A high price
Sir: Further to Lord Greenhalgh’s timely remarks, (“Covid churches lockdown was ‘outrageous’ says ex-minister’, December 2023) it is unfortunate that the UK Covid inquiry is ignoring the baleful effects of lockdown altogether. Equally outraged are the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice campaigners, who are furious about the way they suffered under rules ignored by those superintending them.
We should reserve at least some of our ire for the Sage committee, because the suffering was caused by the rules and not the hypocrisy of “Partygate” and the like. The hypocrisy is certainly contemptible but it is not materially relevant to what happened: ministers and civil servants were frightened and bullied by the Sage committee into taking the catastrophic decision to implement a national lockdown, on the grounds that failure to do so would result in the collapse of the National Health Service and the deaths of thousands of people. Thousands of people died anyway, but the Covid inquiry is not addressing any of this; it is merely deliberating on whether lockdown should have been done “sooner” or “better” – coincidentally rehashing the same futile questions bellowed by over-excited journalists at the daily Covid briefings. The two statistics we needed then, and need now, are how many excess deaths occurred (and continue to occur) as a result of lockdown compared with how many people would have died of Covid-19 anyway – and how much it cost to kill all these extra people.
