Covid Inquiry must avoid a 'Groundhog Day' of pandemic mistakes

The roll call of Core Participants for Module 2 of the Public Inquiry is now public. But are the right people there to ask the right questions?

Closed loop thinking occurs when, in the absence of rigorous, independent testing and challenge, we allow our understanding and expertise blindly to affirm and reinforce itself. Open loop thinking, conversely, takes place when we seek to learn from our mistakes, positively embrace challenge and counterpoint, and so look to understand the flaws and weaknesses in our received wisdom. Open loop thinking helps us to spot moments where we failed, or at least could have done better, and to explore the reasons for those failures; and ultimately helps us to achieve better or more robust outcomes in the future.

With the official UK Covid-19 Inquiry now underway, we are faced with a question as to whether, societally, we are genuinely committed to learning from the mistakes of the pandemic — for most would agree that it is beyond doubt that the UK’s response was not perfect — so that we can be better positioned to navigate the next pandemic.  If we are committed to doing better next time, we must avoid closed loop thinking that will fate poor decisions, inadequately tested and challenged, to be repeated.  

Nowhere is this more important than in the context of Module 2 of the Inquiry, arguably the key module of the Inquiry because it is looking at high-level political decision-making.  It is crucial that the right questions are asked, and the right people are there to ask them. 

Roll call of core participants - an imbalance between those impacted by Covid versus lockdown

The roll call of Core Participants (CPs) for Module 2 is now public. The participants understandably include groups representing those bereaved due to covid but surprisingly, especially considering ‘long covid’ groups are also included, it appears nobody representing those whose lives were profoundly impacted by pandemic response measures such as lockdowns, cancelled medical appointments, school closures, suspension of child welfare safeguards and adverse reactions to covid-19 vaccines is included. One explanation for this might be that groups representing the latter didn’t know to apply, but it is notable that Vaccine Impact Bereaved, a group representing relatives of those who were killed by adverse reactions to the covid-19 vaccine, applied but were rejected.  

What does this say about the willingness of the Inquiry to contemplate questions which at the very least test, let alone challenge, key decision-points in the government’s pandemic response?

Specifically as regards children, Save the Children UK, Children's Rights Alliance and Just for Kids Law were selected as core participants. A consortium including UsForThem, Anne Longfield (Children’s Commissioner during the main period of the pandemic) and Oasis Trust applied but were not selected. We were obviously disappointed by this result, and the failure to grant CP status to any of the Children’s Commissioners for the four nations is both perplexing and concerning given that the statutory role of the Children’s Commissioner is to provide independent challenge to Government decisions on matters impacting children, but despite this, the level of representation for children in this key module is, on its face, relatively reassuring.  

It remains critical, though, that the right questions are asked by the groups involved, including whether the impact of any non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) was considered in the context of children, whether Children’s Rights Assessments were completed prior to taking any of the big decisions impacting children, and whether there was any formal risk-benefit analysis performed in relation to any of the NPIs, especially the mandate for masks in classrooms. 

In a module concerned with political decision-making processes, it is equally important that the Inquiry considers the role of the teaching unions in forcing the closure of schools in January 2021. Given the erosion of trust in routine childhood vaccinations that has been observed since last year, one might also hope that the Inquiry will consider the probity of the political pressure applied to the JCVI and the Chief Medical Officers in September 2021, and the contorted and unorthodox approval process contrived for the roll-out of the covid vaccine to children at that time, though…pigs might fly. 

As regards the selection of core participants for the Inquiry, UsForThem has two material concerns. First, the Department for Education (DfE) is a noteworthy omission from a long list of government departments included both in CP2 and indeed CP1, which is focussing on pandemic planning. It is not clear how one can plan for a pandemic, or indeed any significant disaster or disruption, without a plan for keeping schools open – previous pandemic plans were clear on this point – and it must be hoped that the Inquiry rectifies this in the Rule 9 request they have made to DfE (where the Inquiry can ask an organisation or individual for evidence).

Second, there is plainly already a significant imbalance favouring advocates and institutions who should be presumed to be ardent supporters of the ‘lockdown’ approach to managing pandemic risk (government departments and pro-lockdown groups); there is a notable dearth of participants who dared publicly to challenge the government’s decisions to lock down. Imperial College is included, for example, even though its aggressive data science modelling has been widely discredited as having produced a false premise for the government’s initial rush to lock down the country. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) is included, but voices from industry, hospitality and small business are notably absent. Government departments are included, but other public bodies who challenged those departments – most prominently the Children’s Commissioners of the four nations – are not.

This is important, because although the Inquiry has the power to call witnesses, it is only Core Participants who receive disclosure of documentation and who can suggest questions and receive advance notice of the Inquiry’s report.

If those with CP status all are of a similar mindset or perspective, it is highly unlikely that the questions that need to be answered will ever be asked, if we are genuinely to learn from our mistakes and improve our understanding of how best to respond to the next pandemic. A prime example of this might be the topic of excess non-covid deaths data: despite the fact that excess deaths are alarmingly higher this year than for the same period in the peak covid years of 2020 and 2021, there is currently no group participating in the Inquiry which appears to be advocating for further research to be conducted on this concerning and surely critical data point. Current non-covid excess mortality conceivably could emanate in large part from governmental policy decisions taken as part of the pandemic response, but if none of the main participants are likely to ask the question, what chance can there be of the Inquiry considering this potentially life-saving topic? 

And, though it is a subject that many will be keen to avoid, the controversial topic of covid-19 vaccines is surely deserving of significant attention from the Inquiry, in particular as to the manner in which the government sought to persuade the public to accept the jab, and the evidence that coercive marketing may in fact have had the opposite effect to that intended by the government. The Inquiry is surely the right forum in which to consider whether the rapid and universal roll-out in the UK became ‘too big to fail’ despite escalating concerns about efficacy and safety. Indeed, a number of MPs stressed in the ‘Covid-19 Vaccines: Safety’ debate in Westminster Hall on 24 October 2022 that it is critical for vaccine harms to be investigated by the Inquiry. When refusing the application of Vaccine Impact Bereaved to participate in the Inquiry, the Chair of the Inquiry stated that “…the development of vaccines and their roll out may feature in Modules 2, 2A, 2B and 2C [and] will be considered, in far greater depth, in later modules. I recognise that the issue of vaccination is important and that is why I consider that it must be the subject of dedicated and focused investigation”. However, it is not yet clear whether the Inquiry will have the appetite, or the right participants, to ask challenging counter-narrative questions about potential harms seeded by the UK’s covid vaccine programme and related marketing campaigns alongside more prosaic topics concerning the logistics of vaccine procurement and distribution.

In all of this, the backdrop to these decisions must be remembered: many would argue that pandemic failings were not due to mere ‘lack of judgment’, or innocent mistake, but moral failings on an industrialised scale. Those failings included the suppression of dissenting views, the incursion of freedoms which until 2020 had been considered inalienable, trampling across principles of bodily autonomy and medical ethics; and governmental coercion which in some cases may have led, directly, to serious injury and death.  

In those circumstances the urge to deny, evade or even cover up those failings will be great, but it is precisely because of that, and the severity of their impact, that we must learn from them. Otherwise, trapped in our closed loop, we shall doom ourselves to repeat the same mistakes. Perhaps the Inquiry can achieve that with a narrow group of Core Participants, but common sense (and indeed ‘The Science’) suggests that it would be far more effective to include a broad range of perspectives and concerns, to provide a true diversity of tests and challenges to the groupthink that so pervaded the covid response.