In the hundreds of pages of statements submitted to the U.K. Covid Inquiry, important questions are being raised which Baroness Hallett shows little interest in answering, says Michael Simmons in the Spectator. Such as: was lockdown based on a false premise, conjured up by poorly drafted models? And why did the Government put out a ‘graph of doom’ to justify the second lockdown that it knew to be wrong?
On October 31st 2020, some 14 million British TV viewers sat down to watch an emergency press conference in which Boris Johnson, flanked by Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, announced a second lockdown. Sir Patrick presented a slideshow giving the data that justified the restrictions.
It was terrifying. The argument was summed up by a graph saying that if there were “no changes in policy or behaviour”, there could be up to 4,000 deaths a day, three times the number from the first wave in the spring. …
But the graph was wrong. It was out of date and based on flawed information, as was later pointed out by academics including Cambridge’s David Spiegelhalter and by the U.K. Statistics Authority itself. Might this have been a genuine mistake? In the rush and the panic – news of the lockdown had already leaked to the press – surely officials would have published a wrong graph only if they believed it to be right?
In his testimony, Warner remembers seeing a graph being circulated among scientists two days before lockdown that was “screen-shotted out of a SPI-M [the modelling group] working paper”. …
Angela McLean, now Chief Scientific Adviser but then at the Ministry of Defence, sounded the alarm. The graph had been based on a rate of virus growth – the R number – that was by then known to be incorrect. …
Warner testified that he went into the cabinet room to raise the alarm to the Prime Minister and his officials. The Covid peak might be half of that forecast, he said. Having flagged corrupt data, he thought the graph would be taken out of circulation. …
Only later did Warner find out that this graph had been shown on national television.
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