The Covid Inquiry.

There seems to be a concerted effort to conceal the decision making around the start of covid, which conveniently covers the period of awarding those huge covid PPE contracts.

It seems to be so blatant - surely to god not everyone involved in sending and receiving those messages has lost/wiped their phone. At what point does this failure to produce evidence to the enquiry become a crime?

The accidental WhatsApp /lost my phone scenario all over again?

There are many reasons most normal businesses use Outlook/teams etc.

As, if you have people doing business via essentially private text messages, there is no oversight or accountability for the company, or as is becoming apparent, no oversight at all in government.

Oops I lost my phone, oh well!

At what point does this failure to produce evidence to the enquiry become a crime?

I think it would have to be shown that they deliberately withheld evidence.  I mean we all know they did but proving it?  Very hard indeed

surely to god not everyone involved in sending and receiving those messages has lost/wiped their phone

Everyone involved has clearly systematically destroyed all record of their conversations

That is glaringly obvious and also clearly the reason they used this medium as the main source of their communications

Proving they did so is another matter

It’s all about ‘plausible deniability’, though I’d question if most people think ‘oops, sorry I accidentally deleted everything’ is remotely plausible, when it appears everyone did so?

I still find it really difficult to get my head around the fact that during a time of national emergency the government used an app people use to arrange pub meet ups or whatever to deal with it.

I'm guessing if we are involved in a global conflict again our response will be coordinated on Snapchat or something.

There is very little plausible about any of the covid inquiry. Nothing is going to come of it beyond rich lawyers

Nothing is going to come of it beyond rich lawyers

I genuinely hope that at least we end up with a better idea how to protect the population when the next one rolls around - which we won't be able to do if key information has been deliberately held back in order to cover up dodgy deals and profiteering.

I'm assuming the opposition are keen not to be seen to be making capital out of an ongoing process. Sadly

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-corporate-communication-channels-for-government-business

I wonder if there will be legal ramifications from people prosecuted under this wonderful piece of legislation

Continuing from my post in the other thread which was going off topic.

So far, from what I can see, the Covid Inquiry seems to be heading in the direction of a pre-determined outcome which is 'we didn't lock down soon enough'.  But why are they seemingly not asking the very important following questions:

1. Where did Covid-19 originate from and why was the lab leak theory (now regarded by many scientists, with the lack of any other credible evidence to the contrary, as the most likely) covered up?

2. Why was the Uk's thoroughly prepared and long established Pandemic Preparedness Plan abandoned at short notice in favour of a hastily assembled and untested lockdown policy?

3. Did the benefits of this lockdown policy outweigh the considerable costs and downsides?

4. Why was no impact assessment of the harms of lockdown policy (particularly for children), ever produced by the government or its advisers to aid decision making?

5. Why were highly divisive policies like mask mandates, vaccine passports etc. introduced despite there being little credible evidence of any efficacy in the real world?

6. Why was there such a high reliance placed on very speculative computer modelling to drive pandemic policy, rather than a higher emphasis placed on real world data.  Modelling I might add, that has subsequently turned out to have been wildly inaccurate - some would say total garbage.

There is loads more we need to ask, but rather than the current blame game and tittle-tattle of WhatsApp messages, surely the inquiry needs to look very thoroughly into the fairly basic stuff above as a matter of urgency.  Particularly to avoid making the same mistakes again when the next pandemic arrives.

thank you.

I'm guessing that you're not following the Covid enquiry directly? They're asking your questions of decision makers and their advisors.

I’m guessing that you’re not following the Covid enquiry directly? They’re asking your questions of decision makers and their advisors.

I don't believe they are.  Can you give me an example of where they have asked any of the questions I asked?

Believe what you want, but they are.

Any on ideas who our consiriacy theory peddling new friend is or was in a previous incarnation?

I think the may be a friend of a previous one. The writing style is different but the points being put forward are consistent with a banned user. If it's the one I'm thinking of them there is a slight overlap between them being banned and this new one so it could be a 'passing if the baton' so to speak.

Either way I just scroll past them.

Seems less likely to chuck the toys, call us all bedwetters and post porn than previous incarnations, but time will tell.

1

Its irrelevant

2

Quarantine has been an established and proven policy since the 14th century - theres nothing unproven about it, its pretty much the most proven public health policy and practice there is

3

The benefits did outweigh the costs, the costs to me were the people I loved who died, the benefits are the people I love who didnt die. the costs could have been lessened if the gov, no10 in particular hadn't ballsed it - by implementing policy belatedly we had the costs of lockdown and the costs of failing to lockdown. Staticically, if we'd followed the path of other countries who applied there lockdown more decisively and effectively the around two thirds of the people I've lost would still be alive.

4.

time - and its role in killing people in this instance

5

Masks have been implemented effectively since the plague, they're also quick, easy and cheap to implement. They only people who seem to struggle with them are very effective publically highlighting their own inadequacies. It's one conspiracy theory people literally had written on their face. A poor life choice that'll probably dog relationships, friendships and career prospects for the rest of their lives. Which is a shame.

6.

You don't care about the answer. You just like questions (that you are just reading a repeating) that make you feel important

Is alex22 a John Campbell puppet account?

I assumed it was Andrew Bridgen

I think they're reasonable questions to ask, as said above some have already been answered.

Reasonable questions eh? We can all do that - just getting a point across, nobody needs to feel targetted or the need or reply to the following:

What nationality are you ?

What was your last pseudo on this site ?

Do you feel guilty about voting for right wing populists?

Do you really believe the stuff you type?

How much are you being paid for posting on this forum?

What sort of toy drone do you pilot?

What are your views on leavers who abuse their pets/spouse/children?

You get the idea, loaded questions are a commonly used and abused form of Internet passive agression. What looks like an innocent question is in fact just shit stirring.

Came across a bit of covid literature which I'd not seen before which made me think of this thread:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0264

The first key result in this paper, namely that numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the UK were doubling approximately every 3 days, with similar rates in other European countries (specifically, figure S4 in the electronic supplementary material and a preliminary version of figure 3a), was presented to the Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Modelling (SPI-M) on 20 March 2020.

The context in which these estimates were made is illustrated in figure 4. At the time, estimates of the basic reproduction number and the unconstrained growth rate of SARS-CoV-2, obtained predominantly using data from China, varied widely. However, some of these appeared only in non-peer-reviewed preprints (including those from Read et al. [54], published in this issue), with the discourse dominated by estimates coming from the most established epidemic modelling groups and the highest-impact journals. In line with these, the consensus of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) at the time was on a doubling time of around 5–6 days1,2

This was published in 2021 and the authors included a bunch of people who were actually in the room at the time.

It confirms precisely what I have been saying all along, that SAGE thought the doubling time was at least 5 days up to their meeting of the 23rd (the meeting mentioned here on the 20th was not SAGE but a subgroup that then fed into SAGE).

So all those people trying to tell me that I must have been mistaken, I don't understand how minutes work, and/or the scientists were already sounding the alarm but were nobbled by Cummings, now need to think up some new excuses as to why a bunch of scientists who were there at the time wrote it down a few months later just as I had described. Or they may instead conclude that unfortunately I was right.

I don't know if any of the authors made the effort to correct Vallance's convenient porkies that he told the Inquiry a few months ago.