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Did the Covid inquiry just admit lockdown was a mistake?

Toby Green

Families look at the Covid Memorial Wall in central London. Credit: Getty

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The Covid inquiry has this afternoon published a full report on its first module, assessing the resilience and preparedness of the UK’s pandemic response. It has so far been met with apparently predetermined headlines of how the UK Government failed its citizens by “preparing for the wrong pandemic”, and that the country was “ill-prepared”. The impact of austerity meant that this was certainly true — but the currently unreported and biggest story in the report is its wholesale attack on the lockdown approach itself.

Baroness Hallett’s full report contains remarkable criticisms of the Government’s preferred lockdown policy, which was also adopted across the world. Far from stating that the UK should have locked down sooner and harder, as many predicted, Hallett’s team has concluded that “the imposition of a lockdown should be a measure of last resort […] indeed, there are those who would argue that a lockdown should never be imposed.”

Strikingly, the initial media reactions have barely anything to say about the report’s conclusions on lockdowns, just as the word “lockdown” was not mentioned once in the WHO’s September 2019 report on non-pharmaceutical interventions in pandemics. This is because, though it’s long been an article of faith in these circles that earlier and harder lockdowns were the solution, this is not the conclusion that the report comes to. Instead, Baroness Hallett has concluded that there were devastating failings in imposing lockdown in the first place.

First, the report highlights the fact that lockdowns were untested as a means for responding to a pandemic. One section notes that former chancellor George Osborne “said that no one had thought that a policy response up to and including lockdowns was possible until China had commenced one in 2020, and so there was no reason for the Treasury to plan for it”. This confirms the initial reports in outlets such as the Washington Post that China’s response was “unprecedented”.

There is also extensive weight given to the evidence of epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University, who is quoted as telling the inquiry that lockdown “was an ad hoc public health intervention contrived in real time in the face of a fast-moving public health emergency. We had not planned to introduce lockdown […] there were no guidelines for when a lockdown should be implemented and no clear expectations as to what it would achieve.”

Even more importantly, the report for the first module emphasises that one of the failures of the “ad hoc” lockdown approach was that its novelty meant there was no time to interrogate its consequences. The inquiry notes that “if countermeasures in the form of non-pharmaceutical interventions are not considered in advance […] their potential side effects will not be subject, in advance, to rigorous scrutiny.” In other words, the imposition of ill-prepared policies meant that there was no chance for politicians and the public to interrogate what the consequences would be, a weakness the UK Government has only acknowledged since the end of the pandemic.

The report goes on to refer to the work of the new UK-wide Pandemic Diseases Capabilities Board (PDCB), which noted the upshot of this failure of a cost-benefit analysis. Hallett’s team quotes the PDCB’s summary that the current assessments “do not include a full risk assessment for the use of [non-pharmaceutical interventions]. Given that the imposition of lockdown in part accounted for a 25% drop in GDP between February and April 2020, the largest drop on record, and numerous secondary and tertiary impacts on all sectors, this represents a significant gap in the UK’s assessment of pandemic risk.”

And so the real story of Hallett’s report is not that the UK was prepared for the “wrong pandemic”, but that it resorted to a hitherto-unimaginable policy, on no evidence-base, where the risks were not fully assessed. The real story is the report’s analysis that lockdowns should only be resorted to in future as “a last resort”, and quite possibly should never be resorted to at all.

While there are gaps — the UK government’s own evidence that its Test and Trace system reduced Covid infections by at most 5% at a cost of UK£29.3 billion isn’t discussed — today’s report of Module 1 delivers a devastating blow to the lockdown consensus. It offers an admirable discussion of the many factors to be balanced in a health emergency, citing former chief medical officer Sally Davies and her advocacy of a need to “balance the biomedical model”, so that Government decision-makers receive advice from a wider range of perspectives. This would include economic impact, social wellbeing, and the effect on children and young people in education.

The report pulls the rug from under those whose declamations were taken as quasi-religious pronouncements throughout the terrible years of the pandemic. The real question to emerge is whether the media will honestly report what Hallett’s team has actually said — and what the consequences of this should be.

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Toby Green is a professor of History and associate of the Global Health Institute at King’s College, London. The updated edition of his book, The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Thomas Fazi, is published by Hurst.

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