BEST FORGOTTEN?

To say the voluminous cache of Whitehall WhatsApp messages serialised by the Telegraph back in February does not shed the most flattering of light on UK governance during the Covid pandemic would be a bit of an understatement. The main interest is the often dubious rationale for successive restrictions, the thoughtless ways of government by social media and the appalling way decisions were taken because they looked good rather than because they were right. Yet if journos had been hoping to provoke a level of public outrage similar to that generated by that paper's expose of the MPs expenses scandal in 2009, they will likely have been disappointed. Partly this is because they have not revealed anything about the erstwhile Secretary of State for Health and Member for West Suffolk that we did not know already. To wit the Rt Hon Matt Hancock is a vain, two-timing, over-promoted and thoroughly irritating berk from Cheshire who plainly thinks the proper role of an elected public servant is endless self-promotion. In furtherance of which, the citizenry's most recent memory will be of his appearance on I'm a Celebrity. To the extent he was that member of the freak fest most frequently voted to perform the unfunny, contrived and degrading jungle tasks for which the "show" is allegedly popular, there is probably a natural British reluctance to kick a man when he is down. Plus a lot of people in the media would rather we forget about our experiences during the worst public health disaster in over a hundred years.

The Telegraph was of course an outlier in its (muted) scepticism of lockdowns during the pandemic. The abandonment of a spirit of inquiry by most of the media and its willing promotion of an atmosphere of panic and obedience to government edicts during 2020 and 2021 does not, alas, seem to be part of the official Covid Enquiry led by Lady Hallett. Which is a pity since the taxpayer funded BBC was in the vanguard of the alarmism. Instead, her "deep-dive" is highly likely to be contaminated by the culture wars, ever since a number in the vast scrum of lawyers and lobbyists demanded her ladyship consider, inter alia, "structural racism" and "health inequalities" during the pandemic based on "discrimination". Hallett has further decreed that extensive personal testimony will also be taken from the bereaved on behalf of all the "victims" of the pandemic. Leaving aside the propriety of using a forensic audit of public policy for such considerations, it encourages the belief that grief is not really grief unless it has been publicly expressed. In today's world, the private life has been almost completely subverted. You might just as well hand matters over to Ant & Dec.

Now in the seventeenth month of a veritable trek through the paperwork, Hallett's enquiry has already chewed up over £100m of public funds and has yet to reach Base Camp. Over 60 KCs are on the payroll and so far all they have managed to do is redact the names of hundreds of officials. While France and Sweden completed their own official examinations many months ago, that of the UK already seems to be buried in the long grass if not the deep rough. By the time her enquiry gets to grip with the scandal of the healthcare establishment's treatment of care homes during the pandemic, her ladyship is likely to be in one herself.

The snail like progress of the enquiry was the main reason given by the Telegraph for the disclosure of the "Hancock Papers" in the public interest. In so far as the edited highlights lack balance it is their focus on the toe-curling political mis-steps in London. But as the WhatsApp messages also seem to show some of the scientific advice was filtered or even ignored, one or two commentators have rushed to claim that the government wasn't "following the science" at all. 

Among them is Devi Sridar, Head of Public Health Policy at Edinburgh University, friend  and sometime "personal trainer" to Nicola Sturgeon. Devi, some might recall, was the photogenic advisor to the Scottish Government who was not averse to putting some heavy top-spin on the balls she was asked to play for her SNP masters during the pandemic. In one ill-judged moment, she even asserted lockdown scepticism was the lowest form of Unionism. Now in reaction to the embarrassing disclosures centred on Hancock, she says that "It is clear we didn't have a government working for the broad benefit of the British public during the Covid 19 pandemic". Naturally, we are not supposed to infer her denunciations  apply to the "progressive" government at Holyrood. Notwithstanding Sturgeon's more aggressive suspension of civil liberties in Scotland did not make a farthing of difference to the medical outcomes relative to the rest of the UK. Indeed they were rather worse.

Of course, Sridar is not the only scientist or public health official who has got their "truth" in ahead of the official enquiry. Sir Jeremy Farrar, Head of the Wellcome Foundation and prominent member of SAGE was quick out of the blocks in 2021 with his book Spike. The Guardian was happy to interpret his "thesis" as the government putting its libertarian "ideology" ahead of the science. Certainly Farrar was at the centre of the disputes around the timing of the various restrictions. At one point he even considered resigning over the seeming reluctance of Boris Johnson to order the second lockdown in October 2020. The main point of Spike is for Farrar to assure us that the mistakes during the pandemic were entirely the fault of the politicians, notwithstanding that they were (in the very initial stages at least) acting on data and advice that was, by Farrar's own estimation, highly contingent. 

So it would be good if Lady Hallett ignores all the special interest pleading and proceeds on the assumption that everyone was trying to do their best in very challenging circumstances. Otherwise, the temptation will be to see the political choices in the context of the later discredit into which the Johnson administration fell. 

But if the politicians weren't "following the science", what about the UK government's scientific advisors  themselves?

