The preferred idiom was very sweary. According to Cummings’s communications from 2020, government ministers and civil servants dealing with the Covid crisis were “useless fuckpigs”, “morons”, and “cunts”. Everyone mentioned seemed to have a nickname, as if planning a heist: “Sonic” the Hedgehog Special Advisor; “Frosty” the Snowman Minister of State at the Cabinet Office; “Trolley” the Problem Prime Minister, and so on.

Sexist bravado also apparently abounded, with Cummings threatening, in one exchange with Trolley and Director of Communications Lee Cain, to “personally handcuff” Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen MacNamara and “escort her from the building”. In cadences reminiscent of a made man arranging concrete shoes for a troublesome foot soldier, Cummings continued: “We gotta get Helen out of [the Cabinet Office] She’s fucking up Frosty. She’s fucking up me and Case. She’s trying to get spads fired and cause trouble on multiple fronts. Can we get her in Monday for chat re her moving to [the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government] … we need her out ASAP. Building millions of lovely houses.”

Yet in the flesh at the Inquiry, Cummings was more penitent schoolboy than would-be gangster, apologising repeatedly for his previous “terrible” and “appalling” language. And the contrast was also stark with his written submission, in which, as others have also noted, he came across more like Adrian Mole than Harvey Keitel. (A characteristically mournful extract: “Although I was/am often described as ‘all powerful’ in No 10 in 2020 this is false and very misleading regarding Covid… For example, in January 2020 I could not even stop Chris Grayling being appointed by the PM to chair the Commons intelligence committee”.)

Equally, when the next day MacNamara herself appeared at the Inquiry, giving us first sight of Cummings’s much-maligned female nemesis, the deep histrionics running through his communications about her became even more discernible. For if his own fictional lodestar seems to be Nineties Tarantino films, MacNamara’s seems to be Bridget Jones Diary — even down to the fact of having once brought a karaoke machine to a lockdown party at Downing Street.

Though appearing calm and self-assured on the stand, MacNamara’s reported messages to fellow officials seemed almost parodically self-deprecating and tentative — perhaps partly due to the calibre of the individuals she was dealing with at the time. One email to the Cabinet Secretary from 2020 about the inadequate fit of most PPE with female bodies started with the words “Just when you thought you were out of the woods on annoying emails from me” and closed with “I didn’t know who to annoy with this so chose you”.  She signed off with a fist emoji but immediately felt the need to explain, quasi-humorously: “that’s a fist bump not a punch”.

And as the mostly male officials around her focused their attention on managing manly pursuits like “football, hunting, shooting and fishing” — ignoring trifling issues like women being locked down with no escape from violent partners, or having to give birth alone — with touching optimism MacNamara bought “multiple copies” of a book about male bias in policy for her colleagues to read. Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that, when Cummings furiously said of MacNamara, “we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that cunt”, he was really trying to get out of reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez.

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Some dissatisfaction has been expressed among the commentariat about the extent to which the Inquiry’s KCs — often sounding like gently disappointed headmasters — have focused on the bad language of dramatis personae like Cummings. Writing in The Spectator, witness Professor Carl Heneghan complained of the Inquiry that he “had submitted a 74-page statement on what I thought it should discuss. Instead the main topic was rude words in old WhatsApp messages.” For many, understandably tired of endless trivial complaints about hurt feelings stemming from inappropriate word choices, it perhaps feels like a capitulation to focus less on what a person said or did and more upon how, exactly, he said it.

Still, I don’t think that focusing on the way Cummings and others expressed themselves at work is wholly tangential to the main business of the Inquiry. For a person’s words are one of the main sources of evidence we have in judging their character, understood as a relatively fine-grained collection of personality traits. And there is a definite public interest in knowing which characters, precisely, are supposed to be running the country.

It is why a public inquiry’s unusual access to an individual’s emails and private messages is often so potent — for we get to find out, relatively directly, what sort of people are behind the public actions that affected so many lives. When combined with witness statements, cross-examination transcripts and other material, onlookers can get genuine insight, not just into what a person said or did, but also into who they are: their intellectual obsessions, quirks, and blind spots; their talents and inadequacies; their vices and virtues; whether they are funny or charming, or pompous or boring, or patronising or evasive, or whatever. No wonder other public figures apparently get so worried about WhatsApp disclosure.

