We’re publishing a guest post by Dr. David Livermore, Professor of Medical Microbiology at UEA, about the official public inquiry into the British Government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which he regards as a ‘curate’s egg’ – good in parts, and the bad bits aren’t all that bad. (You can see the Draft Terms of Reference, published on Thursday, here.) The fact that it will be overseen by Baroness Hallett (pictured) is not a disaster – she acted as coroner for the victims of the 7/7 bombings and seems like an honest broker. Nevertheless, Professor Livermore had identified four omissions in the inquiry, such as this one:
First, and foremost: democratic accountability and the use of advisory committees. From the start of the pandemic until mid-2021 we were governed by a War Cabinet comprising Messrs Johnson, Raab, Gove and Hancock, along with Drs Whitty and Vallance. Their decisions were predicated on SAGE’s groupthink. Parliamentary scrutiny was suspended. Churchill’s dictum of ‘experts on tap, not on top’ was forgotten. My view – as a citizen, not as a Professor of Medical Microbiology – is that this should never have happened. Government is to govern; Parliament to scrutinise and expert committees to provide advice.
But, if Government is to subcontract its functions to unelected technocrats, these should include a range of specialities. SAGE is completely dominated by modellers, behaviourists, and public health medicine, with a single fixation on COVID. They say that it isn’t their remit to consider the wider societal effects of their advice.
Handing control of anything complex, let alone a country, to monomaniacs is generally unwise.
We’ve included David’s piece in a new section on the right-hand menu called “The Public Inquiry”. I expect we’ll be publishing a great number of pieces under this heading in the near future.
Worth reading in full.
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Reply to rtj1211
Excellent list
Why not add the complete abandonment of the Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, with no evidence?
Also the banning of free speech. Anything not following the narrative was cancelled, blanked, disallowed or otherwise buried.
If the good Baroness is only allowed to talk to the same liars who have presented the policies such as Witless and Unbalanced, then all she will get is the ongoing government lies.
Even speaking to the bereaved families, if the correct sheeple are cherry-picked, will result in these people saying things like “If only we had locked down sooner”, or “If we had started mask-wearing earlier”, or “if him next door had only had his vaccines like that nice MR Hancock said”. Baroness Hallett will come up with nothing except a whitewash, unless people like David Livermore are allowed to speak openly with no threats.
I speak as a GP, living and working in Australia, where I am not allowed to say anything that contradicts the government narrative, under pain of deregistration, suspension , and re-education.
Can we have some understanding of a “curate’s egg” (https://interestingliterature.com/2020/06/curates-egg-phrase-meaning-origins/).
We should not be as humble on the matter of public inquiries as a 19th-century curate was about his bad egg.
Looking forward to contributing my two penny worth.
No clinicians on SAGE, so inadequate clinical response to diagnosis and treatment issues with unnecessary delay. Also inappropriate bias towards containment rather than treatment
Failure to engage with those who submitted evidence-based proposals
Failure to read the extant literature
Failure to use the right data and statistical analyses.
Failure to prevent nosocomial infection allied to seeding of care homes by discharging patients without testing
Media hysteria
Etc
My two years worth of blog now stands At over 150000 words. Tempting to submit as is!
“The fact that it will be overseen by Baroness Hallett (pictured) is not a disaster – she acted as coroner for the victims of the 7/7 bombings and seems like an honest broker.”
Absolutely laughable, she is part of the establishment therefore its a waste of time.
Will they be looking at the utterly malevolent actions of government agent BIT, whose mandate was clearly to terrify and subdue the population?
If not – why not? If government is by consent, we didn’t consent to the barrage of propaganda these turds unleashed.
And neatly, BIT was privatised, so no FoI requests can be made.
Excellent summary Prof.
Good article, but how sad that no one today seems to know what the expression ‘curate’s egg’ means. It refers to something that cannot be good in parts and bad in parts; if any part is bad the whole thing is bad. Just like an egg. The Victorian cartoon that inspired the saying can easily be found by googling.
