At The Spectator’s Alternative Covid Inquiry last night, science writer and journalist Matt Ridley; Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford; Jonathan Sumption, writer and former Supreme Court Justice; Christopher Snowdon, journalist and head of lifestyle economics at the IEA, and Tom Whipple, science writer and special correspondent at the Times, had their say on what went wrong – and right – during the pandemic. They asked the questions the experts didn’t – or wouldn’t. Here is what they had to say. Spectator subscribers can view the full video of the event here.

This evening shouldn’t really be necessary. The reason why it is is the patent inadequacy of the reports so far produced by the official Inquiry at great public expense. Lady Hallett has retraced in minute detail the inadequacies of the decision makers, but has said remarkably little about the inadequacy of their decisions. She takes at face value models like those of Professor Neil Ferguson based on completely unrealistic assumptions about human behaviour and treats them as accurate statements of fact. She ignores the experience of other places which declined to impose draconian remedies that had been chosen by the UK. She doesn’t address the many authoritative studies which show that there is no significant correlation between the severity of non pharmaceutical interventions and mortality. Lady Hallett accepts that the really serious economic, financial and sociological consequences of lockdowns are relevant, but she then has almost nothing to say about them. She appears to have approached her task on the footing that it was inherently wrong for government ministers not to follow the advice of their scientific advisors, even when they plainly got it wrong, as they did when ministers finally plucked up courage to overrule them on the Omicron variant in December 2021.

We are talking about some of the most basic civil rights

We are talking about some of the most basic civil rights

I’m used to dealing with evidence, and I’m impressed by the evidence that human beings will take sensible and effective precautions to protect themselves against those and those around them, against infection, without the need of coercion. I’m impressed by the evidence that it was unnecessary to lock down healthy people under the age of 65 who were at minimal risk of death or serious illness from covid and could have been treated differently. I’m impressed by the fact that Sweden, which did not lock down, got comparable results to Norway, Denmark and Finland and better results than we did. I’m impressed by the evidence that lockdowns have caused a serious increase in non Covid health problems, notably mental illness and dementia, and I’m impressed by the fact that Lady Hallett has managed to reach her conclusions with only a cursory glance at any of these matters. 

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There is a moral dimension to all of this. I don’t believe that liberty is an absolute or overriding value, but I think it’s a very high value. We are talking about some of the most basic civil rights. The right not to be confined to a place appointed by the state at the discretion of ministers. The right to go where you please without having to justify yourself to the police. The right to associate freely with other human beings. The right to earn an honest living, regardless of whether the state thinks that it is useful or necessary. The right to make your own judgments about the risks of daily life in the light of your own circumstances and those of the people around you, rather than have a minister make these decisions for you.

Now, civil rights of this kind are not just a convenience. They are fundamental to the existence of social animals like humans and to our life as a community. They are a basic condition of human creativity. They are necessary for our mental well being and our happiness. And these are the things that life is about. It takes a great deal more to justify curtailing these rights than anything that one can find in the government’s thinking at the time or Lady Hallett’s reports subsequently.

Disease, like crime, external enemies and economic misfortune are unfortunately risks inseparable from life. Human beings have lived with epidemic diseases since the origin of mankind. The basic question posed by the covid lockdowns is, whose responsibility should it be to limit the ordinary risks inseparable from social existence? Should it be our responsibility? Or the responsibility of the state? We all have a personal responsibility to look after our own safety. We all have a personal responsibility to limit as far as we can the risks which the ordinary incidents of daily life pose to our neighbours. Liberty and safety, however, are only in conflict if we try to shuffle off these personal responsibilities to the state, because the state has only one possible response, namely coercion. And if we make the state responsible for ensuring that nothing goes wrong, then it will restrict our liberty so as to make sure that nothing ever does go wrong, and because the risk of things going wrong is inseparable from life itself, that will almost always mean suppressing a large part of life itself.

I’ve been tasked with answering the question of whether lockdowns did anything to stop the spread of covid. So, to answer this question, we need to understand what would have happened in the absence of any intervention. So we’re talking about, did interventions work?

Well, first of all, let’s try and understand what happens in the absence of intervention. So I’m going to try and gallop through basically my entire lecture course. But here we go. Essentially, we’re looking at a system where people go from being susceptible to being infected and then recovering and becoming immune. And when an infected individual arrives in a totally susceptible population, they will spread the infection, and then themselves become immune, and then the newly infected people spread it onto others, and they themselves also become immune.

Initially, there is a growth in numbers infected, but that growth slows down as the numbers immune build up, because there are fewer and fewer susceptibles that can be infected. Eventually we reach a threshold known as the herd immunity threshold, where the population immune is too high for the infection to continue to grow and it starts then to diminish and eventually to die out with.

The basic question posed by the covid lockdowns is, whose responsibility should it be to limit the ordinary risks inseparable from social existence?

The basic question posed by the covid lockdowns is, whose responsibility should it be to limit the ordinary risks inseparable from social existence?

With any coronavirus, you need to include two other ingredients, which is, first of all that there is a rapid loss of immunity, and also that transmissibility, like many pathogens other respiratory pathogens, is seasonal, so higher in the winter and lower in the summer. Once you put these into the mix, you start to see further waves of infection. And these will eventually settle into a stable pattern, what we call an endemic equilibrium, where the proportion immune oscillates around the herd immunity threshold, and you get these regular winter peaks in infection. Now, this very simple framework can actually explain pretty much every single pattern of spread that we have observed worldwide.

So if the virus arrives in high season, when it’s able to spread very quickly, you see a large initial peak, as we did, for example, in New York City, followed by smaller peaks. Whereas if it arrives in low season, as it did in Arizona, you will see a small........

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