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Jonathan Sumption: Why the Covid inquiry is a farce
Instead of learning lessons from lockdowns, the hearing is more
interested in knocking the stuffing out of the government, writes
Jonathan Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court
ILLUSTRATION BY TONY BELL
Jonathan Sumption
Sunday November 05 2023, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
The Covid-19 inquiry’s terms of reference are as broad as could be, but
it has only one useful purpose. Lockdowns and other aggressive
government interventions were an unprecedented and untested experiment
with the lives and wellbeing of each one of us.
We need to know what they achieved, if anything. We need to know whether
it was worth the appalling collateral consequences for other clinical
conditions, for our mental wellbeing, for our children’s education and
for the economy and public finances of our country. We need to know
whether other policies might have produced acceptable results at a
lesser cost in human misery. That way, we may have some prospect of
avoiding a similar disaster next time, for there will surely be a next time.
Measured against that standard, the inquiry’s agenda and working methods
are a programme for failure. It follows the classic model that has
undermined so many British public inquiries in recent years. It cannot
decide whether it is there to learn lessons for the future or to
distribute blame for the past. These are inconsistent objectives.
Learning lessons means assessing policy options with the benefit of
hindsight and the mass of information that has become available since
the lockdowns. But the inquiry has been more interested in assigning blame.
That means looking at the mechanics of decision-making in all its grubby
detail, exposing the weaknesses of inadequate human beings confronting a
crisis most of them never really understood.
The result is akin to a gigantic exercise in forensic litigation. For a
start, it is over-lawyered. The tribunal employs its own teams of
counsels. There are dozens of “core participants”, most with their own
team of lawyers sitting in serried ranks behind banks of computer
screens. Some of the witnesses have legal representation. The inquiry’s
chairwoman, Baroness Hallett, occasionally reminds the room that she
used to be a criminal judge. The proceedings advance at a snail’s pace.
It is inordinately expensive.
All this is bad enough, but there is worse. The procedure of the inquiry
distorts the exercise by creating a built-in bias in favour of lockdowns
and other aggressive government interventions. Six “modules” have been
announced. They constitute the inquiry’s agenda. All of them are
concerned with the quality of government decision-making. None of them
directly addresses the efficacy of lockdowns, masks, travel bans and
other non-pharmaceutical interventions. These issues have been
shoehorned into module 2, which is entitled “Core UK decision-making and
political governance”. That tells us a lot about the inquiry’s priorities.
No fewer than four branches of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice,
one for each nation of the UK, have been accorded the status of core
participant. They are there to argue that the government should have
been more aggressive, not less. It should have locked down sooner,
harder, longer. The bereaved families are victims of the virus, but we
are all victims of the lockdowns. Yet the only lockdown victims who have
received any significant attention in the evidence are children. They
were indeed badly done by, but who is there to represent the population
at large?
Many of the comments made by Dominic Cummings, an adviser in No 10
during the pandemic, have put the decision-makers in government in the
stocks
Many of the comments made by Dominic Cummings, an adviser in No 10
during the pandemic, have put the decision-makers in government in the
stocks
UNPIXS
At the hearings the agenda is set by the inquiry panel and their
lawyers. Counsel to the inquiry decide what questions to put to each
witness. They decide what angle to take and what points to emphasise,
all in accordance with their own preconceptions. Those preconceptions
are apparent from the transcripts. They are generally prosecutorial.
Counsel’s hostility to some witnesses is palpable. The hunt for guilty
men and women inevitably descends into an argument that decision-makers
did too little too late. The basic assumption is that lockdowns and
other aggressive interventions were the answer and that the problem lay
not in the conception but in the execution.
This may be a good way of putting the decision-makers in the stocks,
something the public always enjoys. But it is a terrible way to examine
the complex and disputed scientific and statistical evidence. Important
scientific witnesses like Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific
adviser; Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer; the modeller
Professor Neil Ferguson; and sceptics like Professor Mark Woolhouse (by
far the most impressive scientific witness to date) and Professor Carl
Heneghan are confined to answering counsel’s questions in the course of
brief, superficial and highly selective cross-examinations.
