So much pandemic pain could have been avoided!

[Chief Stipe]

The Covid Inquiry will never admit it, but we had a strong pandemic plan. What went wrong was Leftie scientists and panicky politicians, writes PROFESSOR ROBERT DINGWALL

www.dailymail.co.uk

By Professor Robert Dingwall Updated 08:06 AEST 04 Aug 2023

 

This may seem hard to believe, but for 48 hours in March 2020, as Covid-19 started to sweep the country, the United Kingdom authorities set out to manage the pandemic in much the same way as Sweden.

That, after all, had been the plan for at least two decades of preparing for such a crisis.

There would have been no 'lockdown', just an honest account of the facts from those in charge. The British public would have been trusted to behave sensibly, as the public was trusted in Sweden.

There would have been no compulsory masks, no mandates to keep us two metres apart from one another, even in our moments of greatest need. Schools would have remained open and the economy fully functioning.

In the event, our panicked politicians lost their nerve. Britain's carefully researched battle plan was binned in favour of more draconian and — as events have proved — more destructive measures to close down national life.

'Britain’s carefully researched battle plan was binned in favour of more draconian and — as events have proved — more destructive measures to close down national life,' Professor Robert Dingwall (pictured) writes

 

The Swedes were disappointed when we abandoned them in what had been an entirely sensible approach, although they won't be too concerned today. Sweden went on to have a far better outcome than us: fewer deaths and less collateral damage to society and the economy.

Not that you would know this from the first stage of the Covid-19 Inquiry, which has cost an eye-watering £40million after just 23 days of hearings. A further £1.6million will be spent on hiring high-end advertising agency M&C Saatchi to promote a scheme asking for people to share their experiences of the pandemic.

Through its lines of questioning, the Inquiry's legal team has been constructing a very different account of Britain's pandemic response.

This alternative story suggests that the government and civil service were negligent, that they failed to make adequate preparations for suppressing the pandemic.

That, in fact, we prepared for the wrong virus — influenza — rather than a novel coronavirus such as Covid-19. Yet this is to ignore the science, the history — and the truth.

I know something about Britain's pandemic planning as, from 2005-11, I was part of it.

As a senior sociologist I belonged to an official group, CEAPI — the Committee on Ethical Aspects of Pandemic Influenza, part of an initiative led by the Cabinet Office to prepare the Government for what was bound to be a major social challenge.

Our brief was wider than the name suggests. We looked at most social aspects of pandemic planning. We saw working papers from almost every government department detailing how a pandemic might affect their jurisdiction.

Our membership was broad, including philosophy, law and social science academics, journalists, patient advocates and people with clinical and operational duties in health and social care. Such voices were largely absent from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in 2020 — a group of scientists including Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance.

We received papers from mathematical modellers and considered them. We did not have those modellers in the room — or on Zoom — shouting down the views of others. Medics were in a minority.

I can say, then, that the official United Kingdom plan for dealing with a novel respiratory virus, even one as dangerous as Covid-19, was quite the opposite of negligent.

Not only was it well thought through, it was admired across Europe. Throughout 2006-7 I spoke at international conferences, where leading public health officials told me as much.

Shoppers form a socially distanced queue outside a Waitrose supermarket in Rushden in April 2020

A couple enjoy lunch in a busy restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden in April 2020

A pandemic challenges a whole society not just its health system. Any British response would be led from the centre of government, and not its health ministry, as in other countries. Decisions would balance public health against wider social and economic issues.

Whatever the enquiry concludes about our preparations, it is false to claim that Britain's planners failed to consider how we might suppress a pandemic virus.

Close attention was paid to whether we might shut borders, restrict internal travel and shut schools. But we decided these things were unworkable or, worse, counterproductive.

For example, it was obvious that border closures would soon cause food shortages. Internal travel restrictions — including checkpoints on motorways — would be unworkable in a country with a dense road network.

