From folder 1 of the corona dossier: The Substantiation of the Lockdowns

Halfway through 2020, after the first startle reflexes, it was time to make policy, also in the United Kingdom. Rishi Sunak, candidate to succeed Boris Johnson, opens a book about how that policy came about. Below (translated) his candid interview in The Spectator and the reaction to it from Lord Sumption, former Supreme Court judge. Robbert Dijkgraaf has to think again about his proposal for the walling of Science™. Hopefully, this English oil slick will spread across Europe. There are other folders in that file.

Directly to the short summary discussion with explanation of Lord Sumption

The lockdown files: Rishi Sunak on what we weren't told

From The Spectator of 27 August 2022
author: Fraser Nelson

When Britain was shut down, the country was assured that all risks had been properly and thoroughly considered. Yes, schools would close and education would suffer. Normal health care would take a hit and people would die as a result. But the government repeatedly said the experts had looked at all of this. Surely it wasn't that they would lock us up without seriously weighing the consequences?

Those consequences are still being felt: the madness of the exams, the huge increase in waiting lists in the NHS, thousands of unexplained "deaths with a surplus", judicial backlog and economic chaos. Was that all expected, factored in, and seen by the leaders as a price worth paying? Already at the beginning of the lockdown, ministers began to worry that the policy was being implemented recklessly without anyone thinking about the side effects. Only a handful of key players at the top made the decisions: among them Rishi Sunak, the chancellor. He has now decided to make public what happened.

When we meet in the office he has rented for his leadership campaign, which will soon enter the final week, he immediately says that he is not interested in pointing out the fiercest supporters of lockdown. Nobody knew anything at first, he says: lockdown was necessarily a gamble. Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, the chief medical officer and chief scientific adviser, openly admitted that lockdown could do more harm than good. But when the evidence began to roll in, a strange silence arose in the government: dissent was filtered out and a "see no evil" policy was applied.

Sunak's story begins with the first Covid meeting, where ministers were shown an A3 poster from scientific advisers explaining the options. I wish I had kept it, because there were things on it that had no effect: banning live events and stuff," he says. It said: you have to be careful not to do this kind of thing too early, because it is very difficult to sustain in a modern society. So the scientific advice was initially to reject or at least postpone lockdown.

This all changed when Neil Ferguson and his team from Imperial College published their famous "Report 9", which stated that the number of victims of the Covid could reach 500,000 if no action was taken – but that the number could be less than 20,000 if Britain applied the "lockdown". That, of course, turned out to be a huge exaggeration of the lockdown's ability to limit the number of Covid deaths. Imperial stressed that it has "not taken into account the wider social and economic costs of oppression, which will be high". But someone involved in policy-making would find out anyway.

If an open discussion was suppressed to the outside world, Sunak found it all the more important that it also took place internally. But that was not his experience. "I felt like no one was talking," he says. We didn't talk at all about missed [doctors] appointments, or the backlog that was massively emerging in the NHS. That was never the case. When he did try to express his concern, he ran into a wall. Those meetings were literally me around that table, just fighting. It was incredibly uncomfortable every time. He remembers a meeting where he talked about education. I was very emotional about it. I was like, "Forget the economy. Surely we can all agree that kids who don't go to school is a big nightmare" or something like that. There was a great silence afterwards. It was the first time anyone said that. I was so furious.

One of Sunak's biggest concerns was the fear message, which his Treasury team said could have long-lasting consequences. In every letter, we tried to say, let's stop the "fear" story. It was always wrong from the beginning. I constantly said it was wrong. According to him, the posters with Covid patients on the ventilator were the worst. It was wrong to scare people like that. The closest he came to defying this was in a speech in September 2020 in which he said it was time to learn to "live without fear" – a direct response to the Cabinet Office's reporting. They were very angry about that.

His Eat Out to Help Out campaign was intended as an optimistic counterargument. 'The survey data across Europe showed that our country had by far the least chance of returning to normal. Everything indicated that everyone was too afraid to do things again. We have a consumption-driven economy, so that would be very bad. And it was. The UK suffered the worst economic downturn in Europe.

Lockdown – closing schools and much of the economy while police were sent after people sitting on park benches – was the most draconian policy introduced in peacetime. No. 10 wanted to present the policy as "according to science" rather than a political decision, and this had consequences for the wiring of government decision-making. It meant that Sage, a wide-ranging group of scientific advisers, was elevated to a committee that could decide whether or not to shut down the country. There was no socio-economic equivalent for Sage; no forum where other questions would be asked.

The person who wrote the minutes of the Sage meetings — and summarized the discussions into guidelines for the government — determined the country's policy. No one, not even cabinet members, would know how these decisions came about.

