BEN KINGSLEY AND MOLLY KINGSLEY

Module Four of the Covid Inquiry has just ended. Its brief and highly-curated existence has confirmed for us all that not only is the inquiry studiously avoiding any confrontation with the most contentious issues of the Covid period, it also appears knowingly to be facilitating the creation of a false record of some core aspects of that period.

It has been conspicuous for some time that the inquiry is determined to swerve topics such as the harm versus benefit equation for lockdowns; the integrity of the vaccine trials; the net benefit, safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccines; the ethics of vaccinating children for the benefit of adults; the role of censorship, propaganda and coercion; and relatedly, the manifest absence of informed consent in the Covid vaccination programme.

All of these critical topics have either been sidestepped or ruled beyond the scope of the inquiry. More corrosively, though, in a number of ways the inquiry appears to be allowing and at times even encouraging the creation of a false record.

Rubber-stamping rather than interrogating complex topics

There are some issues which, although technically within scope for the inquiry, have been given only a superficial airing with no meaningful scrutiny.

Two striking examples concern the role of ethics in decision-making and the Government’s decision to roll out the Covid vaccine to children.

The topics of ethics and ethical frameworks have been referenced only briefly and in passing throughout the inquiry to date, but the questions posed in Module Four conspicuously have failed even to scratch the surface of the many serious ethical violations involved in the vaccine rollout process, including coercive policies, the frustration of informed consent and medicating children to mitigate a policy decision (not a medical decision) to close schools.

Indeed, across all four modules to date, the inquiry has failed to ask a single question about the fact that official meeting records of the Government’s expert ethics advisory committee (MEAG) show that its criticisms of key policies, including in summer 2021 when plans to vaccinate healthy children against Covid came to a head, were suppressed or ignored before the committee was abruptly demobilised.

Likewise, the highly unorthodox and unprecedented decision of the Chief Medical Officers in September 2021 to approve the mass vaccination of children over the heads of the JCVI has been mentioned only so that it could be rubber-stamped by the inquiry as necessary and uncontroversial. The Inquiry would have us believe that there is nothing to see, no questions to be asked of these highly consequential events. That is manifestly not the case.

Establishing flawed presumptions

The inquiry has itself created – and has allowed witnesses to buttress – flawed evidential presumptions that in some cases go to the very heart of the issues that ought to be investigated if meaningful lessons are to be learned. For example, at the outset of Module Four, Hugo Keith KC anchored all of his subsequent interrogations with a series of highly-contested or outright fallacious assertions, including these (emphasis added):

“The overall process by which the MHRA ensured that… all of the vaccines authorised [by it for temporary emergency use]… were effective and acceptably safe, was no different in substance to the process that would have applied had those applications been made… for full marketing authorisations.”

“The absolutely clear expert opinion of the [single expert] instructed by the inquiry… is that the vaccines, those three COVID-19 vaccines, were entirely effective.”

“My Lady, empirically, it is beyond argument that vaccinated people were far less likely to get COVID-19 with symptoms.”

“I must emphasise the rarity, more often the extreme rarity, of the serious adverse effects that were suffered, and the fact that the figures demonstrate beyond any doubt that the life-saving benefits of the UK COVID-19 vaccines vastly outweighed the very rare risk of a serious side-effect.”

Though the inquiry had declared at the outset that it was not competent to address questions of the safety or risk-benefit of the Covid vaccines, instead of not taking a position on these important and contentious topics, the inquiry has presumed, or allowed to be presumed, answers which only support the official narrative — such as that the Covid vaccines were entirely effective.

This matters greatly because, self-evidently, conclusions reached on the basis of a false or unreliable presumption are themselves unreliable and quite possibly false.

It would be as if the Post Office Inquiry had started its process by stating a presumption that the Horizon system was entirely reliable, and that any errors could only have been the result of extremely rare glitches: clearly, such an assumption would have undermined the entirety of the inquiry’s subsequent interrogation of the evidence.

Failing to contemplate uncomfortable realities

There are areas in which the inquiry has been undeniably one-sided or partisan in its outlook. This has been very evident in its consideration of the effects of mis- and dis-information on the vaccination programme.

The inquiry has anchored its analysis with a presumption that it was only commentary challenging official public health messages or critical of the Government’s policy decisions that was capable of being mis- or dis-information. It has not even contemplated the uncomfortable possibility that mis- and dis-information might have originated with vaccine manufacturers, public health officials or the Government.

This alarming myopia — whether negligent or intentional — is all the more striking when one considers that, since 2020, there have been a staggering 16 adverse regulatory judgments (at least) against the main UK Covid vaccine manufacturers in relation to their vaccine products, with the industry regulator, the PMCPA, publishing a litany of damning findings including that manufacturers have:

• propagated misleading information and made unsubstantiated claims about the safety of their Covid vaccines;
• published misleading information about the efficacy of those vaccines;
• promoted unlicensed uses of those vaccines; and
• paid unlawful financial inducements to promote their vaccines.

