The Stanford-based Professor of Medicine told me that lockdowns “will be seen as the single biggest public health mistake in history”.
At a time when all the U.K.’s main political parties backed lockdown vehemently, with Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer and Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP incessantly calling for Covid-related restrictions to be even more punitive, Bhattacharya’s words were not universally welcomed.
On the contrary, his efforts to promote “targeted shielding” – helping the elderly and others with medical conditions that make them particularly vulnerable to Covid, while letting the rest of us get on with our lives – were widely dismissed as irresponsible.
Even in that climate, when to question lockdown was to face social ostracism, Bhattacharya was warning of the “enormous collateral consequences” of keeping people inside and isolating them from their loved ones during the Covid-19 pandemic. He was supported by two more top epidemiologists – Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard. …
I’m shocked – but hardly surprised – that the U.K.’s lockdown policies have been barely discussed during this election campaign.
There seems to be a conspiracy of silence between the main parties to keep quiet about lockdown, seeing as all of them agreed with and helped reinforce it. This position is now, at the very least, open to serious question.
Missed operations, economic scarring, compromised schooling and very serious damage to people’s mental health – not least among children and young adults – were just some of the problems stored up for the future by shutting down the country three times in 2020 and 2021. …
Amidst the election campaign and well away from the public eye the U.K.’s ridiculous “Covid Inquiry” rumbles on. The inquiry team is touring the country as part of the “Every Story Matters” project, allowing people to speak anonymously without giving formal evidence to the inquiry.
Our Covid Inquiry is astonishingly drawn out – having started in June 2022 and scheduled to take evidence until at least June 2026. It’s a lawyers’ bonanza, paid for by us – with costs exceeding £70 million last year alone and the final bill expected to reach almost £200 million.
Rather than addressing the central question – whether, if the U.K. faces a pandemic similar to COVID-19, we lock down again or not – this Covid investigation has instead become a ludicrously expensive talking shop.
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