Far too often the cross-examiner demands a yes or no answer to difficult
questions that call for nuance and qualification. The lawyers seem
keener to dwell on trivia extracted from the WhatsApp messages of
ministers and officials, which do nothing but remind us of the sheer
nastiness of some of them. At one point, counsel to the inquiry asked a
scientific witness whether he was the “f***wit” referred to in a profane
WhatsApp message from Dame Angela McLean, then a scientific adviser to
the Ministry of Defence. How does that help to resolve the serious
issues involved?
STR.COVID_STATS.22.10.23.R
• Surreal week at the Covid inquiry: ‘Voters would want to lynch people
if they knew’
To see how this has distorted the balance of the inquiry, one has only
to look at some of the things that have been left out or brushed aside.
There has been little examination of the role of statistical modelling
as an aid to policy-making. Ferguson’s wildly inaccurate modelling,
which played a critical role in propelling the government into the first
lockdown, got an easy ride.
• Was the UK right to go into lockdown during the Covid pandemic?
The huge margin of error involved in trying to model the spread of an
inherently unpredictable pathogen like Sars-CoV-2 was not touched on.
The modelling of death rates on the ridiculous assumption that people
would take no steps for their own protection unless forced to by
government intervention was barely questioned, although the evidence
shows that people were already doing so before the first lockdown was
imposed.
The implicit assumption of the model — that there was no halfway house
between total government inaction and a universal lockdown — received
hardly any attention. The poor historical record of models, including
Ferguson’s, as predictors of risk hardly got a mention.
Only cursory attention has been paid to what is perhaps the most
striking feature of the government’s response to Covid, namely its
indiscriminate nature in the face of a highly discriminating pathogen.
Healthy young and middle-aged people at little risk of serious illness
or death were subjected to the same restrictions as the old and those
suffering from pre-existing respiratory conditions who were the prime
targets of the virus.
The possibility of selectively protecting the vulnerable and allowing
the rest of the population to get on with their lives has been brushed
aside as impractical. The Great Barrington Declaration, which suggested
this approach, has many critics, some of whom misrepresent its message,
but none of its authors has been called to give evidence.
Woolhouse has reservations about the declaration, but his own
interesting proposals about selective “cocooning” were hurriedly passed
over when he tried to explain them. As he pointed out, belief in
universal lockdowns became a “test of virtue” among government advisers.
That attitude seems to have infected the inquiry.
Boris Johnson’s government has born the brunt of the testimony at the
inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic thus far
Boris Johnson’s government has born the brunt of the testimony at the
inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic thus far
ANDREW PARSONS/10 DOWNING STREET/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Then there is the almost complete absence to date of any attention to
international comparisons. These are of limited relevance to the quality
of government decision-making, because the comparisons can be made only
in hindsight. But they are one of the principal tools available to
compare the efficacy of policy options according to their known results.
They suggest that the nature and scale of government intervention makes
remarkably little difference. The most striking example is Sweden, a
country with broadly similar conditions to the UK. Sweden made some of
the same mistakes as the UK in dealing with mortality in care homes. It
banned mass events. But it did not lock down its population, did not
close most schools and did not even close bars and restaurants, yet
ended up with a death toll lower than the UK’s. There is no sign that
the inquiry has the slightest curiosity about this.
Professor Sunetra Gupta’s witness statement, whose contents have been
reported, has some interesting things to say about Sweden and the views
of ministers and advisers on the subject, but the inquiry has not
published the statement or invited her to give evidence orally. The
inquiry’s report will not deserve to be taken seriously unless it
addresses the one notable experiment with a radical alternative to mass
coercion.
It is not too late for the Covid inquiry to acquire a more sensible set
of priorities. Unless it does so soon, the only lessons we will learn
from it are that officials should not dig themselves into defensive
positions when confronted by dissent and that ministers should be more
competent and diligent than Messrs Johnson and Hancock. We could have
worked that out without the assistance of Baroness Hallett.
Lord Sumption is a former justice of the Supreme Court