The scientists who got everything wrong on Covid are grabbing new powers to make the same mistakes next time

All the worst lessons are being drawn from Covid. In the event of a future pandemic, we seem set to make the same mistakes, only earlier, more aggressively and more repetitively.

like generals gearing up to lose the last war, the world’s scientific and medical bureaucracies are doubling down on remedies that failed before: stricter lockdowns, compulsory vaccination, a bigger role for the World Health Organisation (WHO).

This week it emerged that under the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty, set to be ratified in two weeks, Britain would be forced to hand over a fifth of its drugs, vaccines and other ‘pandemic-related health products’ to the global bureaucracy.

Even that represents a climbdown by the WHO, which initially sought to establish itself as a supranational authority, with the power to compel governments to pursue its edicts on travel, vaccination and other public health measures.

Force

Only at the last minute was a clause that would have imposed a legal obligation on governments to follow WHO recommendations, and to force their citizens to do likewise, made non-binding.

But the direction of travel is clear. The WHO believes that, since diseases cross borders, it ought to have the final say on what individual countries do. This includes a commitment to what it calls ‘equity’, compelling wealthier or betterprepared nations to surrender stocks for redistribution to the less well prepared.

Well, you may say, this sounds reasonable enough. Doesn’t someone have to coordinate things at international level? And isn’t it better for that to be a committee of scientists and doctors rather than a lot of politicians?

For an answer, recall how the WHO performed last time. At the start of 2020, when news began to emerge that hospitals in Wuhan were being overrun by a hitherto unencountered respiratory disease, the WHO parroted the Chinese government’s line, insisting the virus could be caught only from animals.

‘ It is very clear right now that we have no sustained human- to- human transmission,’ it declared on January 14 of that year.

Why did it make this bizarre claim? Possibly because its director-general, Ethiopian politician Tedros Ghebreyesus, owed his appointment to China, which had told its economic client states to vote for him. And China wished to avoid any discussion of the possibility that the virus had leaked from a laboratory.

For a long time, the lab-leak hypothesis was treated as a conspiracy theory. But in their book Viral, published in 2021, Canadian molecular biologist Alina Chan and former Conservative peer Matt Ridley showed that it was overwhelmingly the likeliest explanation.

In other words, two openminded researchers, looking coldly at the facts, turned out to be far more credible than a global bureaucracy that was influenced by any number of political considerations.

It is a constant temptation to think that experts, by virtue of being experts, must be unbiased. But that is not how human nature works. We all have our assumptions and prejudices — the experts more than most, since they are focused on a single field of activity.

For example, civil servants tend to want more power for standing bureaucracies and less for elected ministers. Judges tend not to want to deport illegal immigrants. Police take attacks on the police more seriously than attacks on the general public.

The French call it déformation professionnelle, meaning that our biases are shaped by our jobs. Public health experts are no exception.

Recall, for example, the bizarre letter by 1,200 American public health professionals in June 2020 declaring that, in general, people must not congregate outside, but that it was acceptable if they were protesting for Black lives Matter.

That was an extreme example. But we saw biases at work in almost every public health advisory body in the world when the coronavirus emerged in 2020. They all overreacted, urging measures that, whatever their public health consequences, had huge costs elsewhere.

This was, as I say, inevitable. It was not their job to consider, for example, how school closures might damage children’s education, or how business closures might hit the economy. It was not even their job to consider the nonCovid public health impact of the lockdowns — missed cancer screenings, lack of exercise, mental health challenges. They were focused only on the epidemic.

It is the job of leaders — yes, of politicians — to make these trade- offs. The biggest mistake made during the lockdowns was not an unwillingness to listen to the experts but the precise opposite, namely a readiness to contract out decisions to committees that were thinking only one- dimensionally about disease containment.

Compulsory

Consider, as an example, the question of whether to vaccinate healthy young people — people, in other words, who were at almost no risk of becoming seriously ill from Covid. There were several moral objections to the policy. No vaccine is 100 per cent safe and even a small risk of an adverse reaction is hard to justify when the risk from the virus is yet smaller.

For most of 2020, the assumption was that the vaccine, when it came, would be for the over-50s and the clinically vulnerable.

But when the moment arrived vaccines were made, if not compulsory, hard for anyone to avoid if they wanted to travel, work or live a normal life. The stated reason was that they might help reduce transmission. But we know that their effect on this was negligible. And we knew it at the time. But so monomaniacal were our public health bodies about the disease that they decided that even the slightest chance that it might help justified jabbing the whole population.

Think about that for a moment. We built a huge edifice of restrictions, travel bans and vaccine passports, after assuming the jabs were protecting others, not just ourselves. If, as now seems clear, that assumption was false, then the justification for the prohibitions collapses.

Had the WHO been in charge in 2020, we would not just have had mandatory vaccines. We would have had a global lockdown. There would have been no holdouts. No Swedens, no Floridas.

Catastrophe

We can now see — though it has made astonishingly little impact on our public debate — that these places got it right. I don’t just mean that they avoided the economic catastrophe suffered by countries that closed their shops and businesses. I mean they seem to have come through with fewer deaths.

This astonishing fact should turn our assumptions on their head. We were told at the time that Sweden would see mass fatalities. Instead, it emerged with one of the lowest excess mortality rates in Europe. Does that not suggest our response was wrong?

But we can’t bring ourselves to admit it. Our ludicrous Covid Inquiry has plainly started with its conclusion, namely that we should have locked down earlier.

And, globally, we seem bent on ensuring that no future Swedens will be able to challenge the groupthink, and thereby undermine the credibility, of the infectious disease modellers.

What we really learned during lockdown is how little people cared about freedom. Told one day not to wear masks and the next to mask up, people did not just obey; they raged at anyone who had the temerity to ask why the advice was changing.

It turned out many people enjoyed being bossed about. Alas, the WHO noticed this.