In Cummings’s case, there are also hundreds of blog posts over the years to add to the overall picture. To read one of them is to travel on a syntactically unexpected, invective-laced and often hysterical emotional journey — full of quotes from famous men, head-spinning new ideas (“It would be great if Oxford created alternatives to PPE such as Ancient and Modern History, Maths for Presidents, and Coding”); undecipherable technical jargon; and deep gloom about the future, assuming the world continues not to listen to him (“such is life in a country that increasingly resembles the trajectory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”).

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Cummings’s musings existed in the public domain well before any of his high-profile public appointments. It still astonishes me that anyone reading them could excitedly call off the search for their next political adviser. It’s hard not to wonder whether his appeal was so great for his employers because, though they personally couldn’t understand what he was on about, they were still impressed by the superficial signs of cleverness and staggering self-belief and desperately hoped it all made sense to someone else.

We are, after all, in a strange place these days, in which we pretend we can understand everything relevant about another person’s motives and meaning from just a small, context-free snippet of their discourse. And yet we tend to pay little attention to the obvious warning signs embedded in much larger chunks of publicly available information (such as, for instance, the fact that Cummings reportedly used to sign himself into No. 10 as “Osama Bin Laden”). Perhaps it is partly just a matter of not having enough time or a long enough attention-span to do the reading. But perhaps another reason for myopia in higher Tory echelons about Cummings’s evident weak points was that they felt his swearing, scowling presence there was a comforting counter to a general atmosphere of stifling political correctness and conformity.

If so, I understand this impulse. The more that mindless progressive types try to micromanage language and instil irrational guilt in their traditional po-faced manner, the more tempting it is to stick two fingers up at the lot of them and to start striking deliberately offensive poses just for the hell of it. And if you can’t do that, perhaps the next best thing is to hire someone who will do it for you; someone whose socially transgressive interventions will act as satisfyingly irritating provocations to any mealy-mouthed, rule-quoting pencil-pushers in the vicinity.

In a microcosm, this is the dynamic that appears to be inhabiting large parts of the Right-leaning political spectrum at the moment. The unstated ethos seems to be that if my attitude-policing, finger-wagging political enemy is against something — in this case, using outrageously rude and bullying language at work — then I must be for it; and vice versa. And of course it doesn’t hurt that large swathes of the electorate are similarly fed up with being told off by self-righteous missionary-types.

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But to base your current political sensibilities on what your opponents hate is to court destruction, whether on the Right or the Left. It gives the enemy effective control of the political agenda and can end with some deeply counterproductive, incoherent decision-making. Just as no Home Secretary supposedly interested in free expression should be talking about banning Palestinian flags just because some deeply revolting people currently want to wave them, no government minister should ever employ a loose cannon with an apparent case of oppositional defiance disorder, just because it tends to set the teeth of members of the Blob on edge. As the Trolley knows all too well by now, such initially tempting ideas tend to come back to haunt you.

We have yet to understand the full cost to Britain of having had such an anarchic crew at the heart of government during one of its worst crises in recent history; nor of the way that degraded norms in workplace communication enabled other forms of dysfunction to proliferate there. At the very least, it is already suggested from MacNamara’s testimony that the atmosphere resulted in some chaotic and damaging choices. As she said at the time, in an email to superiors about the lack of options for victims of domestic violence during the first lockdown: “It is very difficult to draw any conclusion other than women have died as a result of this.”

Perhaps the Inquiry will eventually shed some light on this. But either way, Cummings doesn’t seem to have learnt much from the experience. The day after his Inquiry appearance, he was back on social media in his more familiar Lord of Misrule guise, responding to criticism by asking: “so is the problem a/ me calling Hancock ‘a lying cunt killing people’ or b/ Hancock actually being a lying cunt killing people?!” And it doesn’t seem to occur to him that the answer might be “both”.

