What is the point of the Covid Inquiry? It should be to establish which parts of the government’s pandemic response worked, which parts didn’t, and what to do next time. Instead, it is a farce – a spectacle of hysteria, name-calling and trivialities. The stakes could hardly be higher. Lockdown was the most disruptive policy
In his new career as a Daily Mail columnist Boris Johnson has a fraction of the responsibility placed upon his shoulders as prime minister during the Covid pandemic. Nevertheless, in his very first column for the paper he managed to recommend a ‘wonder drug’ appetite suppressant without warning his readers that it is being investigated
This week there was an update to a Cochrane review, which studies the way physical interventions can interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. The review, which Tom Jefferson is the lead author of, looks at evidence from 78 randomised trials with over 610,000 participants. In other words, this review is exactly the sort of higher-quality evidence
This month, the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care published a Technical Report on the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. The report is a long 11-chapter document describing the UK’s response and pointing out suggestions for dealing with future pandemics. The report is described as ‘independent’, but the authors are public health civil servants and
Throughout the Covid pandemic, the BBC’s coverage has strictly followed what is now known as ‘official science’ – with journalists not asking questions, but just reporting what they are told. This has especially been the case when it comes to ignorance of existing research on respiratory viruses. This week saw the BBC report on the
My patient has sepsis. The window for treatment is short; in less than an hour, he could die. In urgent care, the direct line to ambulance control bypasses 999: it lets the call handler know a doctor requires urgent attention for a sick patient. Ten minutes: no response. I’m on a second phone to central dispatch:
Why has the government changed its mind and asked children to wear masks in school? When Plan B was announced last month, there was no requirement. But that has changed. Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, was asked why on Monday. He replied that ‘we conducted a small observational study with 123 schools who had followed mask-wearing in
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This week: The Covid Inquiry has reached its more dramatic stage this week with the likes of Domic Cummings, Lee Cain and Martin Reynolds giving evidence. But in his cover piece for the magazine Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford and director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, says that
At times, the Covid public inquiry has had the appearance of a show trial – one that starts with the premise that lockdown was essential to saving lives and should have been imposed earlier in the spring of 2020, and that is seeking to find the guilty parties who prevented this happening. As Carl Heneghan,
Ill-judged Sir: Professor Carl Henegan’s authoritative demolition of the Covid Inquiry (‘The Covid whitewash’, 4 November) prompts the question of why judges are normally appointed to chair public inquiries. Lady Hallett has clearly had a distinguished law career, but has no apparent expertise in government, public health, epidemiology, medicine or science. Her first move on
Some 140,000 children missed more than half of the school days they should have attended this spring. Research by the Children’s Commissioner, published today, finds that only 5 per cent of these ‘severely absent’ kids go on to achieve five GCSEs. For year ten and 11 pupils who are persistently absent – meaning they miss one
The last patient I treated was 105 years old. She has lived through two world wars, a depression and at least five pandemics. It’s a real honour to treat centenarians. They teach me much about life: how it is and how it ends. I can also lighten the mood with my 80-year-old patients by telling
About six months ago I was contacted by Big Brother Watch, the civil liberties campaign group, and asked if I wanted to help with an investigation into the surveillance of critics of the government’s pandemic response by state agencies. Would I submit subject access requests to different Whitehall departments to see if I was among
For once, Nick Clegg had a point. At the start of this week’s Artificial Intelligence summit at Bletchley Park, our former deputy prime minister spoke about the need to get priorities right. ‘My slight note of caution,’ he said, is that we ‘don’t allow the need to focus on proximate challenges to be crowded out
Does it matter if the chief scientific adviser referred to Rishi Sunak as ‘Dr Death’ In a private message to a Sage adviser during lockdown? This embarrassing fact came out last week in the Covid inquiry, an apparent reference to his Eat Out to Help Out scheme. Some have argued that publishing this comment, made
We are writing as scientists and scholars concerned about the confused and contradictory directions currently being promoted in the management of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are being told simultaneously that we have successful vaccines and that major restrictions on everyday life must continue indefinitely. Both propositions cannot be true. We need to give more weight
Boris Johnson is self-isolating in Downing Street after hosting an MP who subsequently tested positive for Covid-19. As we all know, Johnson has already been affected by SARS-Co-V2. So can the Prime Minister, who has presumably built immunity to this virus, be reinfected? For once the answer is clear: it’s possible. We know this thanks
One aspect of the original outbreak of coronavirus in March and April that has not received enough attention was the spread of the virus in NHS hospitals. With NHS staff lacking Personal Protective Equipment – and as we know now, suffering from a lack of preparedness – the virus spread at rapid speed between people
We all suffer from cognitive biases that cloud our judgment and lead us to the wrong conclusions. But now that we are in the middle of a pandemic, and restrictions are being put in place that have a profound impact on people’s lives, it is more important than ever that we look to the evidence
Earlier this week, I was asked to list the three biggest threats to the media. Aside from the general sales decline of newspapers, I said, the threat of bot censorship – and the lack of accountability from the firms who apply it. We at The Spectator have just come across a classic example of this,