Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has finally conceded “we overdid it” on Covid restrictions. So why haven’t many of the architects of this disaster been held accountable, asks Isabel Oakeshott in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
Far, far too late in the Public Inquiry that took years to get underway, and still has no end date, Whitty this week acknowledged what so many of us could quite clearly see at the time: that the Government went way over the top in its initial pandemic response. Of course, he didn’t put it quite like that. What he actually said, giving evidence this week, is that “in retrospect”, he still worries about whether the Government “got the level of concern right”.
“Some people would say… if anything we over did it,” he conceded.
In a further remarkable concession, he went on to declare that in hindsight, ordering 2.3 million people to cut themselves off from the world entirely for 12 weeks may have done more damage than it prevented. He now says he is “unsure” he would go down that route again, because it caused “significant harms”.
Say what? This is extraordinary! If Whitty is no longer sure that the elderly and most vulnerable (around whom the entire response to the pandemic revolved) needed to self-isolate, what on earth is left of the case for anyone else locking down?
In his characteristically understated way, Whitty appears to have shattered the case for lockdowns. If even he wouldn’t repeat the policy, who would?
Sadly, it has taken so long to extract this confession that the significance is in danger of being lost. For just as the criminally wasteful public inquiry is finally starting to get interesting, most ordinary people have lost the will to live, and are no longer affording it any attention. …
What really rankles is that the architects of this historic disaster are all still sitting pretty. So far from the downfall they deserve, they have prospered. Knighted for his public service, Whitty is still in an almighty position of power, as Chief Medical Officer. Meanwhile his pandemic sidekick, former Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance, is literally lording it, having recently been given a peerage to join Keir Starmer’s front bench.
Worth reading in full.
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