I must admit, I’m really enjoying the Covid Inquiry. Now the Rugby World Cup is over, it’s far more entertaining than anything else on TV. Inspired casting of Dominic Cummings as the evil genius, assisted by Uriah Heap-like Lee Cain. The persecution of the dignified and serene female lead, Ms. Helen MacNamara. Urbane and polished advocate Hugo Keith KC feeds the lines to smoothly serpiginous Simon Stevens – as always, the best politician in the room. There are moments of genuine hilarity as senior civil servants swoon at salty language from Cummings. I strongly suggest they steer away from members of my profession, who are quite capable of expressing dissatisfaction using vocabulary that would make a docker blush. Tension builds inexorably towards the grand entrance of Box Office Boris – don’t forget to tune in, folks.
I do get the feeling however that the Noble Lady Hallet looks slightly bored – quite possibly because she wrote up her conclusions well before the process started and may be finding the performative part a bit tedious.
Because whatever we are watching in Dorland House, 121 Westbourne Terrace, is certainly not an inquiry. This matters, because what we are witnessing is the production of official history. History in its original Greek meaning is defined as an inquiry. An investigation into why things happened, not just a recitation of events.
Dominic Cummings wrote a fascinating 115-page witness statement, which you can access here. There is much of interest in this document. So why did the formidably capable Mr. Keith choose to concentrate on a few hurty words uttered by Cummings and ignore the matters of great substance which had huge relevance to decision making and governance? Mr. Keith is a professional advocate. He is well remunerated for crafting an argument favourable to those who are paying him. I suggest that is precisely what he is doing.
Regular readers will be familiar with my fascination for drilling down into details, but today I’d like to make a broad general observation about Cummings written testimony, which seems to describe a ‘game of two halves’. First half, the Greek chorus aligns in one direction, chanting in unison about herd immunity, focused protection, staying at home if symptomatic, and so on. I like that – its Great Barrington before Great Barrington became a thing. That’s described by the officials as ‘Plan A’.
Then suddenly, around the period from March 9th–15th everything changes. The chorus turns 180 degrees and chants about NHS overwhelm, imminent catastrophe and the imperative for lockdown – or ‘Plan B’ for short. Why?
There is simply too much detail and conflicting information in the mountain of written evidence for one person to tease out the answers – which is precisely why a proper inquiry is needed. My brief reading of the situation reveals a growing sense of panic and fear, driven above all by Professor Ferguson’s graphs of doom, best illustrated in paragraph three of page 32 in Cummings statement. The detail behind this is reflected in an email exchange between Vallance, Whitty and Ferguson dated March 15th.
Ferguson describes a “reasonable worst-case scenario” (RWC). In the RWC, the peak requirement for ICU beds in England is over 180,000, with almost half a million general hospital beds needed for the less critically ill. Think about that. The NHS in England has about 4,700 ICU beds at maximum surge capacity. I haven’t so far seen any detailed reference to the critical supply constraint – the number of ICU trained nurses available. It takes years to train an ICU nurse, so no matter how many ventilators were produced by Dyson, without the nursing staff to go with them, such efforts were meaningless. There is also no detailed commentary on how likely the RWC was. Clearly, if there was a 1% that the RWC would materialise, this may not have been consequential. Yet all of the major players seem to have accepted that the RWC was overwhelmingly likely without lockdown restrictions – why was that? Where was intellectual curiosity amongst our key decision makers?
In retrospect, of course, we know that Ferguson’s numbers were complete nonsense. Yet his interventions were the critical assertions which scuppered the initial plan, loosely referred to as the ‘Swedish approach’. Had we stuck to Plan A, it’s a reasonable inference that the country would be in much better shape than it currently is. Despite this, Ferguson was given the most deferential treatment during his questioning. Again, I ask why?
A proper inquiry would take Ferguson’s modelling apart, line by line. Dissect all the assumptions made. Investigate how the algorithms were set up. Find out who wrote the computer code on which the model was based and what individuals were involved in putting the model together. What inputs were made to derive the RWC and other scenarios? Who decided on those parameters and why? Ferguson is merely the mouthpiece for people who constructed a machine which locked up the entire population for months on end, wrecked the economy and caused massive collateral damage to general healthcare, children’s education and mental health.
A proper inquiry would reveal everything about these backroom people. What their backgrounds and beliefs were. Who paid them. Who guided and motivated them – and why.
That is what a proper inquiry would look like – and we aren’t going to get it because the people setting the terms and conditions of the inquiry don’t want to investigate these matters. Again, I ask why?
Those responsible for the catastrophe of lockdown have already banked their gains – taken the promotions and awards – baubles distributed to incentivise compliance and silence. An inquiry is far too dangerous. An inquiry might raise awkward questions. An inquiry might expose information that did not fit the officially sanctioned version of events. Far preferable to generate a comfortable consensus, even if it is the wrong consensus. Then we can do it all again next time.
Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen – the next show will be starting shortly.
The author, the Daily Sceptic’s in-house doctor, is a former NHS consultant now in private practice.
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That email from Ferguson is remarkable. All on him.
