Covid-19 Inquiry

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, on 27 March 1913, the population of Columbus, Ohio, started running. Afterwards, nobody was exactly sure why or when. James Thurber, the comic novelist, was a schoolboy in the town and recalled the incident in a famous article some years later. He said that perhaps it was simply someone suddenly remembering an appointment to meet his wife, and then a paperboy in high spirits joined in, and then perhaps a portly man of affairs broke into a trot, and before you knew it, the entire high street, from the union depot to the courthouse, was running. After the run had begun, people began to look for a justification, and the hubbub, the noise, eventually formed into one word: the dam had burst. Nobody stopped to point out that there was zero evidence of it having burst and that, anyway, even if it had, it could not have possibly reached Columbus, Ohio. People ran on for several more miles and then, eventually, sheepishly returned to the town. Here is the point: Thurber said that years passed before anyone dared mention it. Everyone carried on with their business as usual—and woe betide you if you made some jokey remark about the day the dam did not break.

It seems to me that we are in a very similar place with the lockdowns. Then, too, we saw herd instinct at its worst: people joining in one after another without stopping to think. It is an interesting counterfactual to ask what would have happened if the first sign of the pandemic had not been in autocratic China but in a country where lockdowns, the confinement of the entire population, would have been unthinkable—let us say if it had started in the Netherlands or Canada or somewhere. It started in China; then there was the attempt by the Italian Government to stop people moving from north to south; and then, suddenly, lockdowns, which had never been foreseen in any previous planning document, were considered a standard tool of public policy overnight. We were panicked into a response that no one had foreseen prior to those days—by shrieking broadcasters such as Piers Morgan, night after night, saying, “Why aren’t we copying these other countries?”, and all the signs up saying, “Covidiots go home”—and, rather like the people of Columbus, Ohio, we did not stop to think, and we still do not want to go back and ask whether it was justified or proportionate.

It is not true to say that there was no plan or that it was a plan for the wrong pandemic. We had a plan that we had worked out in cooler-headed times, at precisely the moment when you are supposed to think rationally about these things. We heard from my noble friend Lord Lansley about a number of the things in it. He said, well, maybe we were wrong about those things, but there has been no evidence at all that the original 2011 plan was wrong to say that face masks would be ineffective at containing a disease or that closing schools would have little impact or, indeed, to make the basic supposition that if you are dealing with something that will spread throughout the population, your best bet is to do that in a way that minimises fatalities rather than pretending that you can stop it altogether.

Actually, there was one country that kept to our plan. They did not have the resources to do their own, so they simply downloaded ours. That was Sweden, which I will come back to in a moment.

Like James Thurber’s citizens in Columbus, we are finding it difficult properly to relive the indignities and horrors that we went through, from the grievous ones, such as people unable to say farewell to dying loved ones, to the trivial ones, such as the debates about whether a Scotch egg counts as a meal. We have forgotten the taped-off playgrounds, the drones sent up to pursue solitary walkers, the police in Derbyshire pouring dye into a lake so it would be less of a beauty spot, and the “pingdemic”—that bizarre period when people were self-diagnosing so that, if they could not take time off work they would self-diagnose as being all clear, and if they felt like a little time off they would claim to have been infected. We have crammed all of these into some remote corner of our memory. In fact, the very difficulty of those things became an argument for continuing. We got into the worst kind of sunk cost fallacy. In fact, the Secretary of State at the time explicitly used that argument: we have been through so much, so let us not let it all be for nothing.

By then, almost everything was pushed into a retrospective justification for the measures that we and other Governments—with one exception—had taken. If infections went up, everyone said, “Well, we can’t relax the restrictions. It would be extremely dangerous”. If they came down, everyone said, “Oh, it’s working. We just need to carry on with this”. People kept on saying, “Follow the science”, but the one thing that we were not doing was applying the normal scientific method. Karl Popper defines science as something that can be disproved, but woe betide you if you even asked the most basic questions at that time about whether there was proportionality. We already had the evidence by the end of April 2020 that Sweden had followed the same trajectory as everywhere else: that the infections had peaked and declined in a place where there were only the most minimal of measures, banning large meetings but otherwise relying on people to use their common sense.