In the early days, Sunak had an advantage. "The Sage people didn't realize for a long time that there was a Treasure Chest person on all their phone calls. A lovely lady. She was great because it meant sitting there and listening to their discussions.

It meant that he was alerted early on to the fact that these all-important minutes of Sage meetings often omitted dissenting voices. His mole, he says, would tell him, "Well, actually, it turns out that a lot of people disagreed with that conclusion," or "Here are the reasons why they weren't sure." This way I could at least enter these meetings better armed.

But his victories were scarce and far apart. He scored one victory in May 2020, when the first plans were forged to go out of lockdown in the summer. There's some language in it that you'll see because I fought for it," he says. There was talk of non-Covid health effects.' It's just a few sentences, he says, but he considers the fact that the side effects of the lockdown were recognized at all at the time as a triumph.

He doesn't mention Matt Hancock, who presided over all of this as Health Secretary, or Liz Truss, who kept quiet. As he said at the beginning, he does not want to name names, but clearly tells what the public has not been told – and what process has led to it. Normally, he said, ministers are shown Sage analyses pointing to horrific "scenarios" that would unfold if Britain did not impose or extend the lockdown. But even he, as chancellor, could not figure out how these all-important scenarios were calculated.

"I was like, 'Summarize for me the most important assumptions, on one page, with a lot of sensitivities and reasons for each assumption,'" Sunak says. In the first year, I could never get this. The Treasury Department, he says, would never recommend policies based on unexplained models: he viewed this as a matter of basic competence. But for a year, the UK government's policies – and the fate of millions – were determined by half-finished graphs devised by external academics.

This is the problem," he says. If you give all these independent people power, you are the bobbin. Sir Gus O'Donnell, the former cabinet secretary, has suggested that Sage should have been asked to report to a higher committee, which should have considered the social and economic aspects of incarceration. Sunak agrees. But because Sage was anointed from the beginning, that retained his power until the uprising that came last Christmas.

When the Omicron variant started to rise last December, the dance started again. A Sage analysis stated that without a fourth lockdown, Covid deaths could reach up to 6,000 per day. That was a factor of 20 too high. But we only know that because for once the government rejected Sage's advice. This time, Sunak himself made inquiries – including with academics at Stanford University, where he had received his education, and with his former colleagues in finance who had started with Covid models. Crucially, JP Morgan used South African data on Omicron to suggest that UK hospitals would not be overrun – contrary to Sage's predictions.

I'm still on jp morgan research's [email] list," he says. It gives me a bit of a different perspective. In the case of Omicron, if that very different perspective was correct, then each of the 12 Sage scenarios provided to the ministers was a huge exaggeration and Britain would be unnecessarily locked up. Still, the wheels were already in motion, Sunak says. They had already had a briefing that there would be a press conference. The system was started up, as it were.

He flew back early from a trip to California. By this time, JP Morgan's lockdown analysis was being mailed around among cabinet ministers like a samizdat paper, and they were ready to revolt. Sunak met Johnson. I simply told him that it is not right: we should not do this. He did not threaten to resign if there was another lockdown, "but I used the closest wording of words I could" to imply that threat. Sunak then called other ministers around and compared notes.

Normally, cabinet members were not kept informed of the decisions made in relation to the Covid – Johnson's number 10 informed them afterwards, rather than consulting them. Sunak says he urged the prime minister to pass the decision on to the cabinet so that his colleagues could give him political backing for rejecting Sage's advice. I remember telling him: let the cabinet meet. You'll see. Everyone will be fully behind you... You don't have to worry. I'll be standing next to you, just like any other member of the cabinet, except probably Michael [Gove] and Saj [Javid]. As it turns out.

Is Sunak exaggerating his own role? For what it's worth, his account is consistent with what I've picked up from his critics in government: that the money-hungry Sunak was on a one-man mission to torpedo lockdown. And maybe the prime minister too. Everything I did was seen through the prism of, "You're trying to be hard, trying to be a leader," he says. He did not try to challenge the prime minister in public, or leave a paper trail. I said a lot of things to him in private," he says. There is a written record of everything. In general, people leak it – and that causes problems.

At any time, Sunak could have come out — or even resigned. I ask him if he should have done that. Resigning such a feat during a pandemic, he says, would have been irresponsible. And going public, or expressing his doubts, would have been interpreted as a direct attack on the prime minister. At the time, No. 10's strategy was to give the impression that lockdown was a science-based policy that only lunatics dared to question. If it were to leak out that the Chancellor had serious reservations, or that a cost-benefit analysis had never been carried out, that would not have been politically convenient for No. 10.

Only now can Sunak speak freely. He opens his mouth, not only because he is a candidate for the premiership, he says, but because there are important lessons to be learned from all this. Not who did anything wrong, but how it could have happened that such important questions about the profound consequences of the lockdown – issues that are likely to dominate politics for years to come – have never been properly investigated.

