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After a few months of the Hallett pantomime, we are quite clear what the Inquiry is not about evidence-based policy, Dr. Tom Jefferson and Prof. Carl Heneghan wrote. “Let’s stop wasting money in media circuses and engage in science.”

One person is overseeing the proceedings of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry: Baroness Heather Hallett, a former Court of Appeal judge.  As her biases toward protecting and maintaining the official covid narrative and in so doing ignoring evidence become increasingly apparent, more and more people are questioning what role the Covid-19 inquiry is actually playing.

In 2020, Reuters reported that the Inquiry was on track to cost more than £200 million.  In August 2022, before the Inquiry had even begun hearings, it had agreed to 22 contracts with 18 different private firms worth a total of £85.3 million.

The public hearings began in June. The accounts up to September 2023 show that the cost of the lumbering investigation had already ballooned to £56 million, The Spectator reported. Adding that the Inquiry is paying out £19.6 million to keep 62 barristers, including 12 King’s Counsels (“KCs”), and a team of solicitors on the books. Another £11 million has then gone towards legal representation for key participants in the hearings. As this army of lawyers is clearly not enough to keep the show on the road, the Inquiry has hired another 118 civil servants as well, who have cost the public purse £7 million.

In the article below, Dr. Jefferson and Prof. Heneghan demonstrate what the Covid Inquiry should be examining and what the UK should be doing if it was following best practices in its response to covid or any other respiratory disease.

Why the Hallett Inquiry Should Be Halted Now

By Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan

The obsequiousness to modellers, distortions of the precautionary principle, character assassinations, Teflon flip flops and swear words are ample evidence that the UK taxpayers are being taken for a ride.

Next time will be worse: the precedent for depriving citizens of their civil rights, abandoning the elders and muzzling entire populations on the basis of no evidence and no real expertise has been set.

We have received many public and private messages of support, and we think the time has come to stop the media circus and get down to answering why evidence was ignored, why gaps were filled with models and Hancockisms and why we did not fill the evidence void with clinical trials designed to answer urgent questions. We still have time, and that is what we should be doing now, not tomorrow, but now. To paraphrase the head of WHO: test, test, test. Dr Tedros was referring to PCR, which, when mismanaged, distorted everyone’s perception of the threat. He now should repeat the phrase to refer to plugging the many gaps in our knowledge.

It seems that even Private Eye’s MD shares this view: 

If we are going to spend 200 million on a “gold standard” pandemic inquiry it needs to determine what the “gold standard,” pandemic management should have been for covid, and should be for a future pandemic. And it should do the science before it determines how far off the UK was from best practice. 

Our readers know how far the UK was from best practice based on personal experience and what they have read in Trust the Evidence.

However, rather than going on about the Hallett Inquiry and its biased chair, let’s look at what could be done NOW to prepare humanity for the possible ravages of whichever next respiratory agent.

We have documented the prominent role played by nosocomial infection with SARS-CoV-2 found in up to 40% of people admitted for reasons other than covid.

A retrospective study using data from 2015 to 2021 was conducted in a paediatric hospital in the USA, looking at the effects of a bundle of interventions against hospital-acquired respiratory infections.

They report a 68% decrease in infection over the period using caregiver screening, symptom-based isolation, personal protective equipment, hand hygiene, staff illness procedures, and monitoring of environmental cleanliness. All these measures were enhanced when the pandemic started. 

The infection decrease is marked, but it is what you would expect from an observational study. However, this mix of interventions has yet to be tested in randomised trials. Some may work, but we don’t know which ones and by how much.  

The forthcoming influenza and respiratory viral theme park season is near and would provide an ideal testing ground to advance science and knowledge. Alternatively, good old rhinovirus is always on hand. The US researchers found that: 

Rhinovirus emerged as the predominant cause of [Healthcare-associated viral infections] HAVI during the pandemic period. It was the only reported respiratory HAVI in our cohort for an entire year with HAVIs due to all other respiratory viral pathogens virtually eliminated. This finding corresponds with what was observed in the epidemiology of communal viral activity during the [2009 influenza] pandemic, and is widely reflected in both reports of significant increases in hospitalisation for respiratory infection secondary to rhinovirus, and in the persistence of rhinovirus/enterovirus detection despite stringent public health measures.

Many treat this RNA agent with contempt, perhaps because no licensed remedies exist. However, rhinovirus is always present and circulating with peaks of up to 35-40% positivity in surveillance, creating epidemics without apparent seasonal patterns. It also likes to coinfect, so it is a menace. Like most respiratory viruses, the illness is mostly mild, but it can cause serious pathologies, especially in those with asthma or chronic obstructive airways disease and also can reinfect people who had recently been infected by a different serotype (there are over 150 rhinovirus serotypes). So, it is the near-perfect proxy for respiratory viruses as targets for preventive physical interventions. 

Activists tried to obstruct the carrying out of research trials to fill the evidence gaps during the pandemic and partly succeeded in creating a climate of intimidation.

However, they would have a difficult time objecting to such a design on ethical grounds as the comparator would be current practice. So, if testing bundles is unethical because “blood would be on the hands of testers,” what could they say of current practice: rivers of blood running everywhere?

If we are willing to educate ourselves rather than submit to the will of influencers and activists, we may learn some valuable lessons.

We could do all sorts of trials with different packages or bundles of measures, and it would probably cost a lot less than the KCs fees for the rest of the Inquiry and infinitely less than the 37 or so billion wasted on mass testing or the equivalent stolen from the exchequer by criminals. It also might educate some folk about science and the progressive accumulation of knowledge.

Once again, do write to your MPs, as now is the time. 

About the Authors

Carl Heneghan is a professor of Evidence-based Medicine at the University of Oxford, Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (“CEBM”) and NHS Urgent Care general practitioner (“GP”) who regularly appears in the media. Tom Jefferson is a clinical epidemiologist and a Senior Associate Tutor at the University of Oxford.  Together they write articles on a Substack page titled ‘Trust the Evidence’.