/guilt factor vital,” replied the Cabinet Secretary. They were dialling up the fear so we would all fall into line, but the effect was undoubtedly to cause anxiety, division and eventually cynicism. Covid never was much of a danger to young people and telling us otherwise was probably both wrong and foolish.
Second, did the authoritarian instincts of public-safety bureaucrats backfire? People were already social-distancing before the first lockdown and the rise in cases was faltering. But coercion may not have just been unnecessary, it has also done real harm to the social contract between people and government. And did the forced closure of schools for months, when children were at relatively low risk of death from covid, do far more harm than good?
Third, what was the source of the early and wrong emphasis on “hands, face, space”? The evidence suggests it was based on a dogma that flu and similar viruses spread by droplets, not through the air. The source of this myth was eventually traced to a 60-year old experiment on tuberculosis that proved nothing of the kind. “Covid-19 is NOT airborne,” said the WHO repeatedly – and wrongly as they now admit. So locking us down indoors was wrong. The advice should have been go outdoors whenever possible, and open the darned windows.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/
Fourth, why did modelling prove so useless? Again and again the models either produced badly wrong forecasts or had huge margins of error that made them practically futile. In the case of the models with which the scientists tried to force us into a last lockdown for the omicron variant in December 2021, they managed both, OVERestimating the death rate if we failed to lock down by at least an order of magnitude. An honest inquiry would examine whether there is any expertise on the future, either in the form of mathematical models, or examination of the entrails of chickens.
Fifth, have vaccine mandates disastrously and perhaps permanently damaged the reputation of vaccines, one of the most miraculously positive of all medical technologies? Vaccine rejection is now common and will result in growing measles outbreaks and worse. The blame for that lies not just with anti-vax HYSTERIA but with our medical overlords who told us to vaccinate our children – for whom the risk from covid was very small – and to get vaccinated or lose our jobs or our ability to travel. Alongside the overclaiming for the vaccines, in particular that they prevented transmission as well as serious disease, this meant that when inevitably a few side effects emerged, people became cynical about vaccines.
Sixth, has lockdown-resisting Sweden proved that our lockdowns killed more people than covid? Its overall excess deaths to date remain far lower than ours. People will argue either way but simply ignoring the issue won’t do.