We know from the released source code that there was a single regression test for the ICL code and no other tests. We also know that wasn’t the original version used to justify lock down, that version couldn’t produce reproducible results due to the multi-threading causing threads to randomly get values from the pseudo-random number generator.
The thing about Dom was he used to rant on his blog about groupthink and misuse of data. He stressed the need to challenge assumptions and a ‘red team’ to scrutinise everything. Then when he had the chance to act… he made all the same mistakes as the people he’d previously lambasted. He fell for the svengali-like patter of Ferguson and his junk models hook, line, and sinker.
I agree that it’s not a “proper inquiry”, but as you mentioned Dyson’s proposal, that is just one of many cases of opportunism. No doubt quite a few others have made a profit from it all; that would be an interesting topic for a real inquiry.
Long may this self licking lollipop of an inquiry continue.
The more coverage it gets, the better.
A finer indictment of today’s oleaginously self gratifying, dim, pompous and hopelessly incompetent British Establishment would be hard to imagine.
The inquiry is further damaging this, admittedly already doomed, government but, given a fair wind, it should destroy the next one as well.
*serpiginous: too good.
I think you answered your own question that they had to lock us down to hide the car crash that is the NHS. That whilst money for the NHS has increased, the number of medics and bed spaces have decreased per head of population.
Hospital beds per capita in the UK is certainly low, but it’s even lower in Sweden where they didn’t lock down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_beds
And in my experience, GPs are now at more danger of the extinction than Greenpiss incorrectly claim that is faced by Polar Bears.
“what we are witnessing is the production of official history.”
Nail on head.
It’s about exonerating the Civil Service, SAGE and the Public Health Tyrants. And making Johnson the Fall Guy.
Oh, and ensuring that a lockdown is still considered appropriate and enforceable in order to deal with any future scenario they come up with.
Yes indeed. But as for Johnson, in true show biz style, he’s picking himself up and dusting himself down and now out in Israel. Of course he is there to express his support for Israel not for any personal benefit we are led to believe. He is not PM and he is not an MP and as he is reputed to be very stingy with paying for his round – who paid for this trip?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/05/boris-johnson-and-scott-morrison-join-forces-on-solidarity-trip-to-israel
The timing of Ferguson’s message is interesting – 15 March 2020.
Because on 19 March 2020 the Government on the advice of its Public Health bodies downgraded Covid from a High Consequence Infectious Disease. That was 5 days before the first lockdown.
“They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall),”
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19
As I understand it the C1984 was downgraded from High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) because if it remained as such that would mean that all potential prophylactics would have to remain available.
Downgrading allowed for the removal of drugs such as Ivermectin and Hydroxichloroquine which the Davos Deviants knew were effective in combating the revised ‘flu and as proved in Uttar Pradesh and by the brave American Front Line Doctors – AFLD.
And following on from that, the absence of such things helped them to issue Emergency Use Authorization for new jabs (it wouldn’t have been valid if there were established alternatives).
Yes. I should have included this. Thanks.
Italian medics had also published this information but it was censored & threats to remove their medical licences were made.
Not many know that despite the censorship & threats, the Italian medics did get the message out only for the use of this information to be made illegal by corrupt governments & medical boards the world over.
This chap nails it.
One of the most staggering pieces of incompetence was the splendidly efficient creation of ‘Nightingale’ overflow hospitals in short order (the opinions expressed re the NHS by armed forces personnel responsible for setting up the Nightingales were unprintable).
Incompetent because the staff to man the Nightingales simply did not exist.
Probably the well named Hancock thought they would be manned by Army medics, forgetting that the Army no longer had much in the way of medics, slashed in multiple defence cuts by his colleagues…..
Interesting comment in the DT article re’ Hancock’s flirtation with celeb’ SAS. ‘Billy’ one of the directing staff, pointed out that such was Hancocks ability to rub his captors up the wrong way that he’d have had his cheek bone smashed in within ten seconds of the start of his interrogation. Indeed, the female staff member called Hancock “a weasel faced c@nt”.
There could have been a bit more to it than that. Back then, it occurred to me that it might have been organised by the MoD on the run up to the budget (which was cancelled) to demonstrate how good they were etc. Thus cutting expenditure on their activities was not a good idea from their perspective. At any rate, a fair bit of the cost must have been on their balance sheet.
Bingo! Enough said.
…and on the 16th March 2020 Imperial College issued Report 9 which was demonstrably completely wrong on the date is was published.
I am starting to fell like a broken record.
Lockdowns were never done before and deemed too harmful by the WHO.
So why use lockdowns?
Why do something so drastic without any evidence it works, but with certainty it
will cause collateral damage?
Brilliant piece by in house Doctor.
One for the PC Hard Drive.
But I urge a tiny addition.
We de need to know exactly who chose Professor Pantsdown Ferguson for his role in this sick farce.
Even I knew his reputation for gross incompetence and doomsaying on stilts before 2020 had dawned.
Whoever picked him or supported his appointment should be breaking rocks on Dartmoor for the rest of their lives.
“WE REALISED WE COULD GET AWAY WITH IT.”