Five Years On, the UK Refuses to Learn the Lessons of the Covid Catastrophe [Article from 8/3/25]

In America, Prof Jay Bhattacharya, the lockdown sceptic once derided by NIH chief Francis Collins as a “fringe epidemiologist”, is about to take over as NIH head in truly sweet karma. But five years on the UK is still mired in denial, say Molly Kingsley and Allison Pearson in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.

This week, in a committee room in Washington, DC, witnesses observed what may turn out to be one of the greatest vindications in the history of medical science. Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine, Economics and Health Policy at Stanford University, appeared before a Senate nomination hearing en route to confirmation as Director of America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). Hollywood would struggle to come up with a more stunning story arc for this mild-mannered hero.

During the Covid pandemic, the man who is about to become the most senior health official in the United States was a pariah. In October 2020, along with two distinguished colleagues, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta, a Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya published the Great Barrington Declaration.

The trio argued that lockdown would cause “irreparable damage” and made the case for “focused protection”; the elderly and the infirm would be sheltered while younger, healthier people got on with their lives (no social distancing, no masks, no quarantine) and built up immunity in the population. The manifesto proposed the lifting of restrictions which were plain silly (shutting children’s playgrounds, limiting exercise outdoors) and others which were deeply damaging (closing schools, cancelling hospital appointments) or merely economically disastrous (paying healthy people to stay at home, suspending hospitality and transport).

In an interview with the Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, in 2021, Bhattacharya warned of an “unseen” mental health crisis. Lockdown, he said, would come to be viewed as “the single biggest public health mistake of all history in terms of the scope of the harms that it’s caused”.

For daring to challenge the global groupthink, Bhattacharya endured vile personal attacks and censorship. Twitter suppressed the visibility of his posts while Google and Facebook, acting on requests from the Biden administration, no less, buried any mention of Great Barrington.

Four days after the declaration was published, Francis Collins, then the head of NIH, wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, who led America’s Covid response, warning that Great Barrington seemed “to be getting a lot of attention” and that “there needs to be a quick and devastating published take-down of its premises”. Bhattacharya, Gupta and Kulldorf, he sneered, were “fringe epidemiologists”.

Collins seemed to be casting himself as the infallible pope of science and Jay Bhattacharya was the heretic who must be burnt at the stake. Well, from next week, that heretic takes the pope’s job. Karma rarely gets much sweeter.

Five years on, Americans are getting to grips with the fact that Great Barrington was pretty much spot on, and the lawsuits are flying. Lockdown has indeed had horrific and indelible consequences. We can all see that, can’t we? Developmental delay in infants, a mental health epidemic, poorer exam results, lethal waiting lists for hospitals which closed their doors to non-Covid cases, a spike in avoidable cancer deaths, difficulty coaxing people back to work, not to mention economic catastrophe (a deafening £450 billion was printed to pay for furlough, PPE and other measures. On this the British political class are silent).

In the US the reckoning is huge. The guilty men are being named and the former heretic Bhattacharya is elevated to the highest office. But here in the UK we are still mired in delusion and denial.

Take Sunday, which is the official Covid Day of Reflection. It’s billed as “an opportunity to come together to remember those who lost their lives since the pandemic began and to honour the tireless work and acts of kindness shown during this unprecedented time”. The heart sinks. While those who lost loved ones to Covid deserve our sympathy, many who died were already in God’s waiting room and could just as easily have been carried off by flu. The day sounds like another opportunity to wallow in soft-focus sadness when what is called for is a tough, hard-headed appraisal of how our pandemic response led to tragic consequences for the living, and what we must avoid – like the plague, funnily enough – in future. We do not need a day of quiet reflection: Britons should look back in anger.

In stark contrast to the US’s determined uncovering of pandemic mistakes and lies, the UK’s Covid Inquiry, led by Baroness Heather Hallett, seems glacial, myopic, evasive and absurdly expensive (it’s on track to cost more than £200 million, although some say half a billion is more realistic, with a stupefying £55 million set to be squandered on up to 150 lawyers).

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