We were elected to run the country, not to blame anyone else. If the device is not there, we will change it. If things are going well, he says, "it's because the person at the top is able to make good decisions – and understands how to make good decisions.".

And that, of course, is his ultimate point: "The leader is important. It matters who the person at the top is. It is the reason why he eventually resigned, and part of his plea to become leader of the Conservative party. He says ministers should be honest about the downside of any policy (including tax cuts), and that denial always makes things worse.

And the other lessons of the lockdown? We shouldn't have given the scientists any power in the way we did," he says. And you have to recognize from the beginning that compromises have to be made. If we had done all that, we would have been in a very different position now. How else? Then we would probably have made different decisions about things like schools, for example. Could a more frank discussion have helped Britain avoid the lockdown altogether, as Sweden has done? I don't know, but it could have been shorter. Otherwise. Faster.

There is one important factor he does not mention: the opinion polls. In March 2020, lockdowns were imposed around the world and the prime minister was already accused of having blood on his hands for not intervening earlier. Whoever was in No. 10 would surely be forced to shut things down by public opinion? But the public, Sunak says, was terrified, while being left in the dark about the -likely- consequences of the lockdown. We helped determine that: with the fear messages, empowering the scientists and not talking about the interaction.

Those trade-offs are clear. At first, no one asked what all those cancelled NHS appointments would mean. When the answer came, it was devastating: a waiting list that is expected to grow from six million now to nine million in 2024. Preventable cancer deaths due to late diagnosis will run into the thousands. Then there is the economic impact. We have a shortage of 300,000 to 400,000 [workers]," he says. That's a problem. Some 5.3 million people have unemployment benefits and many people over the age of fifty stop working altogether: a trend that, according to Sunak, was only noticed "when it was already too late".

Even now, Sunak doesn't claim that the lockdown was a mistake — just that the many disadvantages to health, the economy and society in general could have been mitigated if they had been openly discussed. An official investigation has been launched, but Sunak says there are lessons to be learned now. The emergence of another Covid variant (or another new pathogen) may one day lead to calls for a new lockdown. One of the questions will be how to protect democratic control in a future crisis – how to ensure that policies are vigorously questioned and tested, even when it is appropriate for the government to suppress the debate.

According to Sunak, this was the problem that was central to the government's response to the crisis: a lack of openness. They failed to ask difficult questions about where all this might lead – and they tended to use fear-mongering to nip the debate in the bud, rather than encourage discussion. So in one sentence: how else would he have handled the pandemic? I would have just had a more mature conversation with the country.

Fraser Nelson is editor of The Spectator

Little by little, the truth about the lockdown is being admitted: it was a disaster

The public's fear was deliberately stoked to justify decisions made on the spot based on questionable advice.

By Lord Jonathan Sumption, former Supreme Court Judge
Sunday 28 August 2022, 12.01pm BST, The Sunday Times

Lockdown was an extreme and unprecedented response to an old problem, the challenge of an epidemic disease. It was also something else. It marked one of the most serious governmental errors of modern times. In a remarkably candid interview with The Spectator, Rishi Sunak drew attention to the superficiality of the decision-making process of which he himself was a part. The fundamental rule of good government is not to make radical decisions without understanding the likely consequences. That seems obvious. Yet it is at that most fundamental level that the Johnson government failed. The tragedy is that this is only now being recognised.

Sunak makes three important points. First, the scientific advice was more ambiguous and inconsistent than the government showed. Some of it was based on questionable assumptions that have never been properly researched. Some of it fell apart as soon as it was challenged from outside the groupthink of Sage's advisory body. Secondly, in order to gain support, the government has stoked fears by setting up a manipulative advertising campaign and by supporting extravagant graphs that pointed to an uncontrolled rise in the death rate if we were not locked up. Third, the government not only ignored the catastrophic collateral damage of the lockdown, but also actively discouraged its discussion, both in the government and in its public coverage.

Lockdown was a policy devised in the early days by China and the World Health Organization as a way to completely suppress the virus (the so-called zero Covid). The WHO quickly abandoned this unrealistic ambition. But European countries, with the exception of Sweden, eagerly embraced the lockdown, tearing apart a decade of pandemic planning that was based on focusing aid on vulnerable groups and avoiding coercion.
At first, Britain resisted the stampede. Then professor Neil Ferguson's team from Imperial College London published the infamous "Report 9". Sunak confirms that this panicked the ministers to a measure that the scientists had previously rejected. If No 10 had studied the underlying assumptions, it might have been less impressed. Report 9 assumed that in the absence of a lockdown, people would do nothing to protect themselves. This was contrary to all experience with human behaviour and to the data available at the time, which showed that people voluntarily restricted their contacts well before the announcement of the lockdown.

