{"id":2511920,"date":"2025-11-23T07:01:43","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T12:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/?p=2511920"},"modified":"2025-11-23T09:53:33","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T14:53:33","slug":"theyve-learned-nothing-because-that-would-expose-too-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/2025\/11\/23\/theyve-learned-nothing-because-that-would-expose-too-much\/","title":{"rendered":"They\u2019ve Learned Nothing \u2014 Because That Would Expose Too Much"},"content":{"rendered":"

They\u2019ve Learned Nothing \u2014 Because That Would Expose Too Much<\/a>
\nby Roger Bate<\/a> at Brownstone Institute<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has finally released the core political chapters of its long-awaited report. After nearly three years of hearings, millions of documents, and tens of millions of pounds spent on legal fees, the conclusion is now unmistakably clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They\u2019ve learned nothing, as I detail in my latest research<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worse, they may not want<\/em> to learn. The Inquiry\u2019s structure, its analytical frame, even its carefully curated narrative all point in the same direction: away from the possibility that Britain\u2019s pandemic response was fundamentally misguided, and toward the politically safer claim that ministers simply \u201cacted too late.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On November 20, 2025, Jay Bhattacharya captured this perfectly in a single sentence on X: \u201cFact check; not locking down at all (like Sweden) would have saved lives in UK. Hard to believe how much money the UK spent on its sham covid inquiry.\u201d<\/strong> That tweet was provocative\u2014but it was also accurate in its diagnosis of the Inquiry\u2019s deeper pathologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Inquiry\u2019s Central Mistake: Asking the Wrong Question<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

From the outset, the Inquiry has framed Britain\u2019s pandemic response as a timing problem. Lockdowns were assumed to be necessary and effective; the only question was whether politicians implemented them quickly enough. The result is a dry recitation of process failures and personality clashes inside Downing Street, all of which are said to have delayed the inevitable \u201cstay-at-home\u201d order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that framing was never neutral. It was baked into the Inquiry\u2019s analytical choices\u2014especially its uncritical reliance on the same family of models that drove the UK into lockdown in March 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The centerpiece of that modeling tradition is Imperial College London\u2019s Report 9, the document that forecast hundreds of thousands of UK deaths absent stringent lockdowns. That report assumed near-homogeneous mixing, limited voluntary behavior change, and high fatality rates across the population. Under those assumptions, lockdown becomes not a political choice but a mathematical necessity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Inquiry has now rerun the same machinery and, unsurprisingly, produced the same conclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its headline claim\u2014that delaying lockdown by a week caused roughly 23,000 additional deaths\u2014is not a historical finding. It is not based on observational data. It is simply the output of an Imperial-style model with a different start date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Inquiry has restated the model, not tested it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Evidence They Chose Not to See<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The Inquiry\u2019s blindness becomes fully apparent when we ask the obvious comparative question: if the lockdown paradigm were correct, what would we expect to see among countries that refused to lock down?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We would expect chaos. We would expect mass hospital collapse. We would expect mortality catastrophes to dwarf the UK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We would expect, in short, to see Sweden in ruins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, we see the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sweden kept primary schools open, avoided stay-at-home orders, relied heavily on voluntary behavior, and preserved civil liberties throughout the pandemic. After correcting early care-home errors, Sweden recorded one of the lowest age-adjusted excess mortality rates in Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Swedish experience is not a footnote. It is not an \u201cexception.\u201d It is the control case\u2014the real-world test of the lockdown paradigm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it falsifies it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A serious Inquiry would have begun with Sweden. It would have asked why a country that rejected lockdowns achieved better mortality outcomes than Britain while preserving education, normal life, and basic freedoms. It would have integrated that evidence into every chapter. It would have examined whether voluntary behavior changes, targeted protection, and risk-based messaging can substitute for mass coercion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, Sweden is barely mentioned. When it appears at all, it is described as an anomaly. The Inquiry behaves as though Sweden is politically inconvenient\u2014not analytically essential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Modeling Was Wrong. The Inquiry Can\u2019t Admit It.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

If the Inquiry were genuinely interested in learning, it would examine whether the models that drove the UK\u2019s response were flawed. It would review the assumptions underpinning Report 9. It would test them against real-world data from multiple countries. It would commission adversarial modeling groups. It would bring in critics. It would examine alternative frameworks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It did none of these things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The behavior of the public is a perfect example. Imperial-style models assume that people remain near-normal in their social contacts without legal mandates. But mobility data, workplace activity, and school attendance show that Britons began adjusting their behavior weeks before Boris Johnson held the lockdown press conference. High-risk individuals adapted earliest. Businesses reacted to perceived risks earlier than the state. Families responded faster than the Cabinet Office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The models were wrong about behavior. Yet the Inquiry\u2019s analysis still treats people as if they only respond to orders, not information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result is a fantasy counterfactual: a Britain that would have carried on as normal in March 2020 had the government not intervened. That Britain never existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where Is the Cost\u2013Benefit Analysis?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The Inquiry promised to evaluate the \u201crelative benefits and disbenefits\u201d of non-pharmaceutical interventions. It has not done so. There is no integrated accounting of:<\/p>\n\n\n\n