Leaving false or misleading evidence unchallenged

The inquiry has, we believe, also allowed witnesses knowingly or recklessly to record false evidence. This is a serious allegation, but one which appears to be supported by the transcripts. To give just two examples:

Hugo Keith KC asked a series of leading questions to Professor Lim Wei Shen KBE, the Acting Chair of the JCVI during the Covid period, on the topic of the JCVI’s controversial decision to not recommend vaccination for 12 to 15 year olds in September 2021.

Hugo Keith: And so in that risk-benefit analysis, as you said earlier, between the marginal benefits of vaccination against the very rare but not to be ignored risk of myocarditis, was it a more difficult balance to draw?

Witness: It was a very difficult balance, a hugely fine balance, quite unlike the balance of an older person who might have an adverse effect from vaccination.

Hugo Keith: Do you also consider in the balance, health inequalities, Long Covid, the impact on mental health of children and young persons of being vaccinated or not being vaccinated, as well as the ethics?

Witness: Correct. We consider all those things.

Those leading questions elicited a definitive confirmation that the JCVI considered, among other things, the ethics of extending the vaccination programme to children. This appears flatly to contradict official records both of the JCVI’s meetings to discuss the vaccination of 12 to 15 year olds (which are extensive but contain not one mention of ethics) and of an earlier JCVI meeting (held on May 7th 2020) which had discussed the role of MEAG and ethics, and recorded that:

The Committee agreed that JCVI advice would be based on scientific principles from the available scientific evidence and this would not include detailed ethical considerations which were for DHSC to consider, informed by MEAG.

And on the same topic of the Covid vaccine’s rollout to children, when explaining the CMOs decision to proceed with the rollout, Sir Chris Whitty had earlier misdescribed the JCVI’s advice as characterising the risks of vaccinating children aged 12 to 15 as being “even smaller” than the marginal benefits at an individual child level.

What the JCVI in fact had said — and it seems highly improbable that both Chris Whitty and the inquiry’s lawyers had not read that advice in preparing for his evidence session — was that “the [JCVI] is of the opinion that the benefits from vaccination are marginally greater than the potential known harms but acknowledges that there is considerable uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the potential harms” (emphasis added).

In each of these situations a witness has been allowed by the inquiry to carelessly or knowingly give flawed or false evidence to the inquiry in relation to a critical safeguarding matter of significant public interest. These are but two examples of a growing list that we are compiling.

Prohibiting inconvenient questions – and answers

At many times throughout its hearings to date, including during Module Four, the inquiry has tightly controlled the proceedings and appears to have prohibited inconvenient questions from being asked, or answers given.

It was conspicuous, for example, that when AstraZeneca was called to give oral evidence, not one of the core participants had been given time to ask questions — are we to believe that none had any questions?

Two stark examples of the latter, both concerning topics of significant relevance for the inquiry, occurred in relation to the topics of lockdown harms and benefits and censorship.

When in Module Two Rishi Sunak MP, at the time Prime Minister, broached the subject of a QALY (quality adjusted life years) analysis of the first lockdown and commented that the lockdown “in its severity and duration was likely to have generated costs that are greater than the likely benefit”, he was immediately closed down by Hugo Keith KC, who replied that “we’re not interested in QALYs”.

Similarly, when Michael Gove MP in the same module attempted to raise the question of the lab leak theory, saying “there is a significant body of judgement that believes that the virus itself was man-made”, he was promptly cut off by Hugo Keith KC who intervened, bluntly: “It forms no part of the terms of reference of this inquiry to address that somewhat divisive issue, so we’re not going to go there.”

Conclusions

Module Four has perhaps more than any other module so far revealed the flaws which permeate this inquiry and which will compromise almost any finding it may ultimately make.

Imagine a Post Office Inquiry in which, in addition to assuming at the outset that the Horizon IT system had been infallible, the Chair ruled as off-limits any questioning of the reliability of that IT system; in which anyone who had historically questioned the reliability of the system, or the motivations of Post Office executives and prosecutors, was presumed to be an irredeemable spreader of disinformation; in which examples of false evidence were allowed to become embedded as a matter of public record; and in which lawyers for the sub-postmasters were not permitted an opportunity to pose questions to Fujitsu executives.

Yet this bizarrely Kafkaesque image reflects the reality of the Covid Inquiry. Not only can we not hope to learn lessons of any value from a public inquiry so lacking in curiosity and critical thinking, and so beset by fanatical adherence to a pre-conceived story of the UK’s Covid experience, but in allowing inaccurate testimony to stand unchallenged and by promoting flawed and false presumptions, the inquiry will create a false record that risks distorting public health policy for decades.

Molly Kingsley is a founder and Ben Kingsley is the Head of Legal Affairs at children’s rights campaign group UsForThem. Find UsForThem on Substack.

Via The Daily Sceptic