And, as noted in Report 9, the lockdown would not destroy the virus. It would come back as soon as the restrictions were lifted. The policy therefore only made sense as an emergency solution until the arrival of an effective vaccine, which at that time would take another 18 months.

It was always clear that you could not close a country for months without serious consequences. The shocking thing that emerges from Sunak's interview is that the government refused to take that into account. There was no evaluation of the expected side costs of the lockdown. There was no cost-benefit analysis. There was no planning. It wasn't even talked about in the government. Sunak's own attempts to raise them failed on a wall. Ministers resorted to evasive behaviour, claiming that they were "following the science".

Yet the critical question was never a scientific question. It was a political issue, in which the likely hospitalizations and deaths from Covid were just one element. The scientists said it wasn't their job to think about the social or economic implications of their advice. They were right. The problem was that it turned out to be no one else's job.

We are still paying for this negligence, and our children and grandchildren will pay for it for decades to come. In 2020, UK GDP fell by nearly a tenth, the biggest blow to the economy in at least a century. According to estimates by the Ministry of Finance, 460,000 people have left the workforce never to return. The policy has placed a heavy burden on public finances. The IMF estimates that government spending has increased by more than £400 billion, or around £6,000 for every man, woman and child. Most of these were unproductive expenses. People were paid for not working and companies were supported for having to cease operations. At one point, in the spring of 2020, the government spent about twice as much on compensating for the lockdown as it did on the NHS. Loans rose to 330 billion pounds, a peacetime record.

Then there are the non-financial costs. Other deadly conditions were undiagnosed and untreated. In October 2020, after four months of lockdown, the Office for National Statistics reported more than 25,000 deaths who died at home from conditions such as cancer, heart disease and dementia. A year after the end of the last lockdown, the NHS is still lagging far behind. The number of deaths, 95 percent of which are due to conditions other than Covid, rises to about 1,000 per week. There is a huge impact on mental health, with children and the poor being the hardest hit.

Children lost two terms of face-to-face education. The closure of schools, training institutes and universities has slowed the accumulation of skills and reduced productivity. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated the cost to the economy at £90 billion to £350 billion. The best-off, who have sufficient resources at home, are likely to recover. Those who are already disadvantaged will suffer permanent damage. Existing inequalities will become much greater.

The lockdown was an experiment in authoritarian governance that is unparalleled even in wartime. The government was not only given powers over the lives of citizens that it had never claimed before. In government, decision-making was concentrated in the hands of the Prime Minister, a man with notoriously poor judgment and little sense of detail. The cabinet was kept out of the picture until the very end. Discussion of fundamental issues was out of the question in the name of collective responsibility.

Sunak verwijt de regering hysterische berichtgeving aan het publiek voor het verergeren van de economische gevolgen van de lockdown. Andere landen hebben de angst bij het publiek niet op deze onverantwoorde manier aangewakkerd. Het heeft er volgens hem toe bijgedragen dat het herstel van het Verenigd Koninkrijk het traagste van Europa is. Dat is ongetwijfeld waar. Maar er is een ernstiger punt van kritiek. Angst is door de geschiedenis heen het belangrijkste instrument van autoritair bewind geweest. Tijdens de lockdown was dat wat de regering in staat stelde afwijkende meningen het zwijgen op te leggen en discussie te verhinderen.
Het resultaat illustreerde enkele van de slechtste kenmerken van een top-down regering. Het ontbreken van breder overleg en toezicht leidt ertoe dat beslissingen ter plekke worden genomen, zonder behoorlijke voorbedachtheid, planning of onderzoek. Het bevordert loyaliteit ten koste van wijsheid, en vleierij ten koste van objectief advies. Het moedigt overmoed aan en bant gematigdheid en terughoudendheid uit. Het was slechts de verzwakking van het politieke gezag van de premier na de affaire Owen Paterson die een slap kabinet moed gaf om hem en zijn wetenschappelijke adviseurs voor het eerst te overrulen in december vorig jaar, toen de NHS vreesde te worden overrompeld door de Omicron-variant.

Ministers en wetenschappers die verantwoordelijk zijn voor een beleid dat een hele bevolking onnoemelijk veel ellende heeft bezorgd, vinden het natuurlijk moeilijk om toe te geven dat ze het misschien bij het verkeerde eind hadden. Maar de rijen sluiten tegen het algemeen belang mislukt meestal uiteindelijk. Na deze onthullingen zullen er nog meer gênante onthullingen volgen. Het officiële verhaal begint te ontrafelen.

Lord Sumption is een voormalig Hoge Raad rechter