It’s infuriating to watch the Covid Inquiry ignore damage caused by draconian lockdowns

My friend Julia got a telling off from her son’s school recently. Harry’s attendance, the head warned in a letter, had dropped below 95 per cent. It needed to improve.

Julia fired back an email. “That’s pretty rich coming from a school that closed its doors to Harry for over a year during the pandemic and was in no hurry to reopen, even when it was crystal clear that children were at no risk from Covid. 

“I understand teachers were at very low risk compared to other professions, but they seized any excuse to not get back to the classroom. Our happy, confident little boy really missed his school, his teacher and his friends. Harry developed facial tics and struggled to complete the few worksheets you sent home. 

“As Harry’s dad and I are self-employed, and worked at home, we struggled to keep his lessons going. The disruption to his education has had long-term consequences which sadly are ongoing.   

“The main reason Harry’s attendance has dropped is because, when he should have been in school picking up germs, he was in isolation at home. Since being back in the classroom, his immune system has struggled to cope. He has had several bouts of strep throat and was hospitalised with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) when his breathing was affected. 

“The doctors tell us many kids are suffering the same issues because of lockdown. The paediatric ICUs are full. I don’t think it’s fair for the school to blame the parents.”

Before the pandemic, Julia was one of those mums who was an absolute stickler for the rules. She wouldn’t have dreamt of taking her kids out of school before they broke up to take advantage of cheaper holiday prices. This summer, she intends to do just that, and to pay the increased fine a panic-stricken government has introduced.

The way that schools over-reacted, and the damage lockdown has done to a whole generation of children, broke the contract of trust that existed between parents and teachers. It will be very hard to mend.

Adding insult to injury has been the UK Covid-19 Inquiry. Initially, Baroness Hallett’s hearings were apparently not going to discuss the impact on children at all. It was only after protests by Molly Kingsley and the parenting lobby group, Us For Them, that the way children’s rights were not considered adequately, or even at all, by ministers were raised in Module Two.

It is bad enough that so many unevidenced non-pharmaceutical interventions (many of them plain daft) were foisted on people who were not allowed to ask questions at the time. To watch the official inquiry skate over, even flatly ignore, the collateral damage caused by draconian measures never before recommended in any pandemic plan has been absolutely infuriating. I have been shouting abuse at the television.  

So I am delighted and relieved to see the open letter from 55 leading scientists and academics to Baroness Hallett, which suggests that a “fundamentally biassed” inquiry has failed so far to hear evidence from those who suffered the “negative effects” of the decision to shut down society. Organised by professor Sunetra Gupta, one of the world’s most distinguished epidemiologists, and Dr Kevin Bardosh, director of Collateral Global, a British think-tank set up to examine pandemic policies and an expert in infection medicine at Edinburgh University, the letter points out that there is a total lack of curiosity as to whether Covid measures were appropriate and what mistakes were made – which should never be repeated.

The inquiry’s presumption, so distressing to those separated from loved ones for long periods, and to those whose mothers and fathers, husbands and wives died not of Covid but of neglect or an inability to see a doctor, is that, if only we had locked down faster, matters would have been improved. There is little evidence for that hypothesis as levels of infection fell before many lockdowns.

The scientists also point out that “preferential treatment” has been given to advisers on SAGE “who have a vested interest in maintaining the justification for their policy recommendations”. 

“Very few scientists with an alternative position have been asked to testify, and the inquiry has been confrontational rather than inquisitorial in its questioning of these views,” they say. Quite so. The treatment of Carl Heneghan, a professor of evidence-based medicine, was disrespectful and downright rude.

Unbelievably, Gupta, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed universal lockdowns, preferring “focused protection” for the elderly and the vulnerable, has not even been called to testify. Why is Baroness Hallett ignoring the person who I believe knows more about coronaviruses than all the other expert witnesses rolled together?  

The inquiry should not be a backside-covering exercise for officials who floundered and made poor choices. Lockdown criminalised human contact for the first time in our history; the loss of freedoms was devastating for the elderly and the isolated as well as for children like Harry, cut off catastrophically from his teachers and friends. It now looks as if the numbers killed or harmed by lockdown will far exceed the numbers who died of the virus. The damage to our society – the breakdown in trust is incalculable.

The first act of Covid was a tragedy. If the recommendations in this important letter are not adopted, and urgently, it risks ending in farce.