Back in June I posted up part 1 of my submission to the COVID Inquiry's "Every Story Matters" website. covid19.public-inquiry.uk/every-story-ma… Here's the rest of my submission. It's long but I'm afraid the list of lessons learned from the catastrophe of the last three years can't be summarised in 280 characters. I think many of us on the sceptic side of the argument have already decided that the Public Inquiry is a waste of time - that the conclusions have already been written and that nothing meaningful will change as a result. While I think that is absolutely correct, I still think there's value in writing down our thoughts and publishing them, not for the technocrats in charge of the country but for the wider public. --- Tell us what you think could be learned (Optional) What could have been done better or differently? Was something done well? The list of things which could have been done better or differently is a long one. I'll divide the list into eight categories: 1. The genesis of the virus 2. Pandemic preparation 3. Lockdowns 4. Non-pharmaceutical interventions 5. COVID treatments 6. Vaccines 7. The NHS 8. The media 1. The genesis of the virus It is clear now from documentary evidence and from testimony from scientists involved, that the virus was the product of gain of function research funded by the US government and undertaken in a laboratory in China. Whether the virus was deliberately released or leaked by accident is in many ways irrelevant. The major learning point is that this type of research should be subject to an international ban. The dangers of an intentional or accidental release of viruses engineered to be more contagious or more deadly are too high, the fact that this research was funded by the US government (and the UK government has no doubt been aware of this fact for many months) makes it all the more scandalous. Despite the protestations of those involved, these viruses can only really be used for nefarious purposes. Those responsible for the gain of function research should also be brought to justice. 2. Pandemic preparations Putting aside the origins of the virus, the government had prepared a pandemic plan in advance of 2020, based on the WHO’s recommendations, and initially it appeared that it would implement that plan. The Chief Medical Officer calmly explained that while the virus was a concern for very elderly people and for those with existing serious medical conditions, for the overwhelming majority of people it would be a mild illness from which people would recover (even in the absence of new treatments or vaccines), and the intent was for most people to continue life as normal, albeit with some additional precautions (those with symptoms staying at home, those who were most vulnerable staying at home, increased hygiene measures). This was mischaracterised as a “let it rip” strategy but was essentially encouraging immunity to build up in the population while minimising risk to the vulnerable. Unfortunately at some point, panic took over the UK government and most other Western governments, and the pandemic planning was thrown out of the window (with the notable exception of Sweden which, by and large, continued following their pre-existing pandemic plan, with a far superior outcome in terms of all cause mortality and damage to the economy). The cause of this panic is unclear but seemed to hit most global governments simultaneously. The major learning point here is that our government should persist with their pre-existing well thought out pandemic planning, based on well-established principles and on experience of previous pandemics. In addition, the inquiry should thoroughly investigate the decision-making processes of the UK government at the time of the abandonment of the pre-existing plan. Was this the result of weak government? Of giving in to pressure from 24 hour news media? Of pressure from those with vested interests in there being a large global pandemic (pharmaceutical companies, technology companies, NGOs involved in vaccines, politically motivated campaigns to derail disliked governments, foreign governments)? Measures should be taken to ensure governments are able to withstand such pressures and act in the public interest. 3. Lockdowns Lockdowns proved to be a catastrophic failure as a policy. They did not prevent the spread of what was a highly contagious virus – they simply prolonged the duration of the pandemic. They caused huge collateral damage in terms of physical and mental health, damage to education, loss of businesses, jobs and livelihoods. The government’s own report produced in April 2020 predicted that 200,000 lives could be lost directly as a result of the lockdown policies (due to the impact of lost or delayed NHS treatment). Unlike the lives lost from people who died “with COVID”, 60% of which involved the over 80s and 90% of which involved people with at least one other comorbidity, the lives lost as a result of lockdowns were of people across the age spectrum, many of whom had many more years of healthy life ahead of them. The first lesson to be learned here is that lockdowns must never again be implemented as a policy solution to a circulating respiratory virus. The second lesson to be learnt here is that any policy response to a future pandemic must be carefully evaluated to consider both the short-term benefits in terms of addressing the pandemic and the longer-term costs of the measures. Never again must a policy like this be implemented on the fly as a panic measure. 4. Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) It is clear from every piece of quality scientific evidence that population-wide masking could not and did not have any effect in reducing levels of transmission of the COVID virus, as was shown by the recent authoritative Cochrane study and confirmed by its editor Tom Jefferson. However, use of masks had significant negative effects on physical and mental health, on communications, on the learning of young people. They sustained a sense of panic and fear amongst the population which was detrimental to public health. They also encouraged people who were sick to venture out, believing they were not risking others, when the better public health solution would have been for those people to stay at home. The masking policy was divisive, and those who could not for a variety of reasons wear masks were not properly accommodated (exemptions were available but the government and media did its best to imply that they were mandatory for everyone). The implementation of social distancing and isolating family members and households from each other, as well as the closure of churches, pubs and other venues where people gather was also highly counter-productive, making people more isolated and failing to address the main sources of transmission which were in fact places where people who were sick with COVID gathered: hospitals and care homes. The use of contact tracing and quarantine was farcical. Contact tracing of the asymptomatic was not recommended by the WHO and yet the government implemented it several months after the virus had already spread throughout the UK at a time when contact tracing could have no benefit. Huge sums of money were squandered on an app which only worked on the most up to date mobile phones, leaving people with older phones or no phones not included. Vast numbers of people were required to stay home even though they were fit to work or go to school and had no virus symptoms. A single positive test caused ripple effects which resulted in dozens of completely healthy people being confined to home. Border closures and entry and exit screening were implemented, but on a piecemeal basis and, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, long after the virus was already well-established in those countries, causing huge economic damage with little positive impact on public health. Even in Australia and New Zealand, the costs of isolation in economic and mental health terms were huge, and we are now seeing very high excess mortality in both of those countries. Meanwhile, Sweden, which adopted a very light pandemic response policy and relied on the public’s voluntary cooperation, achieved a far superior overall public health outcome (the lowest all cause excess mortality in Europe over 3 years) while also avoiding the terrible economic impacts seen in the UK and other places adopting draconian lockdowns and NPIs. This is because their public health officials considered public health as a whole, rather than focusing myopically on COVID. So the major learning on NPIs is that masks should not be implemented population-wide for those without symptoms, contact tracing and quarantine of exposed (but healthy) individuals should not be used, and other NPIs such as social distancing should be implemented voluntarily, not by mandate. In short, with NPIs, the WHO’s pre-existing pandemic guidelines (attached) should be used. apps.who.int/iris/bitstream… 5. COVID treatments The approach to treatment of COVID was bizarre. As an illness, COVID was unusual compared to other respiratory viruses, consisting of three phases: initial infection, pulmonary symptoms, hyperinflammation phase. Some doctors identified this progression at an early stage and reasoned that in the absence of an overall cure, it made sense to treat the symptoms at each stage with existing medicines which were known to be successful dealing with those symptoms. They also identified that early treatment, and indeed use of prophylaxis, was key to keeping people alive and preventing the progression to the later stages which were harder to treat. However doctors who adopted these approaches, with success, were not only discouraged from sharing their learning more widely – they were actively attacked in the media, as were the cheap generic medicines and prophylactics they were successfully using. In a situation where people were dying in large numbers this seemed like a massively counterintuitive approach. The official advice in the UK was that if you fell ill with COVID you should stay home, take paracetamol and only call for medical help if your symptoms significantly deteriorated. Of course by this time, many patients were already in stage 2 or stage 3 of the disease and arrived at hospital at death’s door (or died en route or at home). Every winter many elderly patients enter hospital with a respiratory infection and, while they recover from the initial infection, contract bacterial pneumonia. Traditionally this is treated with antibiotics, usually successfully. However in the case of COVID patients, many of whom were suffering pneumonia-like symptoms, these antibiotics were not used. Instead these patients were intubated even though their airway was not blocked, and many died. The approach to seeking successful treatment of COVID was at best counter-intuitive and at worst, sinister. All of the empirical evidence points to a desire to avoid doing work to find cheap generic treatments, to discredit doctors who did so, and to deny evidence that such treatments were successful. It also points to the abandonment of treatments which had been successful for treating similar symptoms in the past. It does not take a “conspiracy theorist” to identify that all of these behaviours helped to smooth a path towards novel, expensive and highly profitable vaccines as being “the only solution” to the pandemic. The key learnings in respect of COVID treatment are that: doctors investigating early treatment using existing medicines should be encouraged via government and public health and their approaches shared widely and adopted quickly; treatment of novel diseases should be driven by doctors, not faceless bureaucrats; that existing successful treatments for diseases should not be abandoned; and that the pharmaceutical industry and its lobbyists should not be able to influence treatment protocols based on its own narrow objectives at the expense of public health. 