The Gambia announced its first Covid lockdown, in March 2020, at a fragile moment. Following years of President Yahya Jammeh’s dictatorship, the democratic government installed under President Adama Barrow in 2017 had ushered in hope. There was, for instance, a noticeable drop in Gambian youth’s attempts to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Yet the country’s pandemic response has erased those gains, and also dealt a severe blow to Gambians’ confidence in its young democracy.

The timing of The Gambia’s lockdown could not have been worse. In March 2020, as many African countries shut down in accordance with WHO advice, The Gambia’s main market at Serekunda closed for six weeks. Late March is when Gambians buy seeds to prepare for planting, in readiness for the rains. The unilateral closure of markets meant that seeds were widely unavailable. A transport shutdown meant that even where they did have seeds, people could not take them to their villages for planting. Even when public transport restarted, several weeks later, social distancing requirements meant that buses were only allowed to operate at half capacity. As this was uneconomic, many buses did not run at all.

Anyone who did manage to sow crops then had difficulties in harvesting, since social distancing protocols meant that no more than two people could work a plot at one time. When food was finally taken to market, the forced impoverishment of the population meant that few could afford to buy it and much went to waste: the UN estimated on-farm losses of 50% in Africa in 2020.

The aggregated effect of The Gambia’s Covid response was a massive reduction in farming revenue and in available food. In effect, these were policies guaranteed to cause hunger and malnutrition — and to stoke food price inflation through the destruction of stores and harvests. Food inflation quickly grew in 2021 and remains in double digits, much higher than pre-pandemic levels.

At the same time, and as in the rest of the world, the Gambian government threw money at Covid-19. Donor advice on hygiene saw all public institutions forced to buy large plastic vats and gallons of hand wash and disinfectant. This, and the costs of implementing Western biomedical surveillance regimes, was paid for by taking on new debts: the Gambian government implemented a 500 million dalasi (US$10 million) emergency response fund — a vast sum for a country with a per-capita GDP of US$772. This was financed by a World Bank loan of the same value, and by an IMF loan of US$21.3 million.

Meanwhile, Gambian tax revenues fell by half in 2020, owing to the economic cataclysm, meaning that debt repayments stacked up even higher. This is money that The Gambia does not have. It was frequently said that “we could have fed the country for 10 years for the amount of money that we spent on Covid-19”. The Gambia is beset by poverty and malnutrition. Structurally indebted to Western creditors, with a median age below 18, and where a teacher’s monthly salary is under £50, the spending of these sums to implement Western protocols for a disease quickly known to affect mostly the elderly and obese is scandalous.

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Gambians themselves protested vociferously. Some tried to break into Serekunda market to continue working, and others — when a mask was demanded — asked who would pay for it. But the question remains: why did Gambian politicians implement these policies? In fact, creditor pressure from the EU and other Western embassies, from the World Bank and the WHO, made it almost impossible to do anything else.

Still today, billboards line the country with EU funding logos, indicating the “correct” way to wear masks. This offers a flashback to the bombardment which Gambian officials received from Western agencies on handling Covid-19. Weekly flurries of information arrived with instructions on “appropriate” behaviour. Weekly “situation reports” were demanded from the Gambian Ministry of Health by these partners: these reports had to indicate the effectiveness of the Covid protocols, and case numbers. This information was a prerequisite for further access to the finance so essential in the economic meltdown.

The Covid vaccine rollout made this dynamic even clearer. When by late 2021, vaccination numbers remained low, the UK High Commission warned Gambian counterparts that tourists would not return until all those in the tourist industry were vaccinated. Indeed, the UK only removed The Gambia from the red-list of countries once the vaccine rollout had “decreased risk to British nationals”. In the end, public officials were virtually forced into vaccination. Most of these vaccines were not gifted to the country, but paid for through World Bank loans which increased structural indebtedness.

The consequences have been vast. The impact on Gambian young women has been especially severe. The closure of schools in the pandemic made schoolgirls vulnerable to being sent away for marriage by parents desperate to earn some dowry money to assuage the pain of the pandemic restrictions. One expert in the field described how early marriage had become common in The Gambia during the pandemic.