- Was SAGE really in the dark about the likely effect of the pandemic on mortality? As early as February 2020 teams from both Imperial College and the Institute for Disease Modelling in Washington separately estimated the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for Covid at 0.9 per cent based on an analysis of a large sample of people repatriated from China who had the virus. This was far more accurate than some of the wilder estimates of the time which were crudely extrapolated from deaths divided by the number of reported infections, a hugely underestimated number. So far the UK has reported 24.4m cases of Covid, with 219,000 fatalities.

-  Did SAGE really not have a proper grasp about those most likely to be incapacitated? The Shenzhen Centre for Disease Control and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore separately looked at the infectiousness of the disease. It was established very early on that infection was determined by close and sustained proximity to a sufferer - among reported cases there was a 15% chance of infection in shared accommodation, and a 9.6% probability of catching it elsewhere (such as the workplace). Critically, the study indicated that age was a key determinant of mortality - the elderly were particularly at risk, the risk to children vestigial. The latter were also marginally less likely to contract the virus in the first place. The median age of those in the UK who died with Covid was 83, the majority with co-morbidities such as obesity or heart disease. Average UK life expectancy is 81. Yet there are those like Devi Sridar who assert that government policy meant people lost their lives wholly unnecessarily.

- If the likely mortality rate was so low and disproportionately hit the elderly, why did the whole country have to enter quarantine rather than the most vulnerable? Yet the rationale for lockdown was also based on the assumption that early availability of an effective vaccine was unlikely. In this case "availability" was deliberately confused for the public's mind with the process of "discovery". Techniques (such as the use of messenger RNA) and the ability to fully map the genome of the virus meant the chances of formulating a vaccine in timely fashion were good - indeed Israel claimed to have one a month after the first lockdown in the UK. The problem, as Sir Chris Whitty said at the time, is that vaccines aimed at diseases with less than a 2 percent IFR need to be subjected to lengthy trials to ensure they do not kill more people than they save. 

- Why did the work of the infectious diseases team at Imperial appear to have so little impact on the infamous "scientific" models of Neil Ferguson?  He too was at Imperial and it was his forecasts which caused the government to abandon all thoughts of following the "light touch" approach of Sweden. His warning that the UK faced half a million fatalities within a few months unless the country locked down was a pivotal moment. He also forecast over 50,000 deaths in Sweden by the summer of 2020 as they continued to treat their citizens like grown ups. The cumulative death toll in Sweden to date is under 24,000. More damningly for the lockdown zealots, Sweden has also reported the lowest incidence of "excess" deaths from all causes over the course of the pandemic in the western hemisphere. Despite early and glowing reviews in the on-message FT, Ferguson's methodology is now widely discredited.

- Why was there so much denial by those such as Farrar that the government's scientific advisors had seriously considered "herd immunity" as a viable strategy to beat Covid? This after all was the approach which Sweden chose. Both Whitty and Vallance talked of it publicly in approving terms. Was it not just a case of the medical and scientific establishment trying to pretend that every sequential decision which was made was the most logical one, when the opposite was frequently the case?

- Why was the wearing of masks and the "two metre" rule given such prominence in the public health restrictions, despite the scepticism of the government's senior scientific advisers as to their efficacy? Or was it just a grotesque bit of theatre to cause anxiety and thereby enhance compliance with other more intrusive aspects of the government's response? Hancock's revelation that Downing Street went along with mask wearing to avoid a political row with Sturgeon has a depressing ring of truth about it.

- Why was there such a muddle over the respective merits of testing and tracing? Sridar  claims that earlier testing would have been the best way of avoiding the "shutdown or nothing" approach of the government and approvingly cited the "diagnostic approach" of South Korea. But the Koreans were red hot about tracing individual citizens with symptoms of Covid rather than mass testing. They focused their efforts on immediately quarantining those infected and those who had been in proximity to them. But for some reason, the UK abandoned any thought of controlling the spread of Covid by accessing the location data held by infected people on their phones. Perhaps too many of those in authority were unhappy with a technique which would have revealed their own whereabouts. Instead, and under the deathless direction of  Baroness Harding, the UK eventually got round to burning its way through £37bn worth of mass testing (which did almost nothing of itself to prevent the spread of the disease) and a loose regime of self -isolation which had one of the lowest compliance rates in Europe outside the public sector.

Lockdown was not public health policy in action. Rather it was a grotesque sign of the hole at the centre of public health policy. The response to Covid arguably represents one of the biggest failures of the state since the 1930s. In the draconian suspension of civil liberties and the criminalisation of almost all social activity, the UK attempted to recreate a regime last seen in Britain in the seventeenth century. Citizens were not treated as human beings but as mere instruments of public policy. In fact, it is clear the establishment thought the vast majority of the population were pliable morons. That is the true meaning of Hancock's WhatsApp messages. But will Lady Hallett get it?

Meanwhile the rest of us should seriously think about trying to get a Swedish passport.