The BBC reports that Wales’s First Minister Mark Drakeford has told the Covid Inquiry that local Covid lockdowns were a “failed experiment”.
He could have said it was a failed policy or intervention, but Drakeford chose to say lockdowns were an “experiment”.
An experiment is a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery and test a hypothesis.
However, at the time, lockdowns were a policy enforced by law.
Mark Drakeford announced in May 2020 that the maximum fine for repeated breaches of the lockdown rules in Wales rose from £120 to £1,920. Up to June 8th, 2,282 Fixed Penalty Notices were issued for – as it seems now – failing to participate in an experiment. People in Wales were twice as likely as English to be fined for breaking lockdown rules. Some experiment.
We are at a loss to explain how the people who set the laws can do so based on experiments. As for experiments, where was the consent procedure, where was the control group and where was the evaluation?
The Welsh Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser for Health, Rob Orford, read from the evidence Drakeford provided to the inquiry that “in hindsight perhaps they weren’t the best idea”.
Yet again, we learned that policy wasn’t based on any evidence. “I’m not sure where the origin of the idea around local interventions came from, whether that was the U.K. Government or Welsh Government.”
We utterly reject the “hindsight” argument, which Sir John Edmunds also used as an excuse for some of his most extreme advice.
We reject it because we pointed out the obvious on April 8th 2020: you cannot affect the circulation of an endemic respiratory virus with any of the interventions known to us, including vaccines, which were not on the table then.
We pointed out that wrecking society and the economy to chase an evidence fallacy was the stuff of nightmares. We and the rest of society have paid a heavy price for this temerity.
Policy must be based on expertise and evidence. If there is no evidence, you either generate it or sit on your hands as the precautionary principle suggests, until such time as the costs and benefits of alternative actions are clear.
No amount of boot licking, spin and hiding from the public can give us back what this mob of politickers, modellers and activists have taken.
The post will not self-destruct or self-delete; it isn’t an experiment.
Prof. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
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