Secondly, there has been a huge increase in Gambian youths seeking to migrate to Europe illegally. The restrictions shattered the Gambian economy. Hotels, which employ more than 50,000 Gambians, were closed. The youths lost their jobs and many of them were forced into the dangerous ‘backway’ journey to Europe. Indeed, the fledgling democratic government’s noticeable achievements in youth job creation were all but wiped out by the pandemic, and the 2022-23 season tourism was still only at 30% of pre-pandemic levels.

Another harm came in the primary health sector. The pandemic and the endless Western agency briefings as to the requirements on vaccination, social distancing and masking meant that frail health facilities were completely rewired to focus on Covid-19 patients. This meant that as malaria, fevers and digestive diseases took their usual toll on the population, no one did much. The medical personnel, drugs, ambulances and facilities were all dedicated to fighting the pandemic in accordance with the demands of Western embassies and NGOs. This made maternity, child health and outpatient services suffer disruptions which were, in many cases, fatal. There was also a severe disruption in the Meningitis A, Tetanus, and Hepatitis children immunisation schedules, which still have not completely recovered.

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Given the devastating impacts of the pandemic response on the general population, Covid vaccine hesitancy is strong. A recent survey suggested that close to 70% of Gambian adults surveyed trusted “prayers” more than the vaccines. Many accuse healthcare officials of diagnosing simple cases of malaria as Covid-19. Popular distrust extended to the Government’s efforts to alleviate the food scarcity caused by the restrictions. A series of corruption scandals have broken pointing to the embezzlement of Covid-19 relief funds, while key suppliers contracted by the World Food Programme over two years failed to deliver the required 8,550 tons of rice intended as relief for needy families.

All of this could take decades to fix. Austerity has been forced on the country by external creditors and their incessant demands for information and compliance to protocols that, to most Gambians, were useless — and where Covid-19 was far from the greatest health threat they faced. As elsewhere around the world, vast levels of corruption were involved with the effective printing of money that went with the Covid response. Meanwhile, international solidarity collapsed, as Western activists appeared far more concerned by the political landscape in their own countries than by the effect of these policies on African lives — about which many remain reticent to this day.

What policymakers do not appear to have grasped are the consequences that all this will have. For all multi-billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates’s plans, and the current US government’s ideas about future pandemic preparedness and mass vaccine manufacturing in Africa, it is clear that no citizen of that continent will be prepared to trust future lockdowns, social distancing measures or mandatory vaccinations. While policymakers opine and “official narratives” are constructed, the experience in The Gambia, and across Africa as a whole, will ensure its response to the next pandemic will be nothing of the kind.

* Co-contributor Hassoum Ceesay is writing in a personal capacity

This is worth remembering as the Covid Inquiry embarks on its mammoth investigation. Former prime ministers, chancellors, and, yesterday, the Covid-era health secretary Matt Hancock have taken their oaths of honesty, promising to help us understand what happened and why. As an exercise in modern lesson-learning, it sits on the same shelf as the The Grenfell Tower Inquiry, The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, The Undercover Police Inquiry and The Infected Blood Inquiry, all of which have been rumbling away for years now. All have, at times, shown the strength of a statutory public inquiry — its ability to force uncomfortable evidence into the public domain. But all have also demonstrated the fatal weakness of the process. Whatever findings emerge, we still lack the powers to force politicians to do anything to ameliorate their terrible mistakes.

I have spent much of the last four years reporting on the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, which is a perfect illustration of this shortcoming, being in part an investigation into why so many of the inquiries before it were ignored. Parts of the Grenfell tragedy are now fixed in the national-political consciousness, from the cladding which turned the building into a deathtrap, to the governmental bungling of building regulations which allowed its wide use. And so, as our Covid reckoning creaks into action, the appalling chain of state failure over Grenfell provides a painful but useful warning of how far responsible actors can deviate from proper practice — and how difficult it is to force reform.