6. The vaccines The COVID vaccines have proven to be neither safe nor effective. They do not prevent infection or transmission of the virus and any impact they have on reducing symptoms or preventing death is low, limited in time and limited to the early variants of the virus. Fast mutation of the virus renders the vaccines pointless. According to the MHRA, a serious adverse event has been reported for every 470 doses of COVID vaccines in the UK, and well over 2,000 people have been reported dead in the UK shortly after vaccination, with the vaccines being the suspected cause. Their safety record in comparison to equivalent vaccines like the seasonal influenza vaccine is very poor. No vaccine in history with a safety record as poor as this one has been allowed to remain on the market. The lack of safety and efficacy of these vaccines has been evident from the very beginning. The Astra Zeneca vaccine was withdrawn from use in Scandinavia as early as March 2020, problems with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in relation to myocarditis especially in young males has been known for a similar length of time. The data from the clinical trials gave cause for concern on both a safety and efficacy basis, but the MHRA authorised their use and persisted in defending their use despite the mounting evidence that the products did not work and were causing harm. Despite the weight of evidence that the vaccines were ineffective and dangerous, the Government made vaccination mandatory for care workers in the UK, resulting in a huge flood of people leaving the care industry (directly contributing to the NHS bed blocking crisis in winter 2022/2023) and also intended to make vaccination mandatory for NHS workers, only changing its mind when it became apparent how many NHS doctors and nurses were opposed because of their knowledge of the truth about the products. In wider society, the government created a de facto mandatory vaccination policy via the huge pressure in the media for people to be vaccinated, requirements for vaccination for entry to venues. For many people with jobs requiring foreign travel or with family abroad, vaccination was effectively mandatory. This in turn created huge pressure on those opposed to vaccination for valid reasons and created huge division in society and even within families and organisations. And all for products which did not alter the course of the pandemic but involved significant other risks. The key learnings in relation to the vaccines are: that never again must government health policy be driven by pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists; that the MHRA should be obliterated and a new, independent, publicly funded medical products regulator be created in its place; and that vaccine mandates must never again be implemented by a UK government. 7. The NHS The pandemic and the response has had a catastrophic impact on the NHS. The public were asked to "stay home to save lives and protect the NHS", but thousands of lives were lost and continue to be lost unnecessarily, not elderly people to COVID but much younger people to preventable diseases. The NHS, in the sense of the institution and its employees, has been “protected”, with dramatic increases in funding over the past three years, but the service to the public has deteriorated massively. The GP service is, for many people, patchy, available only via telephone or video appointment; waiting times for appointments are long causing people to go direct to A&E instead. A&E is very busy as a result of this, of the build up of people with untreated chronic illness leading to acute conditions, vaccine injured patients, and the lack of care workers and care home capacity (exacerbated by the care worker vaccine mandates) means a lack of beds in A&E resulting in people being treated in ambulances with the result of long waits for ambulances in many places. Waiting lists for operations have mushroomed. Clinics for chronic illnesses like diabetes and asthma are overrun. Cancers are being found later when the prognosis is poor due to delays in screening and treatment. Morale in the service is at rock-bottom with industrial action now a frequent occurrence. The pandemic response was in short, an unmitigated disaster for, and by, the NHS. The key learning here: lockdowns must never happen again. A single illness health service must never happen again. GPs must never again close their doors to patients and leave them reliant on a telephone triage service when they are ill. The NHS needs to be reformed to become a service which protects its patients; not a service which needs patients to protect it and which often seems to exist mainly as a sales outlet for the pharmaceutical industry. 8. The media It’s fair to say that the pandemic response would not have been nearly as catastrophic as it was without the involvement of the media. It’s arguable that it was pressure from the 24 hour rolling news media for “something to be done” that resulted in governments abandoning their measured approach to pandemic planning and opt for completely unprecedented lockdowns; and that it was the drumbeat of fear from the media which kept the pandemic alive when any significant danger had long gone. Media benefited hugely from government advertising budgets during the COVID era. They willingly spread fear and panic engineered by the government’s behavioural psychologists in return for millions of pounds of taxpayer money. They willingly censored voices from science and academia which opposed lockdowns for what turned out to be entirely correct reasons; they vilified people who opposed vaccine mandates and who exposed the vaccines’ lack of safety and efficacy; they vilified doctors working on early treatment strategies. For the most part they failed to provide any balance to the government or pharmaceutical company narratives; they simply acted as the communications arm of government. We ceased to have an independent media in any meaningful way. And Ofcom, the regulator which is supposed to act in the public interest to monitor the behaviour of the media, was as bad as the industry, repeatedly taking action against the few outlets which dared to provide any balancing or dissenting points of view. What are they key learnings here? Mainstream media, and Ofcom, have failed the public. I would hope that the inquiry recognises this and recommends to government that major changes are made to separate government and media, and never allow the situation where mainstream media becomes nothing more than a government spokesman to recur, but I think that is a futile hope. The main recommendation should be that the government abandons its plans to implement more censorship on the internet, ensures that the BBC abandons its censorship units, and allows a thousand alternative independent media sources to flourish. While the pandemic years were disastrous, without alternative media providing a means for truth and alternative points of view to be shared, we would be living in an even more dystopian and authoritarian world.
