Over 230,000 people in the UK have died from Covid-19 disease. Almost half the deaths – 100,000 – occurred by January 2021, less than a year into the pandemic. The Covid Inquiry currently underway in London is supposed to be exposing how this disaster could have been allowed to happen, and to hold those responsible to account. Yet the politicians who are its key witnesses have been allowed to breeze their way through the inquiry with no serious challenge over the statements they made or actions they took, or failed to take, during the first year of the pandemic. Instead they have been allowed to lie, to equivocate, to feign ignorance or loss of memory and basically to absolve themselves of all blame. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was not challenged for claiming that WhatsApp messages from his old phone covering the period 31 January to June 2020 were: ‘not retrievable’. Current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – then Chancellor of the Exchequer – drew a similar blank over crucial WhatsApp messages from the period, saying that he ‘did not have access’ to them because he had changed his phone several times and failed to back them up. Appearing before the inqury on 12 December 2023, Sunak ‘could not precisely recall’ important evidence a total of 24 times – much of its relating to his disastrous ‘Eat out to help out’ scheme in August 2020, which – as could have been predicted – seeded a second wave of the virus, prompting a second lockdown. This collective amnesia and blank record of messages comes despite a hard-fought legal ruling in July 2023 to compel those in government at the time to hand over the relevant two years’ worth of Signal and Whatsapp messages to the inquiry. Instead, those who presided over Britain’s Covid disaster chose to delete evidence of their arrogance, their negligence and their crimes. We must never forget that while Covid-19 ravaged disproportionately the working class, in particular the old, the sick and those minority ethnic communities, these self-serving ruling class buffoons sneered and party, willing, in Johnson’s notorious words, to ‘let the bodies pile high’.
Corruption
Of course, they and their mates did very nicely out of the pandemic – though the obscene levels of corruption that were part and parcel of the state response have been uncovered not by the inquiry but by a combination of leaks and investigative journalism from among others the Good Law Project and Byline Times.
As hospital staff denied sufficient or appropriate PPE in the early stages of the pandemic, the pandemic, the government created a murky ‘High Priority’ ‘VIP lane’ of 50 companies which were given priority to bid for contracts to supply PPE. Most had nothing to do with PPE manufacture; for instance, pest control companies. Then health minister Matt Hancock handed a £40m contract to his pub landlord. Baroness Michelle Mone, whose company PPE Medpro, set up 12 May 2020, was given contracts worth £203m to supply gowns and masks which were faulty or unsuitable. She personally received profits of £65m. Mone and her husband have now had £75m in assets seized by the National Crime Agency as suspected proceeds of crime. This is only the most egregious example of the deep corruption and profiteering of the Tory government under Boris Johnson. The Department of Health ended up spending £12bn on PPE, much of it acquired via the VIP Lane. A bill of £85bn was added to the NHS budget, £70bn of which is still unaccounted for and includes the VIP lane spending. On 12 January 2022, the High Court ruled the use of the High Priority VIP Lane illegal.
Mass infection policy
The victims of this total lack of accountability, reflection or oversight mean that, in substance, nothing has changed. The Covid-19 virus is still being allowed to run rampant through the population with no containment or protection measures; in 2023 alone, the disease killed 17,000 people. Even in health care settings, mask-wearing has ceased to be mandatory. The latest results of the ONS Covid Winter Infection Survey and the modelled estimate from the UKHSA showed that the percentage of infected people in England was 3% in mid-January 2024, making it the fourth biggest wave so far. 600 people were being admitted to hospitals in England daily. There is no evidence of Covid-19 being ‘seasonal’, ‘endemic’ or ‘mild’.
Many children remain unvaccinated and most under 50s have not had a booster vaccination for over two years. Only 11.7 million of the 21.7 million people ‘eligible’ for a booster have had it. The remaining doses will just be binned alongside close to two million doses of anti-viral medication Paxlovid. In December 2021, at the height of the Omicron wave, the UK agreed to buy 2.75 million courses of Paxlovid. The government’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended the drug be used only for people with serious underlying health conditions. This stringent restriction has meant an estimated one million doses worth $700m were out of date by December 2023. Another 550,000 doses are expected to expire in February, with a further 650,000 by the end of June (Financial Times, 1 January 2024).
An estimated 6% to 10% of those infected with Covid-19 will go on to develop Long Covid, with serious potential long-term implications. The head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonoses unit, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, has warned that ‘10 years, 20 years from now, what are we going to see in terms of cardiac impairment, pulmonary impairment, neurologic impairment? It’s Year Five in the pandemic, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about it’. Long Covid already affects around two million people in the UK.
Charles Chinweizu