The story of missed warnings starts in 1999, when the Government was warned of the risks of dangerous cladding on social-housing high rises. Following the death of a pensioner in a cladding fire in Scotland, a select committee of MPs presented a report which said there were potentially hundreds of other buildings around the UK with similar systems. “We do not believe that it should take a serious fire in which many people are killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimising the risks,” it said. They called for a rule change to make all cladding systems either entirely non-combustible or proved fire safe by a large-scale test. They also suggested regular monitoring by social housing providers, to ensure the safety of systems already installed was understood.

Neither recommendation was implemented. Behind the scenes, it is now clear there was lobbying against higher standards for cladding — with an industry body warning of “economic consequences for the building industry and the UK as a whole” if tighter standards were imposed. This concern appears to have taken precedence. This is all the more alarming, when you consider that, after the 1999 report, the Government commissioned tests on cladding materials in 2001. In the event, one test had to be stopped after five minutes because it risked setting the laboratory alight. But nothing was done about it. The precise cladding product tested would later find its way onto the walls of Grenfell Tower.

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After another fire in 2009, which killed six residents (three of them children), concerns were raised about the advice conveyed by 999 handlers. The residents of Lakanal House, a tower block in south London, had been told to stay put, as a result of the logic that a blaze in a block of flats would stay in the compartment it started in. After the coroner’s inquest in 2013, the fire service promised better training of its call handlers to prevent a repeat tragedy. But this was downgraded amid budgetary pressure and the call centre would go on to repeat the exact same mistake on a much larger scale at Grenfell Tower in 2017.

The Government, meanwhile, was told by the coroner to encourage the retrofitting of sprinkler systems in ageing social housing blocks. But behind the scenes, officials scoffed at these recommendations. They told ministers their legal responsibility demanded they only reply to the coroner’s letter, not “kiss her backside”. The letter, which ultimately went back to the coroner, signed by then-secretary of state Eric Pickles, rejected the recommendation on sprinklers, adding that it had already “encouraged” them following a previous inquiry into a tower block blaze. But nothing happened.

The review of regulatory guidance, meanwhile, was kicked firmly into the long grass. By the time of the Grenfell Tower fire, it had not even started. This meant the opportunity to make a relatively simple tweak to guidance to remove the same outdated standard identified in 2001 was lost. With it remaining in place, unscrupulous cladding companies were able to sell the material — which burns with a similar ferocity to petrol when ignited — for use on more than 450 towers around England. An entirely avoidable disaster was therefore rendered all but inevitable by a simple failure to learn from prior mistakes.

Of course, the fact that we know all this and can openly say it is testimony to the fact that the Grenfell Tower Inquiry has done one part of its job well. It has obtained the documents which show the trail of mistakes which led to the blaze and interrogated the witnesses responsible. No journalist or committee of MPs would ever have got close to the revelations it has brought to light. But the question remains: what is the point if this knowledge does not lead to change? Why drag bereaved families through a tortuous four-year legal process and then let the recommendations rot on a dusty shelf?

Because the savage irony beneath the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s truth-seeking is that it appears to be headed for the same fate as the ignored warnings it has so assiduously documented. While its final report won’t appear until next year, the inquiry made many recommendations following the publication of its first phase report in October 2019. Crucially, it told the Government to end the total reliance on “stay put” advice in its guidance, and instead require the development of a “Plan B” to get everyone out if a blaze got out of control.

Practically, this was supposed to be achieved through legal obligations on building owners to prepare evacuation plans, install manual alarms which could be activated by firefighters if needed, and make “personal emergency evacuation plans” for disabled residents (who died disproportionately at Grenfell). Boris Johnson promised unequivocally to implement “every recommendation made”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this promise was quickly forgotten. In April 2020, the Home Office held a behind-closed-doors meeting with industry figures. In it, they slammed the proposals, calling them “not cheap” and “totally impracticable”.

