While America has chosen to ignore most COVID policy failures, unless they can be used to score partisan political points, the British government has been running a COVID Inquiry, examining mistakes the government made to better prepare for the next pandemic. The proceedings took an interesting turn in recent days, when top government advisor Mark Woolhouse at the University of Edinburgh lambasted the BBC for misrepresenting COVID risks to promote harmful lockdowns, while senior government advisor Devi Sridhar, also at the University of Edinburgh, kind of admitted that she maybe, perhaps gave poor advice—alerting several reporters who began calling her out on social media and documenting her blatant lies.
The statements by both academics underscore that lockdowns failed as a pandemic policy but were enforced with the help of media who, instead of challenging government policies, began promoting them.
“I find it extraordinary that no formal assessment of the expected impact of lockdown was implemented,” testified Woolhouse, who studies infectious disease epidemiology, and advises the Scottish government on pandemics. “This despite it being obvious that lockdown was likely to cause severe harms to the economy, education, mental health, health care access and societal well-being … exacerbating inequalities.”
Government advice on pandemics did not “consider the wider harms caused by the response to the pandemic” such as government policies that led to school closures and the banning of outdoor activities, even though the virus did not transmit well outdoors, Woolhouse said. He added that the risk of a child dying from COVID was “about the same as the risk of that child being struck by lightning in the playground” causing the government to ignore that the virus was “ten thousand times” more deadly to the elderly.
“In the media, the BBC television news repeatedly reported rare deaths or illnesses among healthy adults as if they were the norm, again creating a misleading impression of who was at greater or lesser risk,” Woolhouse testified. “I suspect this misinformation was allowed to stand throughout 2020 because it provided a justification for locking down the entire population.”