Closing schools provoked much discussion, but the consequences were clear. As soon as you shut these, the country's workforce is crippled by the need to stay at home and look after children.

Children are much safer in school — provided there are enough teachers and volunteers to supervise them. Children's interests came first in our considerations.

A study this week from the Institute for Fiscal Studies found the pandemic had a 'catastrophic' impact on children's emotional and social skills.

As far as I recall, masks were not even discussed. From my own reading, it was clear that cloth masks had not helped during any previous influenza pandemic.

Their widespread use in a few Asian countries had as much to do with urban pollution as infection control following the SARS (2002) and MERS (2012) outbreaks. An independent 2007 review by the Cochrane group — a global non-profit without commercial or conflicted funding — underlined the lack of evidence of any benefit.

Contact tracing was equally pointless beyond the first few hundred cases (to build a more specific picture of the virus).

There was no great benefit in closing bars, clubs, cinemas, theatres or other places where people mix. There was no evidence from previous pandemics to justify this.

In summary, the British planners decided it would be far more cost-effective just to ask people to stay at home if they had symptoms.

They had considered the evidence available, weighed the costs, harms and benefits and concluded that attempts at suppression were unlikely to be effective.

Government resources would have been better used to keep society and the economy going rather than shutting it down. Of course, all plans should be reviewed regularly in the light of new risks and evidence, and it is true that Britain's pandemic preparations were due to be revisited.

A man walks past a 'Stay Home, Save Lives' sign in central London in January 2021

A review was begun in 2016 but was disrupted by factors, including Brexit preparations.

The basic plan, though, remained a good one — including the decision to base it on pandemic influenza. As Professor Dame Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency, told the Inquiry, this was the sensible model.

Pandemic influenza is as novel a virus as Covid-19 (it is not simply a version of seasonal influenza or any of 200 or so other viruses that can cause similar symptoms).

And it is pandemic influenza that has returned time and time again, killing millions around the world in the preceding century or so.

We do not have to reinvent the wheel every time a new respiratory virus comes along. Since March 2020, I have often asked myself why a great deal of emergency planning work was so lightly discarded. I think there are three main factors.

First, we overestimated the courage of politicians and their willingness to tell the country the truth — that we were facing a crisis and little could be done to prevent significant loss of life.

This is obvious in the evidence given by former Health Secretaries Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock, the latter having been in charge for most of the pandemic.

Both assumed that something could be done — must be done — and looked for people to support that assumption, regardless of the expertise of those advisers.

Second, we did not allow for the fact that a large body of scientific and medical professionals would seize on the pandemic as an opportunity to attack a Conservative government that they disliked.

This was partly a consequence of mounting pressures on pay and working conditions but there was also a clash of values.

The pandemic released a streak of elitism and paternalism that has long been present in both biomedical science and among public health experts.

The crisis presented an opportunity to use the power of the state to remodel society, and the way individuals relate to it, without democratic consent or respect for the rule of law.

Third, we underestimated the opportunities for private gain, both in the commercial sense — think of the tax-payer-funded millions spent on testing, PPE, contact tracing and Perspex screens — and in the sense that Covid-19 led to greatly increased funding for biomedical research.

A woman walks past a 'Stop the spread of Coronavirus' sign in Glasgow

Former Health Scretary Matt Hancock (pictured) has given evidence to the Covid Inquiry

The scandals of PPE supply — the tens of millions wasted on inadequate products and fraudulent claims — are becoming increasingly apparent. But it is also the case that the pursuit of a technological fix for every problem funnelled resources into science without the usual scrutiny.

Policy analysts have been concerned for some considerable time about the excessive influence of biomedical interests on UK science funding and investment. The pandemic has overwritten those concerns in spades.

Looking back, you could say some of us were a little naive about what would happen when a pandemic finally took hold.

As rational planners, we expected the same level of rationality in others — a mistake, perhaps.

But we have every right to expect rational scrutiny from this vast, time-consuming and expensive public inquiry.

Falsifying the past serves no one's interests in the long run.