When the government consultation on the implementation was published in the summer, the detail for implementing these key measures had been critically watered down. But this was not made clear. The Home Office press release which announced the abandonment of the recommendation on the evacuation of disabled residents was proudly titled “Home Secretary unveils ambitious plans for fire reform”. But it contained not a single line which made it plain that the recommendation of a seminal, four-year and £170m inquiry was being dropped. If you didn’t already know the detail back-to-front, you would never have known and most of the media didn’t.

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And if you want a singular illustration of the weakness of the inquest and inquiry process, consider the death of 23-year-old Emma Waring in 2014. In that instance, the coroner recommended the fitting of sprinklers in flats occupied by residents with particular vulnerabilities. But the government did not even reply to this recommendation, until I submitted a Freedom of Information request seeking its response in 2018. When they finally did, 785 days after the deadline, they still did not accept the recommendation.

All of which suggests the Government cares little for what inquests and inquiries recommend, lending urgency to the launch this week of a campaign for a National Oversight Mechanism — an independent body which would review and report on the Government’s progress in implementing the changes official inquests and inquiries propose. Proposed by the charity Inquest and backed by Grenfell survivors and bereaved and the families of those who died of Covid, such a mechanism would, at least, shine a light on the state’s unwillingness to do what it so blithely promises victims in the aftermath of an atrocity: to learn and apply the lessons from its most deadly mistakes.

None of this is to say that it will solve everything. But as the Covid Inquiry cranks into gear, the very least we can hope is that more people will be paying attention. For unless something changes, history tells us its recommendations will be remembered only when the next disaster strikes, a new inquiry is asked to investigate why the lessons from the last one were ignored, and the whole miserable cycle rolls around again.

As two of the key preliminary hearings in the UK Covid Inquiry take place this week — two years after Boris Johnson said “we owe it to the country to produce answers in a reasonable timescale” — bereaved families and policy sceptics could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing is an excuse to kick controversies and failings into the long grass. Will this inquiry follow the pattern of previous ones and avoid the difficult questions?

There are already concerns. With the World Health Organization refusing to provide a statement of evidence, not all the relevant stakeholders are engaging with the process, while bereaved families already feel marginalised. But the Inquiry’s broad Terms Of Reference (TOR) are encouraging: decision-making, the availability and use of data, “legislative and regulatory control and enforcement”, “the use of lockdowns and other ‘non-pharmaceutical’ interventions (NPIs)”, the impact on mental health of the whole population, the specific impacts on young people and education, and the safeguarding of public funds are all included. As are questions of the treatment of Covid-19 in hospitals, care homes, and “the development, delivery and impact of therapeutics and vaccines”, alongside the consequences of the pandemic on provision of non-Covid treatments.

But how will the Inquiry address these issues? Will it simply reinforce the mainstream public and Government messaging — or will it provide a meaningful examination of this peacetime catastrophe? Given the current narrative regarding the most controversial of pandemic measures, “the use of lockdowns and other [NPIs]”, one might perhaps be allowed a little scepticism. That the UK failed to lock down soon enough is pretty much orthodoxy in policy circles. This was the conclusion in October 2021 of the Health and Social Affairs Select Committee, soon repeated by luminaries such as Jeremy Hunt — and trumpeted by Keir Starmer as early as April 2020.

A serious inquiry shouldn’t simply repeat the mantra — it should consider the novelty of the lockdown model (the WHO’s November 2019 pandemic preparedness report into NPIs did not mention the word “lockdown” once), as well as its long-term effectiveness. The TOR encourage the “reasonable regard of relevant international comparisons”, and it’s to be hoped that this is taken seriously. Italy’s national lockdown was the first in world history —  and yet it has one of Western Europe’s highest Covid death rates. South Africa’s was the strictest lockdown in Africa, and yet it has far and away the highest Covid death rate on the continent. Peru had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in 2020, and now has the world’s highest Covid fatality rate.

So this inquiry should seek to understand how and why the world’s political and scientific establishment cohered around a completely untried and untested model for dealing with the Covid outbreak. It should attempt to connect this to some of the other themes in the TOR, especially the question of political decision-making, such as how and why did the UK’s scientific establishment depart from the previous consensus that, as the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said on March 13, 2020, “If you completely locked down absolutely everything, probably for a period of four months or more then you would suppress this virus… but when you do that and then you release it, it all comes back again.”

