Media: premature disclosure

By Richard North - March 5, 2023

What we are seeing at the moment is an attempt, led by the Telegraph to rehash the Covid debate, but on its terms.

In so doing, it is pre-empting the official inquiry and, in presenting a limited version of events, based largely on a single source – the Hancock Whats App files – it is distorting the narrative in a way that is not greatly adding to the sum of human knowledge.

Certainly, if the Telegraph is trying to assert that a government led by its favourite son – the Oaf – with the odious Hancock running the health portfolio, made a complete pig’s ear of the response to the Covid epidemic, then that is hardly news.

Real news would have been a story of how this dysfunctional crew had managed an effective response. But then, that was a situation as unlikely as Boris Johnson turning up at Hyde Park with five loaves and two fishes and feeding the five thousand.

Indirectly, as criticism mounts of Isobel Oakshott’s egregious breach of confidence in releasing the files, the paper is seeking to make the case that the media, in covering the epidemic, did a poor job as well, thereby justifying the release.

That the media performed poorly is a thesis with which I would find it difficult to disagree. Into May 2021, I recall writing that the media noise on Covid-19 had become far too great for any useful contribution to be made by an independent blogger.

Where experts were two-a-penny, self-appointed or otherwise, I wrote, it was better to keep one’s own counsel and let them get on with it – which is largely what I started to do.

The previous year, in April 2020, I’d written almost in despair of the “almost overwhelming torrent of verbiage from ‘leading experts’, politicians and commentators”, and observed that, in seeking to contain what was a new and worrying disease, the actual conditions to be satisfied to achieve control were relatively simply defined, amounting to a mere two in number.

In essence, I asserted, these boiled down to satisfaction of one of these propositions: either you take the infection out of the people, or you take the people out of the infection. In principle, I added, it really is as simple as that.

Looking at the second proposition first – without the benefit of hindsight or inside knowledge, I ventured that this was what the government had been hoping to achieve with the lockdown.

It did not need a specialist or an expert in infectious disease control to understand that the infective virus was abroad, carried by an unknown number of people, with hotspot reservoirs in hospitals, care homes, prisons and other institutions.

Thus, the logic of the lockdown was fairly straightforward. We were being kept out of harm’s way by keeping us locked up in our homes, minimising our contacts with virus carriers.

There was, as we were all too well-aware at the time, an alternative way of making us unavailable to the virus and thereby containing the disease. That was by vaccinating the population. However, at that point in the epidemic, a vaccine was not available.

Perceived wisdom then was that we were unlikely to secure a vaccinated population in the UK for at least a year, if not longer. And the efficacy depended on the premise that a vaccine could be found worked, and that enough doses of vaccine could be manufactured in the time.

As to the lockdown – which at the time was our main weapon against the disease, I acknowledged that it was impossible for this to be complete. All we could have hoped for is that it would be of sufficient rigour to achieve the desired object, before it became economically and socially unsustainable.

There were people at the time, for libertarian and other ideological reasons, strongly objected to the imposition of the lockdown, and the objections strengthened as the additional lockdowns were imposed.

I had a great deal of sympathy with the argument that the lockdowns would have been less necessary had my first proposition been satisfied: that you take the infection out of the people. Practically, this would be achieved by rapidly identifying infected people and their contacts and taking them out of circulation.

But, with the almost complete failure of the inordinately expensive and cumbersome “track and trace” programme – about which I wrote a great deal – the government abjectly failed to achieve this objective, leaving the lockdown as the fallback.

What, in my view, neither the media nor the official narrative addressed was how, over many decades, the public health system in this country had been allowed to decay so that, when we were challenged by a serious epidemic, there were no longer the resources nor the capabilities to mount an effective response.

This situation had been made far worse by the failure of planning where, from the WHO downwards, the international and national public health communities had prepared for the wrong disease – pandemic influenza instead of Covid, which, from an epidemiological perspective, behaved very differently.

This error was magnified in the early stages by an over-long persistence in promoting the wrong control measures, with the nightly embarrassment of having the facile Johnson nagging us to wash our hands, despite the lack of any scientific support for this ritual, which probably did more harm than good.

That much of the response to the epidemic was not governed by “the science” became all too obvious by what I latterly described as “hygiene theatre”, where we were being enjoined to adopt useless rituals, largely for the sake of being seen to be doing something.

The ritualistic and often inadequate response, and the dysfunctional behaviour of the Johnson administration – led by Cummings and his infamous “eye-test” – gave more than enough space for a group of self-appointed pundits to question certain aspects of the Covid policy.

Over term, we saw new groups coalesce, under the generic banners of “lockdown sceptics” and “anti-vaxxers”, and even “Covid deniers” who argued that the pandemic was a conspiracy organised by evil globalists intent on the subjugation of the human race.

To question the official response to a major epidemic – which is as much a matter of politics as it is science – is by no means unreasonable. But the best time for a wide-ranging debate is rarely at the hight of an epidemic when there is an urgent need to take potentially life-saving measures.

In what is an uncertain and worrying time, there will always be mistakes and, in retrospect, the evaluation of events will invariably show that there could have been better ways of doing things. A classic example is the Aberdeen Typhoid Outbreak of 1964 which brought normal life in this northern Scottish city almost to a complete halt.

The narrative, based on the official inquiry, gives a good insight as to where we are now with Covid, and illustrates the pressing need for a comprehensive and dispassionate report on the handling of the epidemic, pulling no punches.

Whether the current official inquiry is even capable of carrying out such a complex task remains to be seen, but at least it should be given a chance to do its work and present its report.

In the interim, I don’t believe the hype induced by the Telegraph is helping. Some of the issues raised are undoubtedly valid, but there is nothing there that could not have waited until the official inquiry had completed its work.

And if Isobel Oakshott is so keen that the issues raised by the Hancock files should be properly aired, she should ensure that the inquiry is given copies which, as far as I understand, is not the case. For the moment, though, it looks as if the rest of the media is leaving the Telegraph to get on with it, although some are reverting to type by spreading more “Harree drivel”, which is almost as bad.

Tucked away in the Observer is a potentially dangerous development on climate change politics, as the net zero policy gradually unravels.

Given the impact of this failed policy on everyday life, we could do with more media attention on the here and now, with fewer self-indulgent media “scoops” and much less of the royal soap opera.