Accountability can't be predetermined by those seeking to evade it

The truth behind decision-making in crisis times demands scrutiny, not excuses.

Over the past few weeks we have seen a string of key pandemic players attempting, in effect, to mark their own homework.

First came feeble mea culpas from Chris Whitty and Boris Johnson; Whitty apologising for ‘perhaps’ overstating the risk of Covid ‘at the beginning’ of the pandemic, and then Johnson who in the course of the media blitz to promote his memoir has confessed to being ‘unsure’ whether lockdowns worked.

Meanwhile, it was reported earlier this week that Moderna has notched up the dubious achievement of becoming the first pharmaceutical company in the UK to be found guilty twice in a single week of ‘bringing discredit upon the pharmaceutical industry’, in one case for allowing the use of social media to recruit children into a Covid vaccine trial using illegal financial inducements.¹ This is the most serious finding that can be declared by the UK pharma regulator, the PMCPA, though as an industry self-regulatory body it has no power to impose any further penalties on miscreants.

What do these events have in common? The avoidance of accountability.

The Whitty and Johnson 'acknowledgements’ whiff of being less expressions of genuine regret, and more carefully crafted self-exculpations intended to narrow the scope of any future critical assessment of their conduct. 

Whitty’s apology, framed around overstating the risk of Covid ‘at the beginning’ of the pandemic, skillfully elides the fact that State-coordinated inflation of Covid risk continued throughout the pandemic period and extended well into the period of the mass vaccination campaign: witness, for example, Patrick Vallance’s infamous ‘chart of doom’ briefing in autumn 2020, fear mongering about the likely virulence of Omicron (even as the South Africans strove to distance themselves from the UK Government’s stance); and the unprecedented, unorthodox and unethical decision of the CMOs to override the Government’s own committee of vaccine experts, JCVI, by recommending the vaccination of teenagers, on the pretext of preventing school disruption. 

Johnson's trademark waffle, in this case about being unsure whether lockdowns worked or not, nudges out of focus the accumulating evidence which suggests his administration’s many pandemic transgressions extend far beyond anything that could reasonably now be cast as a mere ‘mis-step’.

Whitty and Johnson might well aspire to stage the scene for an escape from accountability. Moderna meanwhile has already escaped any serious consequence for corporate behaviour that crossed any number of ethical redlines, as well as breaching legal requirements, as a result of the pharma industry being allowed to stack the deck by regulating itself. 

The first adverse finding against Moderna, made on 6th August 2024, concerned the offer of a payment of £1,500 to children who would agree to participate in a trial; the offer was broadcast in a WhatsApp message by a doctor at a major NHS trust which had been retained by Moderna to test a new version of its Covid vaccine; Moderna had previously been warned that such an offer would be unlawful and should not be made, but it failed to take steps to ensure that this happened.  The UK regulator, the PMCPA, found Moderna to be in breach of various clauses of its Code of Practice including clause 2 — bringing discredit upon, and reducing confidence in, the pharmaceutical industry — the most serious breach possible under the Code of Practice. A mere three days later, a second adverse finding followed concerning an improper promotion by Moderna of its Spikevax Covid vaccine at a trade conference in April 2022. Moderna was once again found guilty of breaching clause 2, this time for having discussed ‘off label’ uses of its vaccine.

For different reasons each of these two judgments are illuminating; the first because bribing children to test a highly controversial medical product carrying significant, documented harms is not only abhorrent behaviour, but in breach of all kinds of ethical codes and international medical conventions; a point made by Esther McVey writing in the Telegraph.²

And the second because the full case report, linked to here, demonstrates levels of arrogance and ignorance about the UK's pharma regulatory regime in roughly equal measure. 

In both cases, findings are of serious breaches of the regulatory rules, yet the only ‘penalty’ that Moderna will suffer is the cost of a five-figure administration fee: a derisory rounding error for a company with a market capitalisation of USD 24 billion.

That these two judgments followed a string of other recent PMCPA decisions involving Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline for similar serious rule breaches relating to their conduct during the pandemic period – including the 2022 decision following a complaint brought by UsForThem in which the Panel found Pfizer's CEO guilty of misleading parents in relation to the safety and efficacy of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine for children – only serves to underline the disregard the industry appears to have for both the British public to which their products seem routinely to be mis-marketed, and the regulatory rules which they are in theory bound to follow.

And ‘disregard’ is the word which might also apply to Boris and Whitty’s carefully crafted self-exculpations of what many in the British public regard as disgraceful conduct during the pandemic.

That period of domineering government involved some of the most disastrous policy decisions of modern times, and mounting evidence indicates that some of the key organisations and individuals involved in those decisions could be guilty not only of serious misjudgments, but of behaviour which was reckless to the point of criminality, knowingly unethical, and in some cases outright dishonest.  

Examples are numerous and indeed fill a book – we have written in great detail about this period in The Accountability Deficit – but examples include:

• a two-year-long refusal to evaluate the harms of policy decisions against benefits which, given that the risk of serious harms from key pandemic interventions appear to have been flagged at the most senior levels of government, could well touch a criminal standard of recklessness; 

• the deliberate and industrialised manipulation of the public’s understanding of risk and reward by means of the suppression of dissent and the deployment of propaganda, as evidenced by a vaccination campaign that was both implausibly optimistic and dangerously dismissive as to risk, and which official compensation claim statistics already show led to serious injury or death for (at least) thousands of people; and 

• an institutionalised disregard for ethics and integrity, as evidenced both by the deliberate and repeated sidelining and eventual premature demobilisation during the pandemic of the Government’s expert ethics advisory committee, the Moral and Ethical Advisory Group, and the scope of the pandemic contract corruption scandal.  A report by Transparency International³ reveals that a staggering one in three of pandemic procurement contracts — contracts with a total value in excess of £15bn — involved three or more flags of serious corruption.

None of these are characteristic of good government in a healthy, functioning democracy, nor do they suggest a regard for integrity, ethics and the rule of law.  Much of the evidence has been hiding in plain sight for three years now.  Whether or not Johnson or Whitty are personally implicated in wrongdoing (as distinct from incompetence) isn’t the point: the point is that when evidence of serious wrongdoing is alleged, the scope of accountability and the terms of any reckoning cannot be set in advance by those who may stand accused.

Whether it is former Ministers or officials attempting to narrow the scope of enquiry, or pharma groups sheltering behind the mirage of an industry regulator, the outcome is the same: a distraction from the conversation that we should now be having about the nature of the accountability required.

1. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/02/moderna-offered-children-cash-test-covid-vaccine/

2. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/02/moderna-offered-children-cash-test-covid-vaccine/

3. https://www.transparency.org.uk/report-landmark-investigation-finds-corruption-red-flags-153-billion-uk-covid-contracts