And it should seek to interrogate how and why the lockdown approach became unchallengeable, leading to a situation in which 40% of the deaths from Covid-19 in the Western world took place in the most vulnerable of all settings — care homes. Why did the Imperial College modellers’ predictions that the lockdown measures would see fewer than 6,000 people dying from Covid in the UK overestimate the effectiveness of these measures by something like 3,000%? And why was the UK’s pre-2020 pandemic planning — which emphasised balancing the costs and benefits of all interventions according to the principles of proportionality and flexibility, minimising the disruptions to everyday social and economic life, and protecting the vulnerable — thrown out of the window?

This core question should be connected to the broader impact on healthcare. Instead of protecting the NHS, did lockdowns produce the crisis we now see flooding the health service? Should more care have been focused on the vulnerable, while allowing the rest of society to continue as normal? Would this have then mitigated the damaging effects of lockdown on young people and societal mental health, as well as avoiding the immensely regressive consequences of school closures?

Although the effects of lockdown should lie at the heart of the Inquiry, there are other aspects of the pandemic which deserve scrutiny.

Why, for example, did the Government ignore the potential benefits of natural immunity, when evidence suggested early on that prior infection confers durable protective immunity in the case of SARS-CoV2, as confirmed by a study just published in The Lancet? The idea of letting the virus spread through those who were at low risk from it (the overwhelming majority of the population), allowing them to generate antibodies, while protecting high-risk groups, was a well-established epidemiological concept, and yet it was dismissed as outlandish, despite being initially advocated by Patrick Vallance.

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Why, too, was compulsory universal masking adopted, despite the fact that no existing data supported the use of face-masking in the general population as a protective measure against respiratory viruses? Even the WHO had originally stated that “the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks” — including lulling elderly and at-risk people into a false sense of security by making them mistakenly believe they will be safe while wearing them. This has now been confirmed by meta-analysis published in January by Cochrane, widely considered the gold standard of healthcare data review. And what was the point in the use of mass testing for the general population, including in very low-risk children, at a massive cost, without evidence of individual or community-wide benefit from doing so?

The question of treatment is often ignored in the heated exchanges around Covid, but it also deserves serious examination. Why was so little research conducted into early at-home treatments for Covid? Based on existing drugs, these had apparently early benefits in reducing hospitalisations and deaths — which were subsequently confirmed in peer-reviewed studies (see here and here) — as early as March 2020. They were ignored, though, even after the publication of a first early treatment protocol based on efficacy and safety in the prestigious American Journal of Medicine in July 2020.

The potential of a number of early treatments was relatively unexplored, even though they might have worked well to prevent infection and illness. Instead, how many people ended up in hospital because all they were told, at the onset of the first symptoms, was to stay at home, rest, and in the case of a high fever to take paracetamol? And then, once they were in hospital, how many of those who developed serious respiratory issues perished because they were placed on mechanical ventilators? During the first wave, this became the mainstay of treatment for severe and critical cases of Covid-19; however, it soon become clear that a shockingly high number of patients put on ventilators ended up dying. It would later emerge that the use of pressurised oxygen was literally destroying patients’ lung sacs that were inflamed and damaged by the virus, and therefore unable to withstand the high pressure of mechanical ventilators. Why was the ventilation protocol maintained for months despite such appalling results?

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Finally, why were fast-tracked, experimental, and, ultimately, little-known “next-generation” mRNA technology-based vaccines offered to everyone, including those at little risk from Covid, even though it was known that the vaccines didn’t prevent transmission, and were associated with serious side effects? Wouldn’t a focused, risk-based approach to vaccination have been more advisable?

There are serious questions to be asked about the management of this catastrophe. The scope of the inquiry is necessarily huge. But the politicisation of the debate around Covid is fraught. There are strong headwinds, built up during the initial years when the lockdown consensus was so powerful. But as the failings of the Covid policy response become ever clearer, let’s hope the the British public isn’t lumbered with yet another meaningless inquiry.