The Bloody Sunday Enquiry cost £68 million in lawyers fees. It went on for 12 years. The Covid 19 enquiry will go on for years, cost more, and by the time it is published, will be less relevant than an enquiry into the average temperature of bathwater in people’s homes.
Sir Humphrey was a strong advocate of official enquiries. They delay action, and bury the truth with the passing of the years. The Grenfell enquiry opened in 2017. Is there an end of it in sight?
A group of independent public health experts, virologists, and infectious disease specialists, the sort of people decent enough to only take their loss of salary in compensation, and none with any connection with the outbreak, could produce a reliable set of conclusions and suggestions on action over Covid in a month, for about £25,000.
I would guess that lawyers’ fees for this charade will be in the region of £70 million and the report will not be available until 2026. By which time an effective multi strain vaccine and treatment for Covid 19 and other variants will in be common use.
Only 2 online articles in a month! What’s going on?
“Incomprehensibly [sic] direct flights are still landing from India….travellers from there are not always segregated on arrival – meaning they could spread the virus to others at the airport.” – Daily Mail, 20 May 2021.
Some time ago the Daily Mail (for reasons I need not discuss here and now) dug up something I had written as a boy in the 1950s (based on information from one its own affiliates) opposing the unchecked immigration of people carrying contagious diseases, as an example of my lifelong “racism”.
“Those states – New Zealand, Taiwan, Singapore – that imposed rapid lockdowns and border closures recorded dramatically fewer deaths…this lesson that Boris Johnson’s government has once again neglected. Public Health England placed the Indian variant under investigation on 1 April, but it took another three weeks before India was finally added to the UK’s ‘red list’… By that time, at least 20,000 passengers who may have been infected with the new strain had arrived….of the people who entered from India between 25 March and 7 April, 4.8 per cent tested positive for Covid-19….the Indian variant [which takes three main forms] will soon become dominant in the UK…. A government that routinely champions its commitment to border control has repeatedly failed to shield Britain from new waves of infections.” – New Statesman, 21 May 2021.
Incidentally, I remember that obviously confected defamation of Mr Ashton by the Daily Mail, which exploited his fleeting association at Oxford some 60 years ago with their press-freedom opponent Max Mosley, and the outrageous and blatantly disingenuous rejection of his complaints by the so-called “Independent” Press Complaints Organization online.
Thank you, Mr Wilson. I hope to publish a fully detailed account, including how my wife was frightened on the doorstep by a journalist with lies about me while I was in bed with a broken ankle, under the title “Anatomy of a Smear”. A simple, inexpensive remedy for press falsehood and cunning innuendo, would be a statutory right to reply in the same medium, denied to me completely by this wealthy high-circulation newspaper. Journalists should have the right to speak truth to power, especially government, but not the power to print untruth with impunity about ordinary people who lack funds for libel lawyers.
I forgot to complete the quote from the socialist weekly: “Rather than maintaining an arbitary ‘traffic light’ system, the UK should require all visitors to have proof of vaccination and a negative test result…. The Covid crisis was a warning from the future; a product of a globalised era in which viruses and other lethal threats [NB] traverse borders with ease. Our response must be to strengthen national [NB] and global resilience…a successful [sic] vaccine roll-out on its own is no guarantee of safety….”
Sainted Editor,
If it’s possible to vaccinate against Covid-19 and all its variants, why isn’t it possible to vaccinate against the common cold and all its variants? The answer is that it isn’t possible in either case, because these closely related viruses mutate constantly and cleverly.
So we have to choose between living with a slightly lower average annual life expectancy than is ideally desirable for at least a few years, or leading the lives of flagellants and hermits amid economic catastrophe.
I prefer the former. Don’t you?
What this snippet says is really quite enough to enlighten us all not only on the current “crisis” but on just about every crisis since 1066. A bargain at around £ 5 an issue.
Well said.