The real Covid criminals

Whilst ordinary people are being prosecuted for minor Covid misdemeanours, the real Covid criminals remain free, wealthy and honoured.

Over 130 breaches of Covid regulations still being prosecuted at least five years after the event; many of those prosecuted guilty of no more than simply misunderstanding complex and ever-changing, often nonsensical rules; those found guilty fined on average £6,000 and as much as £10,000. An 18 year old student fined for attending a party during lockdown; a 72 year old woman prosecuted for travelling back from Kenya without evidence of a Covid test.

The persecution of so many ordinary people through the courts for petty Covid misdemeanours is not only a waste of precious public money, it cements the UK’s burgeoning reputation as a censorious nation of authoritarian, petty-minded officials, woefully adrift from our roots of common sense decency grounded in the rule of law. Worse, it stands in dismal contrast to the near complete absence of accountability for those at the other end of the social and political spectrum: those holding senior positions in Government and officialdom implicated not only in serious failings of pandemic era decision-making, but also in behaviour lacking ethics, integrity and in some cases compromising the rule of law.

A 60 year old real estate consultant whose phone ran out of battery en route back to the UK (rendering him unable to access his proven negative test) endured years battling through the courts after being slapped with fines of £1,295, yet there has been scant discussion about whether senior public health individuals who appear to have agreed to suppress vital discussions about the origins of Covid to protect academic blushes, and funding, might not be implicated in some form of public health fraud. Two-tier justice in action.

Senior officials in private industry have been similarly shielded from accountability. Whilst American expat Dodi Wexler was hauled in front of Stockport’s magistrates court for the ‘crime’ of mistakenly booking a day 5 PCR test on the way home from the US in March 2021 (the requirements at the time were for a day 2 and day 8 PCR test), we’ve heard barely a whimper about the fact that three major Covid drug companies - Pfizer, Moderna and Astra Zeneca - have since 2020 racked up judgments for an astonishing 55 serious violations of the UK pharmaceutical industry’s regulatory code for mis-selling their Covid vaccine products. These are officially documented offences for which the companies involved, and the senior executives implicated, are yet to bear any financial or other consequential penalty.

Five years in, our threadbare justice system has found the resources to prosecute some thirty thousand ordinary civilians for actions often amounting to little more than good faith misunderstandings of unintelligible rules grounded neither in logic nor in science. At the same time, the UK’s behemoth of a public inquiry has conspicuously failed to discuss (or even spot) the fact that public domain meeting records of a key central government ethics committee - the Moral and Ethical Advisory Group - appear to indicate that the group was sidelined and then shut down after it attempted to warn ministers and officials against implementing some of the most egregious aspects of government pandemic policy.

Though not every example of pandemic wrongdoing implies criminal culpability, a country that was serious about accountability would be focusing its justice system away from low level mishaps by confused and generally law-abiding individuals, onto high level consequential wrongdoing by decision makers in positions of influence and power, particularly in cases where that wrongdoing betrays a lack of integrity.

A country serious about accountability would be asking what repercussions should meet policy makers who effectively visited house arrest on the population at large but then flagrantly ignored their own rules. A country serious about accountability would ask whether it was the case, as some doctors have suggested (and many felt at the time) that the public were not accurately informed about the risks to which they were exposed. Was Covid really ever a serious threat to younger adults and healthy children? And if not, was the benefit of lockdowns, Covid vaccines and multiple boosters oversold? And if so, was informed consent ever obtained by officials for a vaccine roll-out involving millions?

In other countries, questions are being asked and answered. A US House of Representatives Report published at the end of 2024 was eviscerating of the Biden administration’s handling of the pandemic response. The fact that President Biden saw fit to bestow a pre-emptive pardon on Dr Anthony Fauci illuminates at least the contemplation of criminal-level consequences at the highest level of government. Yet here the UK Covid Inquiry, with a team of over 150 lawyers and projected to cost over £200 million, has rolled out the red carpet for ministers and officials some of whom might more appropriately be facing cross-examination in a dock.

Perhaps the lack of accountability for high-ranking officials reflects a lack of political will — after all, politicians of all major parties were largely aligned in their blind devotion to the necessity and proportionality of a response that many experts warned from the outset would cause unprecedented harm. There remain many in positions of power or influence who have a vested interest in avoiding difficult legal questions from being interrogated too rigorously.

Or perhaps it stems from the fact that, as yet, suitable national and international legal frameworks do not exist to deal with the complexity and novelty of some of the wrongdoing that is starting to be revealed. There may as yet, for example, be no prosecutable offence of conspiring to mislead the public about the source of a pandemic, or of overstating the health risk of a virus, or of falsely promoting the necessity of draconian lockdowns.

But whatever the reason it is a stain on our once world leading legal system that in the dock stand ordinary civilians, guilty of little more than misunderstanding ‘do what I say’ rules that too often the rule-makers themselves disregarded, whilst the real Covid criminals remain free, wealthy and honoured.

An abbreviated version of this article first appeared in Spiked