In America, Prof Jay Bhattacharya, the lockdown sceptic once derided by NIH chief Francis Collins as a “fringe epidemiologist”, is about to take over as NIH head in truly sweet karma. But five years on the UK is still mired in denial, say Molly Kingsley and Allison Pearson in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
This week, in a committee room in Washington, DC, witnesses observed what may turn out to be one of the greatest vindications in the history of medical science. Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine, Economics and Health Policy at Stanford University, appeared before a Senate nomination hearing en route to confirmation as Director of America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). Hollywood would struggle to come up with a more stunning story arc for this mild-mannered hero.
During the Covid pandemic, the man who is about to become the most senior health official in the United States was a pariah. In October 2020, along with two distinguished colleagues, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta, a Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya published the Great Barrington Declaration.
The trio argued that lockdown would cause “irreparable damage” and made the case for “focused protection”; the elderly and the infirm would be sheltered while younger, healthier people got on with their lives (no social distancing, no masks, no quarantine) and built up immunity in the population. The manifesto proposed the lifting of restrictions which were plain silly (shutting children’s playgrounds, limiting exercise outdoors) and others which were deeply damaging (closing schools, cancelling hospital appointments) or merely economically disastrous (paying healthy people to stay at home, suspending hospitality and transport).
In an interview with the Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, in 2021, Bhattacharya warned of an “unseen” mental health crisis. Lockdown, he said, would come to be viewed as “the single biggest public health mistake of all history in terms of the scope of the harms that it’s caused”.
For daring to challenge the global groupthink, Bhattacharya endured vile personal attacks and censorship. Twitter suppressed the visibility of his posts while Google and Facebook, acting on requests from the Biden administration, no less, buried any mention of Great Barrington.
Four days after the declaration was published, Francis Collins, then the head of NIH, wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, who led America’s Covid response, warning that Great Barrington seemed “to be getting a lot of attention” and that “there needs to be a quick and devastating published take-down of its premises”. Bhattacharya, Gupta and Kulldorf, he sneered, were “fringe epidemiologists”.
Collins seemed to be casting himself as the infallible pope of science and Jay Bhattacharya was the heretic who must be burnt at the stake. Well, from next week, that heretic takes the pope’s job. Karma rarely gets much sweeter.
Five years on, Americans are getting to grips with the fact that Great Barrington was pretty much spot on, and the lawsuits are flying. Lockdown has indeed had horrific and indelible consequences. We can all see that, can’t we? Developmental delay in infants, a mental health epidemic, poorer exam results, lethal waiting lists for hospitals which closed their doors to non-Covid cases, a spike in avoidable cancer deaths, difficulty coaxing people back to work, not to mention economic catastrophe (a deafening £450 billion was printed to pay for furlough, PPE and other measures. On this the British political class are silent).
In the US the reckoning is huge. The guilty men are being named and the former heretic Bhattacharya is elevated to the highest office. But here in the UK we are still mired in delusion and denial.
Take Sunday, which is the official Covid Day of Reflection. It’s billed as “an opportunity to come together to remember those who lost their lives since the pandemic began and to honour the tireless work and acts of kindness shown during this unprecedented time”. The heart sinks. While those who lost loved ones to Covid deserve our sympathy, many who died were already in God’s waiting room and could just as easily have been carried off by flu. The day sounds like another opportunity to wallow in soft-focus sadness when what is called for is a tough, hard-headed appraisal of how our pandemic response led to tragic consequences for the living, and what we must avoid – like the plague, funnily enough – in future. We do not need a day of quiet reflection: Britons should look back in anger.
In stark contrast to the US’s determined uncovering of pandemic mistakes and lies, the UK’s Covid Inquiry, led by Baroness Heather Hallett, seems glacial, myopic, evasive and absurdly expensive (it’s on track to cost more than £200 million, although some say half a billion is more realistic, with a stupefying £55 million set to be squandered on up to 150 lawyers).
Where other countries got their Covid reports done and dusted years ago (Lady Hallett’s Swedish counterpart, Mats Melin, had completed his final report four months before the terms of reference for the UK hearings had even been agreed), our inquiry has taken on an Alice Through the Looking Glass pointless perversity. How painstakingly it confirms its own prejudgments and prejudices while studiously avoiding anything contentious.
The core question the British public may have hoped to have answered was whether the staggering costs of the Government’s population-wide interventions outweighed the benefits. With some nine million people now economically inactive in the UK, upwards of 7.5 million languishing on hospital waiting lists, and marked rises in obesity, mental health issues, alcohol-related deaths, substance abuse and disability all traceable back to 2020 – don’t we have to ask: seriously, was it worth it?
With Sweden standing by her decision to avoid draconian mandatory lockdowns and restrictions on personal liberty, a view which the Swedish inquiry called “fundamentally correct” (albeit indicating that certain venues should have been closed earlier), an influential (bipartisan) Congressional report on the pandemic emphatically concluded: “The prescription cannot be worse than the disease, such as strict and overly broad lockdowns that led to predictable anguish and avoidable consequences.”
Academic papers suggest only a negligible benefit of lockdown in terms of saving lives. So why is the UK inquiry dodging those critical issues altogether?
From the outset, Lady Hallett’s inquiry has largely accepted the necessity of unprecedented, authoritarian interventions in a country we were told was facing an existential threat to its entire population. (The fact we knew quite early on that Covid was a remarkably age-stratified virus, with the risk of death to the elderly a thousandfold what it is to the young, is never mentioned. The average age of death in Italy, where the European chapter of the pandemic began as garment workers returned from China after the holidays, was 82.4 years. Not much different from the average life expectancy for a British man.)
“There was no real argument as to whether, for good and obvious public health reasons, these measures had to be contemplated,” said Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, to Michael Gove on the topic of lockdowns. “They were matters of life and death. So there wasn’t really a thesis and an antithesis position here, Mr Gove. All the public health advice on a public health crisis was pointing in one direction.”
Unfortunately, that is a typically smug, complacent contribution to this inquiry. It also happens to be untrue. The UK’s pre-existing pandemic plan never featured lockdowns because everyone knew how ruinous they would be. (Granted, the plan was based on an H2N2 influenza pandemic, but both viruses spread rapidly and kill by causing acute respiratory illness.) Also, in science, there should always be a thesis and an antithesis.
When he gave his evidence, the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak (who became alarmed as Chancellor at the vertiginous and mounting bills), was shot down in flames when he had the temerity to reference a study that suggested more quality-adjusted life years would be taken by the first lockdown than the virus itself. “I don’t want to get into Quality Life Assurance models [sic],” sniffed Hugo Keith, betraying a surprising lack of familiarity with a standard public health assessment metric which is used to weigh costs for every single medical treatment. But not Covid.
Worth reading in full.
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