The Covid Enquiry

The Official Inquiry into the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic will probably go the same way as most official inquiries into the British government’s handling of other important issues. It will be characterised by arse-covering, blame shifting, deflection, pathetic excuses, the scapegoating of minor players, and then nothing much of any significance will change. The only lesson that the British Government ever learns is that, no matter what happens, it is never the fault of those in charge. In any event, the inquiry will drag on for years and, by the time it publishes its invariably underwhelming conclusions, the lead players will already have placed themselves beyond any semblance of democratic accountability and their cronies will have rewarded them for their services to failure and self promotion with a nice cosy seat in the House of Lords. However public inquiries do have the potential to cause political embarrassment while they are going on and when the politician who is the object of that embarrassment is already weak and beleaguered. This can prove very damaging to the ego fuelled self promotion which is what passes for a British ministerial career these days.

Currently Rishi Sunak is going through extraordinary contortions in order to prevent retired senior judge Baroness Hallett, chair of the Covid Inquiry, from accessing all the information that she requires to conduct a thorough inquiry. What the Government’s position boils down to is that it will decide what information is or is not relevant to the Inquiry. This is the Government, let us not forget, whose actions and behaviour are the topic of the inquiry. The usual Tory nodding donkeys are being trotted out to assure the public that the decision to take legal action to prevent the inquiry from having access to unredacted WhatsApp messages between ministers and officials while the official response to the pandemic was being framed is entirely legitimate and above board. But there is no precedent for a government seeking to thwart a request for evidence from an official inquiry that the government itself set up.

It is widely expected, even by senior Tories, that the government will lose its attempt to prevent the information being handed over. The inquiry was given a very broad remit by the same government that is now saying: “Oh, but when we said we’d be totally transparent we didn’t mean THAT transparent.” The Government can only be taking this step because it fears that the information being sought by the inquiry is political dynamite. That can be the only explanation for taking legal action which most observers believe has little chance of succeeding, and which is causing political embarrassment by the mere act of initiating it. Sunak clearly feels that the small chance of blocking the inquiry from seeing the information, and weathering the criticism that the legal action provokes, is far better for him than allowing the information to come out.

Boris Johnson is heaping the embarrassment upon Sunak by voluntarily handing over his own WhatsApp messages to the inquiry. He will most likely receive huge criticism from the inquiry for his chaotic and shambolic handling of the pandemic, but politically Johnson has little left to lose. He’s out of office and has more immediate problems in the shape of the Commons investigation into whether he misled Parliament, the verdict of which has the potential to end his political career and finally put an end to his diminishing hopes of a triumphant return to Downing Street.

Right now Johnson is more interested in settling scores with Sunak, and Johnson almost certainly knows just how damaging the contents of those WhatsApp messages could be to his former Chancellor. As Chancellor Sunak was directly responsible for the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme, encouraging people to dine out at restaurants even though there was a significant risk of spreading the coronavirus. The scheme was blamed for a sharp rise in Covid infections. The scheme was panned by Professor John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was a member of the Sage committee of advisers to ministers as “spectacularly stupid.” The scheme allowed diners to claim a 50% discount on meals when it was launched in August 2020, before the widespread roll out of effective vaccines. It cost the public purse £850 million and one study found that it was responsible for an 8 to 17% rise in covid infections.

During the pandemic the Conservatives repeatedly insisted that its response to the spread of the virus was “led by the scientific evidence.” That was a lie, and those WhatsApp messages will prove it in embarrassing and damning detail. Professor Edmunds insists that Sunak’s pet project was never discussed with the scientists who were supposedly advising the government. Speaking to the Observer newspaper Professor Edmunds said: “If we had [been consulted], I would have been clear what I thought about it. As far as I am concerned, it was a spectacularly stupid idea and an obscene way to spend public money.” Edmunds dismissed the Government’s repeated claim that it “followed the science” when setting policy to tackle the pandemic as “nonsense.”

The president of the British Medical Association, Prof Martin McKee, also criticised the “dysfunctional” way in which the Treasury under Sunak overlooked scientific advice throughout the pandemic. It wasn’t just the scientists that Sunak did not consult with. According to reports he did not consult with his cabinet colleagues either. The biographer and Conservative historian Anthony Seldon claims in his recent book ‘Johnson at 10: The Inside Story’ that the then Health Secretary Matt Hancock only found out about Sunak’s pet scheme when he read about it in a press release. (Incidentally, this biography is well worth reading as it gives depressing insights into the 'reign' of Boris Johnson.)

This is why Sunak is so afraid of letting the Covid inquiry see all the evidence. He has always claimed that he was the grown up in the room and upon entering Downing Street vowed to restore integrity, professionalism and accountability to government. These WhatsApp messages will show that he was just as cavalier and reckless as Johnson and had an equal disregard for the consequences of his decisions on the public, even if that meant people might die. All Sunak cared about was getting himself in the spotlight and furthering his rampant ambition. And Seldon's book makes this crystal clear.

