The Covid Inquiry might be too obsessed with trivialities to get to the truth behind lockdowns, but it’s starting to creep out anyway. Lady Hallett’s inquisitors have so far focused on the rude words they have been able to dig out of people’s private WhatsApp messages, showing little interest in the written evidence submitted. But it’s quite a treasure trove. It’s starting to become clear that there was a moment where Britain could have avoided lockdown – and, crucially, how panic set in.
Let’s go back to when much of the world had copied the Wuhan lockdown, with two major exceptions: Britain and Sweden. In both countries, public health officials were reluctant to implement a lockdown theory that had no basis in science. Ditto the case for mandatory masks. The public had responded: mobile-phone data showed millions were already staying home. Could you really put an entire nation under house arrest, then mandate masks, if you had no evidence that either policy would work?
Sweden held firm, but Britain buckled. It was all decided in 10 fateful days where, thanks to inquiries in both countries, we know a lot more about what happened.
The written evidence submitted by Dominic Cummings is one of the richest, most considered and illuminating documents in the whole Covid mystery. He was, in effect, the head of staff to a prime minister he viewed with despair, even contempt. He has since admitted that he was discussing the possibility of deposing his boss within “days” of his 2019 general election victory. So he was prone to taking matters into his own hands, trying to circumvent what he regarded as a dysfunctional system and an incompetent PM.
His frustration, at first, was directed at the public-health officials who resisted lockdown. Sage advisers were, at the time, unanimously against it. Even Prof Neil Ferguson fretted that lockdown might be “worse than the disease”. Was this the cool, firm voice of science – or the blinkered inertia of sleepy Whitehall? Cummings suspected the latter and commissioned his own analysis from outsiders, whose models painted a far more alarming picture. He knew these voices would be dismissed as “tech bros”. But, he says, “I was inclined to take the ‘tech bros’ and some scientists dissenting from the public-health consensus more seriously.”
There was no Sage modelling until quite late on but, soon, models and disaster-graphs were everywhere. Cummings’s evidence includes photos taken in No 10 of hand-drawn charts with annotations like “100,000+ people dying in corridors”. He says he told Boris Johnson that failure to lock down would end in a “zombie apocalypse movie with unburied bodies”. The PM asked him, if this was all true, “why aren’t Hancock, Whitty, Vallance telling me this?”
It’s a very good question. Cummings told him the health team “haven’t listened and absorbed what the models really mean”. Soon, Neil Ferguson’s doom models were published – and making headway across the world. Britain’s scientists fell in behind the modellers.
It was a different story in Sweden where Johan Giesecke, a former state epidemiologist, had returned to the Public Health Agency and was reading Ferguson’s models in disbelief. Remember mad cow disease, when 4 million English livestock had been slaughtered to prevent the disease spreading? “They thought 50,000 people would die,” he told his staff. “How many did? 177.” He recalled Ferguson saying 200 million might die from bird flu when just 455 did. Modellers, he argued, had been calamitously wrong in the past. Should society really be closed now on their say so?
On March 18, Cummings had asked Demis Hassabis, an AI guru, to attend Sage. His verdict? “Shut everything down ASAP.” On the same day, Giesecke’s team in Stockholm was pulling apart Ferguson’s models, finding flaw after flaw. When some Swedish academics started to call for lockdown based on Ferguson’s work, Giesecke agreed to go on Swedish television to debate them. As did Anders Tegnell, his protégé. They gave interviews non-stop, in the street and on train platforms, making the case for staying open. They showed it was possible to win the argument.
No one was picking apart the models in Britain. No one could: there was shockingly little transparency. Even Cabinet ministers were kept in the dark. One internal report said Covid patients would need up to 600,000 hospital beds; the actual number peaked at 34,000. The PM was told that 90,000 ventilators were needed: in the event, it peaked at 3,700. The extra ventilators ordered in this panic (at a cost of £569 million) ended up in an MoD warehouse in Donnington. The virus, we now know, was falling before lockdown: as Sweden suspected, the public’s behavioural change was enough.
The wasted money was nothing compared to children needlessly denied education, the 8 million NHS appointments that never took place or, as we learnt this week, the mental-health impact of lockdowns. Only later did we find out that the virus had been forced into reverse before we locked down, due to people behaving sensibly and staying home: something the “tech bros” and modellers failed to properly factor in. The panic was on a false premise. Lockdown was a social and economic wrecking ball that never needed to swing.
We know, now, just how close Britain came to avoiding this. But we’d have needed a government machine better able to see through dodgy models. Given the huge public pressure to lock down, it would have taken a persuasive and respected figure to make the case against. Simon Case, the Civil Service chief, made a good point in one of the leaked emails: leadership could only have come from the PM. He was changing his mind daily. So in this battle between science and panic, science never really stood a chance.
Britain’s Covid Inquiry has years to run: Sweden’s was over some time ago. It unearthed an email that Giesecke sent Tegnell, just after Denmark and Norway locked down and pressure on Sweden was at its peak. It was a quote from a Swedish diplomat in 1648: “An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundas regatur”. Underneath, he included a translation: “Don’t you know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?”
It could be the closing motto to this whole tragic affair.
William Turner is a seasoned U.K. correspondent with a deep understanding of domestic affairs. With a passion for British politics and culture, he provides insightful analysis and comprehensive coverage of events within the United Kingdom.
