The Covid Inquiry Whitewash

It has finally arrived, all thousand-plus pages of it: the second UK Covid-19 Inquiry Report.

Years in the making, tens of millions of pounds in cost, and delivering exactly what it was constructed to deliver.

Not truth, not accountability, not a sober assessment of what happened, but a carefully curated political document in which the conclusions were pre-determined from the moment the inquiry’s terms of reference were drafted.

There was never any danger that it would find lockdowns misguided, school closures catastrophic, or mass behavioural compliance a mistake.

Instead, its central claim is the oldest trick in the bureaucrat’s handbook: if only we had done more, sooner, harder.

But behind that familiar refrain lies a striking void: the inquiry’s evidential foundation is tissue thin.

Its most sensational finding, that acting earlier would have ‘halved’ deaths, is built almost entirely on modelling, not on empirical data, clinical evidence or retrospective cause-of-death analysis.

The main point, that locking down on March 16 instead of March 23 would have saved 23,000 lives, is presented as if it were a scientific fact rather than the speculative product of a mathematical model, the assumptions of which are neither universally accepted nor subjected to proper scrutiny.

And here lies the inquiry’s most glaring failure: it adopts wholesale the idea that the UK covid death toll can be treated as an undifferentiated block, despite the now well-established shortcomings of how those deaths were recorded.

The inquiry repeatedly reports ‘deaths involving Covid-19’, the Office for National Statistics’s broadest category which includes anyone who died with a positive test or a clinical suspicion, regardless of whether the virus caused, hastened, or was irrelevant to their death.

The inquiry knows this, acknowledges it in passing, and then proceeds to ignore it.

It does not attempt to disentangle deaths of Covid from deaths with Covid, in spite of this distinction being central to any honest assessment of policy effectiveness.

How many of the older patients who died in 2020 succumbed to late-stage dementia, heart failure or frailty, and merely happened to test positive? How many were hospital-acquired infections? How many were indirect casualties of policy? Delayed cancer treatment, missed heart attacks, isolation or the collapse of routine care? These questions are not answered. Some are not even asked.

Instead, the inquiry’s narrative proceeds on the assumption that the daily tallies were precise and directly comparable across time and place; an assumption which any serious analyst would treat with scepticism.

The inquiry fails to examine the consequences of the UK’s exceptionally broad death-certification guidance, under which covid was often recorded on certificates in the absence of objective evidence. The cumulative ‘Covid-19 deaths’ figure is not a measure of lethality, but a measure of classification.

Yet from this shaky evidential base, the inquiry constructs an edifice of moral certainty: the Government acted ‘too late’, people died ‘needlessly’, and the ‘correct’ course was a faster, deeper curtailment of civil liberties.

In other words: more restrictions; earlier and harder. Not a word is spent considering the opposite possibility: that lockdown itself caused profound harm, that its benefits were marginal, or that the catastrophic health, economic and social consequences might outweigh its unproven lifesaving claims.

TNC readers will not be surprised. From the outset, this inquiry was built on the assumption that the only problem with Britain’s covid response was insufficient authoritarianism.

There was no remit to question lockdown. There was no remit to examine harms. There was no remit to interrogate the test-and-trace mania, the masking rituals, the vaccine passport fantasies, the policing of parks and beaches, the closure of churches and playgrounds or the grotesque cruelty inflicted on older people who were warehoused in residential and care homes, to empty hospital beds that were never used. All of these were outside its pre-selected tunnel of concern.

We have, then, not a quest for truth but a bureaucratic exoneration exercise, one that quietly absolves the state for its unprecedented assault on civil liberties while blaming its failures on not acting more radically.

It is the perfect political shield: the Government can now point to a vast, expensive report that claims ‘earlier action’ would have saved lives, and critics can be told that any dissent is ‘anti-science’, ‘conspiracy theory’, or ‘revisionist’.

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has not revealed what went wrong, it has revealed what the British state cannot admit – which is that it panicked. It cannot admit that it overreached. It cannot admit that it destroyed livelihoods, severed families and inflicted psychological wounds on a scale unseen in peacetime.

The inquiry has delivered exactly what it was designed to deliver. The rest of us should treat its conclusions with the scepticism they richly deserve.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

This piece was first published in TCW Defending Freedom, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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