That is what a scientific approach would have done. It would have said, “Consider the control in the experiment”. We had a laboratory-quality control there all along—we had a country that had stuck to the plan that we were panicked out of following.

What can we see about the results in Sweden? First, and most obviously, there is not a smoking crater where its economy used to be. In fact, Sweden suffered less of an economic hit in the pandemic than it did in the 2008 financial crisis. The Swedish budget was back in surplus by 2021—imagine that. The last Government were done for by our selective amnesia about the cost of these lockdown measures and the current one will be too, because people still do not like to face the fact that for the better part of two years we paid people to stay at home, we borrowed from our future selves, and that money would eventually need to be paid back.

What if it was all for nothing? Let us ask the question: what price did Sweden pay for sparing its economy? At the time we were told that there would be an almost civilisational collapse there. I remember the Sun had the headline, “Heading for disaster”, while the Guardian’s was, “Leading us to catastrophe”. The argument was not that Sweden might end up with a slightly better or worse death rate than other countries, it was that this would be an outlier by any measure—that there would be bodies piled up in the streets.

The data are now more or less in. It was very difficult to track these things at the time because different countries have different methodologies. Different countries have different ways of measuring fatalities. Were people dying of Covid or with Covid? There were some territories which could not measure even that because they did not have a sufficiently advanced healthcare system. I think of my native Peru, which had about the toughest lockdown on the planet and about the worst fatality rate—again, showing how little correlation there was.

The one thing you can measure with a consistent methodology is excess mortality. You can apply the same calculation to any given population. You can say how many people died in the previous three years, how many you would then expect to die in this period, and compare that with what actually happened. You can be more sophisticated and factor in obesity and age profile and so on. However you do it, you find that Sweden ends up with one of, or on several measures, the lowest excess mortality rate in Europe. This should be the only thing the inquiry is looking at and we are debating, and yet it is somehow considered bad form even to mention it. We are still, like the citizens of Columbus, Ohio, unwilling to face the fact that it may have been disproportionate.

Among the institutions that put Sweden as the single lowest excess mortality rate in Europe are the BBC and the ONS. This is not some Barrington declaration fringe thing, these are the data. Yet there is this extraordinary readiness to tiptoe around rather than face them.

Should this not be the sole focus of the inquiry whose provisional findings we are discussing? Should not the only question that really matters be: were non-pharmaceutical interventions effective? Given the cost of the ruined educations, the elderly people isolated and the debt, was it proportionate? We should not be asking that question in a vindictive spirit. I understand that people have to err on the side of caution, that there was a panicky atmosphere and that we were dealing with something we did not know. It is understandable that people have to go with the best models they can find. But we no longer have to rely on models. We now have actual hard data. Yet we seem extraordinarily reluctant to ask the central question: did lockdowns work? Did they work a little bit but not enough to justify the dislocation? Did they work a great deal? Or, as the Swedish case prima facie would suggest, did they not work at all? Did they in fact drive up the mortality rate because of unrelated healthcare problems—everything from unscreened diagnoses to the fact of confining people and denying them exercise?

How is it that we can have this lengthy and expensive inquiry—Sweden has completed both its inquiries and moved on while we were still getting around to phase 1 —and have had all those conversations, and not asked that one central question?

Looking at this interim report, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is results-driven, or at the very least tendentious. In fact, you could infer almost everything you needed to know about this inquiry from the fact that, incredibly, witnesses were required to take a Covid test. It must be the last place in discovered space where this is still a thing, where Covid is not treated as an endemic disease.

You could tell from the tone of the questions what the conclusions would be—that the Government should have done more; that it was insufficient; why did we not lock down earlier or why did we not lock down harder?—all of it begging the question, all of it making assumptions that have, until now at any rate, not been interrogated, let alone proved.

This matters because, as the Minister said at the start, there is bound to be another pandemic and therefore knowing whether lockdowns work should be a critical question of public policy. Although, I have a horrible feeling that even if we were to rewrite, in a cool-headed way, a response plan without lockdowns, the evidence of 2020 is that such a plan, however reasonable and moderate, would be torn up in a panic under pressure from shrieking broadcasters and angry newspaper headlines.