I see we’re using a picture of Baroness Hallett in her Gerry Anderson (costumes by Sylvia Anderson) phase.
Such matters should never again be conducted by statisticians and models. No committee in future should be free of economists and business people (by which I mean those who actually run businesses, those who run them and those who work in them).
We ought to have a constriutional amendment that no Cabinet could be similarly lacking but the political class would never allow that.
Expect nothing from an inquiry where so-called bereaved families are to play any role. Losing relatives to death is bad but – in the end – unavoidable. Someone who then starts screaming bloody murder for the still living to be tortured because of his mad desire to get even with someone is nothing but a lowlive which ought to be silenced.
A lot of people have suffered hardship and loss due to goverment policy and certainly not due to the pandemic.
Heather Hallett these days – the picture used in the article is how many years old?
Well noted. A lie of omission is still a lie.
the politicians say we did the best we could with the information we had. No information should ever say that elderly people with a limited lifespan should ever be locked away from family, while care workers were able to be near them, why not the families. Hands touching through glass, wheeled out to ‘see’ your family. The whole thing was an utter disgrace in a so called civilised country.
Bye bye British establishment hello new post apolcalyptic groundswell. it is up to us what we make of it and the contempt we have for our patrician past.
I don’t think I’d be inclined to trust any official involved with 7/7 – another dodgy event once you dig into the details…
Psycopaths patting each other on the head whilst giving the plebs an illusion of probity. You saw the contempt they had in parliament for the raising of our concerns, even though they were underwritten by despair, suicide, addiction. The idea that those with a science based education should have any power at all is deeply pernicious. I have been around these people. They are intellectual and spiritual babies. Sixty years ago it was the greats of literature that we looked up to. Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann was top of the charts. Have you ever met anyone superficial who loves the great novels? The culture that we are forced to live under now isn’t just a degradation it is a radical uprooting force which has only death at the end.
The best enquiry would be a Court appearance before a jury of all those involved in creating the last two years of Hell.
However, I already know the.conclusion of the enquire.
Lessons Will Be Learned™️
To the question, who goes to gaol? the answer will be: nobody.
Then it will be business as usual until the next enquiry into why sanctions against Russia caused UK and its citizens more damage and cost than Russia?
When that is out of the way, we can have another lovely enquire into why Net Zero drive us back to the Stone Age.
Do they still sell whitewash these days or is it called something else?
Let us not forget that we do not know yet where the so called pandemic started from and how? If we do not get to the bottom of that there is zero chance of stopping another similar incident.
I think any inquiry into this will be started from the idea that lockdowns and social restrictions were necessary and they work, and that covid is this extremely deadly disease that kills everyone. If that is the case, any such inquiry is invalid. It’s like the Nuremberg trials starting with the premise that the Jews deserved it.
That might have been the case but there are signs of hope now. Let’s not forget we we had some of the least restrictions in the western world during this last wave. Some pennies have dropped in important places.
one thing among many I definitely never want to see again is the revolting advertising of “look into my eyes and tell me you did enough” that advert was a disgrace and you do feel as if to say look into my eyes and tell me why people have been deprived medical treatment because the NHS packed up services, and pretty much barring doctors appointments and also making people redundant etc. You even here an uptick in stories now of people selling their houses and cars to go private as they cannot get treatment ffs.
Absolutely. Have a look at the graph of the NHS waiting list if you haven’t. It’s eye-watering.
The Baroness’s e-mail address seems to be [email protected]
If you want her individual e-mail address, i.e. to suggest that the terms of reference are inadequate, I think you’ll have to ask for the HoL for it.
No mention of Macron threatening to close the channel ports if the UK did not discard it’s perfectly sensible ‘focused protection’ pandemic plan, and follow #NATO’s nazi lockdown policy ….
God save me from the ugly rash of academics who’ve got their names on newspaper articles or websites off the back of this pandemic – or more exactly, off the back of government “pandemic” policy – despite never having bothered to acquire a decent set of writing skills.