A Scottish perspective on the Indian variant

It was always predictable that the so-called Indian variant of the coronavirus was going to enter the UK. There are now fears that this new variant will cause a “third wave” resulting in an increase in hospitalisations and the suspension of the much anticipated loosening of lockdown restrictions. One question that many have is how new variants of the virus arise. This is an example of evolution in action. So first, a quick lesson in viruses.

To simplify things considerably, a virus is just a piece of DNA and an associated protein coating. A virus cannot reproduce by itself. Instead , the coronavirus, like other viruses, hijacks the mechanisms of the cells in the body of an infected host and forces those cells to make copies of the virus. Typically during the course of an infection many millions of copies of the virus will be churned out. Every time the virus is copied, there is a chance of an error taking place in the copying process and the virus not being copied correctly. The overwhelming majority of times, the virus is copied correctly, however because so many copies of the virus are made during the course of a typical infection, there’s a high probability that some faulty copies will be created.

Most of these faulty copies - the mutations - will be less effective at doing the virus’s two jobs of hijacking cells in the body and of being transmitted from one host body to another. These mutations will soon die out. Many other mutations will not be any better or worse at these jobs. However a small minority of these faulty copies will be more effective at hijacking body cells in the infected person and more effective at being transmitted from one person to another. These mutations have a competitive advantage over other less effective variants, and will preferentially spread. This is what happened with the so-called Kent variant which is now the dominant strain of the virus in the UK. This variant was more effective at being transmitted than the variants existing at the time, so eventually it crowded out the others.

Because millions upon millions of copies of the virus are made in each one of the millions of people who have become infected, new virus mutations are constantly being produced. There is concern that eventually one of these virus mutations might cause more serious illness or that it could be resistant to the vaccines currently in use.

New variants of the virus crop up constantly. The more restrictions there are on foreign travel, the easier it is to keep novel and potentially risky variants out of the country. Of course this must be balanced against people’s right to travel freely. It seems that in reaching a decision on this, the Scottish Government has given more weight to public health considerations than the Conservatives at Westminster, who appear to put more weight on the commercial interests of the travel and transport industries. Since the Scottish Government has no control over foreign borders, in this respect Scotland is at the mercy of UK government decisions which can undermine decisions made by the Scottish Government. The UK government delayed putting India on the red list of countries for over three weeks after concerns were raised about the spread of a new variant of concern there. Travellers arriving in the UK from India were allowed to self isolate at home instead of having to go into supervised hotel based quarantine.

The good news is that there is no definitive evidence - yet - that this new Indian variant is resistant to the vaccines that we currently have. Neither is there any evidence to suggest that this new variant causes more serious illness in those it infects. The other good news is that if a vaccine resistant variant was ever to arise, scientists would not have to go back to square one and develop an entirely new armoury of vaccines from scratch. It should be possible to “tweak” existing vaccines so that they’d be effective against a resistant strain.

However there is concern that this new Indian variant may be more effective at being transmitted from one person to another, although it’s not yet clear just how more effective it might be. If it’s more effective at being transmitted this means that the new variant is more likely to infect people and to cause more cases of serious illness simply because there are more people who are being infected. If the virus is able to infect more people more rapidly and to reach more people who are vulnerable to serious illness, the incidence of serious illness increases even though the variant does not in itself cause a more serious illness. That could cause a significant rise in hospitalisations among those who have not yet been vaccinated. This possibility is what alarms Scottish public health authorities and has led to the loosening of lockdown restrictions being paused in Glasgow.

The big problem that the Scottish Government faces is that it has to fight the virus with one hand tied behind its back. Scotland is in the position of trying to bail out a leaky boat with a Westminster shaped sieve. Decisions made in Scotland can all too easily be undermined by decisions made at Westminster.

Without control over international borders, Scotland was left in the ridiculous position of demanding hotel-based quarantine for the tiny number of international travellers who flew directly into Scotland from “red list” countries, but the far larger number of travellers who arrived in the UK-Ireland common travel area from abroad but whose flights first took them to England or Dublin where they then caught connecting Scotland were able to organise their own unsupervised quarantine at home. The UK Government continued to allow travel from India even after it became clear that the situation in the country was spiralling out of control.

It is not unreasonable to assume that if the far stricter supervised hotel based quarantine had applied universally to everyone arriving in Scotland there could have been a chance that the entry of the new variant could have been prevented and we might not now be in the position of having to delay Glasgow’s exit from lockdown amidst concerns that the new variant of the virus is getting a foothold in parts of the city. But that’s hypothetical. We are where we are, more concerning is that even though there is clear evidence of community transmission of the new variant in parts of England, and concerns are being raised about a possible third wave, Johnson is not pausing the loosening of lockdown restrictions in England. A surge in infections in England will have an inevitable knock on effect in Scotland.

Hopefully this new variant will not prove to be markedly more efficient at transmission but if it is, and there is a third wave, it will once again highlight how Scotland’s efforts to contain and control the pandemic are being undermined by a Conservative government which prioritises financial and economic concerns above public health.