Covid and the politics of panic

It is 15 months since Sweden’s Coronavirus Commission presented its final report. The 770-page document analysed how the country handled the pandemic and came up with numerous suggestions for how things might have been done better. The initial response, it concluded, was too slow, but the report vindicated the decision to make social distancing measures voluntary rather than compulsory.

Why, then, has it taken the UK’s own Covid inquiry so long even to get going? In two weeks’ time the chair of the inquiry, Baroness Hallett, will finally start to hear evidence for module one – which looks at Britain’s pandemic preparedness – but she has said that she expects to be collecting evidence for three more years. And then of course the report will have to be written. Perhaps by the tenth anniversary of the outbreak we may finally have some answers.

The lockdown WhatsApp messages show what happens when a small group is given too much power

Meanwhile, the same apparatus that failed Britain so badly is still in place. If a new pathogen were identified tomorrow, we would be thrown back to the old Sage advisory system. There is still no proper emergency response protocol or any official requirement to check that public health interventions don’t cause more problems than they solve.

In the pandemic, the normal mechanisms of government were supplanted by impromptu WhatsApp discussions. We know this because Matt Hancock, the health secretary at the time, has since given all his WhatsApp messages to the investigative journalist Isabel Oakeshott so that she could ghostwrite his memoirs. Oakeshott in turn decided that it was in everyone’s interest to make the messages public in order that lessons could be learned, and the Daily Telegraph published them in what became the Lockdown Files.