“Handing control of anything complex, let alone a country, to monomaniacs is generally unwise.”
They need to give you a troubleshooting job, eh, David, so you can show them the way a person with steady hands and a clear sense of good management does things?
Here’s another cliché for your collection: trahison des clercs.
It’s trite but nevertheless accurate.
https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/03/12/whitty-lied-then-children-died-ons-data-proves-it/
“The pandemic has affected us all, some much worse than others. I am acutely conscious of the suffering it has caused to so many.”
Wrong. And this biased opinion alone should cause immediate disqualification for submission to the prevailing deeply flawed and dangerous groupthink. It was the government response and the response of the establishment and mainstream media that caused the suffering. It was not as bad as they told us. And their so called vaccines were not what they said they were. And it’s still ongoing.
“A public inquiry”… Especially the British variety, an exercise in obfuscation and filthy lies! Tell me I’m wrong.
You may be right but it’s the best we’ve got for now so I think we should do everything we can do get something out of it.
After the Chillcot enquiry I don’t think you are wrong
“The dodgy dossier was not sexed up”. A.Campbell.
We don’t need their Public Inquiry -or a picking over and evaluation of the ‘terms’ to know the results already -this is, after all, the UK Deep State in Action -only one conclusion is required:
“Whitewash”.
Many protective coats for all those concerned.
The way I see it, we have three options. (1) Accept we live in a tyranny. (2) Leave. (3) Fight for something better.
You seem to be going for (1). How about we engage with this process and see if we can do a bit of (3)?
Some sort of campaign to raise awareness of MPs who are WEF members, The average Jo is still ignorant of the WEF but many would be familiar with DAVOS. An ignorant public is a real problem.
Holding discrete national inquiries, (UK, Austria, Australia) is akin to investigating individual concentration camps and ignoring the puppeteers, the rotting Fauci/Gates/Wellcome/Roche/WHO/WEF axis of evil.
Start at the top of the pile of ordure.
just a small point on your list including Wellcome and Roche.Neither of these companies produced any”vaccines”. Wellcome is part of GSK, which together with Sanofi, Merck and Johnson & Johnson are the worldwide leaders for vaccines. the first 3 did not produce anything, J& J did but amost ignored and so I have been told only meant for use in third world. Another reson for my scepicism that these items only produced by 3 companies Astra Zeneca, Pfizer and Moderna with no special previous reputation for vaccines.
Thank you.
Roche was behind PCR testing and all that that contributed to the whole.
The Wellcome Trust is arguably the unholy UK equivalent of the Bill and Melinda Gates Philanthro-Mafia Eugenics outfit.
Merck and GSK are still enjoying the HPV windfall. (See the Indian trials chapter in Kennedy’s Fauci book.) Perhaps it’s their turn next?
At least that is what they’re doing in the Court of Public Opinion. A proper international people’s Court.
My inquiry results always were and are:
Any discrimination is wrong and illegal.
Any assault, let alone abolition, of any inalienable individual right is wrong and illegal.
Any censorship, let alone punishment, of free speech is wrong, illegal and will lead to a worse outcome, in particular with regard to science.
As such, the response to the virus threat was a total moral, legal, democratic, societal, scientific and financial catastrophe and the declaration of bankrupcy of today’s states and their people.
Unfortunately, all these mistakes and assaults were deliberate, (ab)using existing power structures and human psychology and are now ingrained, which means that they will therefore enthusiastically be repeated when the next threat comes along.
The Government announcing that it was “following the science” was the first mistake. But the SAGE committee was supposed to advising the Government, not announcing to the world on what they thought the policies should be. That was the second mistake.
It is difficult to find a workable solution on how the Government can obtain the expert advice it needs, and yet treat that advice in the proper context of the situation in the round. But it is evident that committees such as SAGE – stuffed as it was with people Sir Patrick Vallance knew would reach the ‘right’ conclusions – is not the way to go in the future.