If they "followed the science" and "got all the big calls right"

[verdantverdure]

And protected the people of Britain, and our economy...

Then Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock and all the Cabinet Ministers of the Conservative government since 2019 have nothing to hide

And can hand over any and all communications to the Covid Inquiry.

Exactly this

I am no fan of the government and really want the enquiry to dig deep and expose the issues

But even on here you can easily see the opposite opinions, united in their hatred of the government but totally opposite views as to what should have happened instead.....

And this is why I think the enquiry will ultimately achieve nothing. As I said above...there was a strand of opinion that the whole deal was overplayed, that chris whitty et al were bumbling left wing technocrats who didnt know there job. There was another strand of opinion that government wasn't doing enough....nobody should be allowed out of the house to meet anyone etc etc etc.

In these days of social media the two camps basically retreated to their own echo chambers.

If you look back on AIDS in the early 80s, many of the same things emerged. HIV denialism was pretty big. The Daily Telegraph opposed the idea that HIV caused AIDS for years. The South African government refused to accept the idea and so refused all aid based on anti retroviral drugs. As far as they were concerned it was all just a conspiracy driven by Western capitalists. That view cost at least 300000 lives. Toby Young's right wing online publication Quillette ran at least one article in 2020 which restated HIV denialism, and maintained that the current epidemic was just another left wing plot.

The obvious difference is that aids occured before social media!

If the Covid Inquiry can't achieve anything because it was all unknown then there's even less reason for the British government to refuse to comply with British law and hand over the evidence to the Inquiry they set up.

"Party of fiscal responsibility"

There was one instance where the science (and medical view) was followed, the order of vaccinations and who went first for their vaccine.

I'd say 99% of the big calls they either got wrong or decided too late to have the maximum impact.

I'd be OK with not handing over all phones and information yet, whilst the criminal trials that should take place happen. Corporate manslaughter, corruption, misconduct in a public office, health and safety breaches, for example.

My arse!

@TooBigForMyBoots

I'd be surprised if anybody was in favour of bypassing established providers to give inflated contracts for testing and PPE to mates of the government in return for substandard goods and services.

I think almost everyone would agree on that.

Profiteering in a pandemic is never a good look, but the fact that it materially affected the country's pandemic response, and caused more lives to be lost is a whole extra layer of wrongness.

All but the most partisan supporters of the government must agree, surely?

Are they still using the phrase 'followed the science' now? That alone is reason for them all to lose their seats at the next GE, frankly. There was never one unified 'the science' when it came to covid, couldn't possibly be, because pandemic management inherently involves value judgements about who and what to prioritise.

Either way though you're obviously right about the messages OP. The bit about privacy concerns is particularly pathetic. If politicians are worried about that, they shouldn't conduct government business on their personal What's Apps.

When someone says ‘follow the science’, just check what other science they are into. Usually these same patronizing, condescending proponents of ‘the science’ are the ones who also believe that women can have a penis.

These are the ONS Covid death figures for the summer period

https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/covid19deathsresultingfromtheeatouttohelpoutscheme

Not sure I would want to live my work life in a goldfish bowl where every decision I took, everything I did was scrutinised to the nth degree.

But this seems to be the kind of society we are moving to.

What it will do is hamper peoples ability to operate, to the point that their output is far lower, because they will spend 90% of the time thinking about how stuff they say in private might actually be used against them, and 10% of the time actually dealing with the problem at hand.

So basically, if we want politicians to be more self serving, more grey, more constant arse covering, more unwilling to take any sort of position other than a completely neutral one, this is exactly the way to go about doing it.

Not sure I would want to live my work life in a goldfish bowl where every decision I took, everything I did was scrutinised to the nth degree.

Being in government probably isn't for you then.

I agree!
Power corrupts, people who seek it and people who have it are extremely prone to behaving corruptly and therefore need to be scrutinized constantly.
We should take it as a given that those who have wealth and power will do whatever they can get away with to hold on to and further that wealth and power- therefore they need to be constantly under the spotlight 🔦

Following the science is now under debate though. John Hopkins has just completed a meta analysis of the worldwide responses to COVID. The unfortunate truth is that lockdowns didn't work, didn't reduce deaths, and that the costs to the economy, our childrens education, mental wellbeing, and to general health outcomed, will last a generation. Fab.

Yet anyone who questioned the efficacy of lockdowns back then or even until recently was labelled a conspiracy theorist.

Because the science was wrong. Or misused. Perhaps people should remember that on the next topic where they are told to follow the science.

The trouble is that most people have no idea how hard it is to run a country! Politicians are humans and humans make mistakes. Sadly, in our social media-biased world, anything can be taken out of context, blown up, and presented as 'the truth'. No wonder they want to keep some of their conversations private.

BTW, I would be in favour of a COVID enquiry - if, and only if, it was to learn what we could do better next time - NOT if all it does is assign blame. Which, sadly, this enquiry will.

Again though, people who feel like this aren't suited to being in government. We have legal requirements about scrutiny, openness and disclosure. Which despite some of the dafter arguments otherwise, are a good thing. They're not optional. It's fucking ludicrous to argue that people are right to ignore their legal obligations after the fact because they've decided the rules shouldn't apply to them.

These are some of the questions asked, surely you want answers to them?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1664326476273991680.html

I'd like to know what the plan was from May - November 2020. Apparently, a vaccine was way off, were they just hoping something would turn up?

My suspicion is that they knew a vaccine was likely ahead of where the admitted publicly, that would have been the only justification for restrictions in that period.

The Matt Hancock whatsapps seem to show that the government were more worried about being seen to be doing something than actually doing something.

Responsibility

Accountability

Transparency

Not "blame".

The Nightingales were the ultimate in "being sen to be doing something"

Where is this? I cant find anything but the one that came out early in 2022.

Not sure that it would actually be for anyone given how little they are paid and that at every point in time they are one utterance or text away from ending their career.