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The Covid Inquiry

weltweit said:
I wonder if the old phone will turn out to have been accidentally wiped.
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I am hoping government techs switch it on to download the messages, whilst hackers get into it at the same time and also download them, then leaking them to the media, it would be like Christmas coming early!
 
I can remember hearing how such messages were secure and secret, perhaps Jonson et al also thought that, come back to bite them now though hasn't it.
 
As we don't really know what's it those messages, remeber if you want to know be 'careful what you wish for' as they say.

Eg. A lot of people dislike Johnson pre pandemic, but based on the last whattapp leaks, he came across as an elder statesman compared to Hancock and Simon Case's messages!
 
Thesaint said:
As we don't really know what's it those messages, remeber if you want to know be 'careful what you wish for' as they say.

Eg. A lot of people dislike Johnson pre pandemic, but based on the last whattapp leaks, he came across as an elder statesman compared to Hancock and Simon Case's messages!
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Personally, I’m hoping that their systemic corruption is exposed, but I’d be surprised if an establishment inquiry actually outed the murderous venal cunts.
 
Thesaint said:
As we don't really know what's it those messages, remeber if you want to know be 'careful what you wish for' as they say.

Eg. A lot of people dislike Johnson pre pandemic, but based on the last whattapp leaks, he came across as an elder statesman compared to Hancock and Simon Case's messages!
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Fucking hell
 
bluescreen said:
TBH I find this rather sinister, suggesting that Johnson should keep quiet about inconvenient truths or else.
Not that we'd recognise a truth if it flew out of his mouth anyway, but that's beside the point.
Cabinet Office continues to demonstrate its desire to control the 'independent' inquiry.
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Certainly that last point.
Not sure I see Sunak's threats as sinister but more very obviously a desperate last-ditch attempt to control the narrative. Looks like team Johnson have already priced in the electoral rout at the next GE and see the inquiry as one means to make sure that Sunak is well and truly gone, paving the way for new party leader. I'd imagine that blustercunt has already tapped up enough donors to make sure that, even if his legal support is withdrawn, he won't have to dip into his personal fortune.
 
sealion said:
You have set the bar seriously low here. Fuck me :D
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Keeping the thread lively 😏. My point really is we don't know what else was said by who behind the scenes by either members of the cabinet, civil service etc so don't be surprised by anything.
 
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teqniq said:
Oh what a surprise! Huge legal bill ahoy as vermin get profligate with public money in an effort to cover their arses:

www.mirror.co.uk

Rishi Sunak's legal battle with Covid inquiry could cost 'well into six figures'

The Cabinet Office launched a judicial review to block requests from the inquiry chairwoman to hand over unredacted WhatsApp messages between Boris Johnson and officials involved in the crisis
www.mirror.co.uk www.mirror.co.uk
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He can afford it, he's minted.

Oh, hang on, he wants me to pay his legal bills, legal aid style, ffs.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
imo two kinds of inquiry are needed.

One inquiry to look at the corruption and to identify wrongdoing of various kinds.

And a second inquiry into what worked and what didn't, what failed, what should have been done but wasn't, what was done and shouldn't have been done. This inquiry would need to be wide-ranging and of a 'no-fault' nature - to identify and learn from mistakes rather than to punish them.

I don't hold out much hope of either kind of inquiry happening. But I don't see how one single inquiry can cover both aspects as the 'no fault' aspect of the second one would be crucial, while the first kind would be all about finding fault. So we'll probably end up with something that covers neither aspect adequately. This kind of inquiry has a dismal history in this country, after all.
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I expect even the sort of flawed inquiries we have in this country will have very little trouble covering at least three quarters of the fertile, relevant ground and coming up with the right conclusions. Some of that work has already been done, and I will comment on that later.

Especially because many of the mistakes were really obvious at the time, and the establishment as a whole had to quickly learn from a chunk of them, sometimes within days, sometimes within a few months. Sometimes they were forced to do the right thing but then managed to backtrack later when the circumstances gave them more wiggle room to revert to type.

The areas that will be more complicated will be those involving corruption and the 'politics' of decisions. I have no opinion at this stage as to how far the inquiry might get when it comes to the corruption, I will just have to wait and see. And when I say the 'politics' I include all the stuff where the level of satisfaction that observers express in regards the inquiries findings will vary based on the observers own personal opinions about what the right thing to do was in terms of the science and public health. For example if the inquiry comes out with things that please me and that I believe involve the correct, sensible stance to take, that will not please those who have a very different stance to me on such matters, some of who exist on this forum and in this thread.

I have no idea yet how much commentary I will offer on the inquiries proceedings. I dont know if I can add anything, or how tediously nerdy too many people will find much of the detail.
 
When I spoke of lessons already learnt by the establishment, here is an already published example from late last year:

"A technical report for future UK Chief Medical Officers, Government Chief Scientific Advisers, National Medical Directors and public health leaders in a pandemic."

www.gov.uk

Technical report on the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK

A technical report for future UK Chief Medical Officers, Government Chief Scientific Advisers, National Medical Directors and public health leaders in a pandemic.
www.gov.uk www.gov.uk

This is a technical report for our successors on some of the scientific, public health and clinical aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the 4 nations of the UK. This is from the UK Chief Medical Officers (CMOs), Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA), UK deputy CMOs (DCMOs) most closely engaged in the COVID-19 response, NHS England National Medical Director, and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) Chief Executive.

This is written for a specific audience: future CMOs, GCSAs, National Medical Directors and UK public health leaders facing a new pandemic or major epidemic in the UK and who were not part of the public health response COVID-19 pandemic. It is of necessity technical.
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Ongoing public inquiries will give the definitive narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic to date, including policy decisions taken and why. This report does not cover that ground. It does however cover relevant issues on science and public health that might be useful in the future.
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It is difficult for me to summarise such things.
 
elbows said:
. Sometimes they were forced to do the right thing but then managed to backtrack later when the circumstances gave them more wiggle room to revert to type.
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If it establishment/Tory bashing is the prized outcome, I'm confident there will be no shortage of source material!

The media I suspect will focus on the interpersonal behind the scenes soap operas too, as that is their usual preference.
 
Thesaint said:
The media I suspect will focus on the interpersonal behind the scenes soap operas too, as that is their usual preference.
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Which is one of the reasons I ended up going on about establishment instincts, shit priorities, etc so much, so that the bigger picture is not lost to the soap opera. But since I did that so very much during some crucial months in 2020, I'm not sure how much I now have left in me to go over it all again. Maybe I will have to carefully select only a few things to rant about during the inquiry.
 
gosub said:
Covid disinformation unit made 'hourly contact' with tech firms, its leader reveals

Is this outside the scope of Baroness Hallett? after all Number 10 did politiely admit to her that they were lookng for holding position while they work out what their postiton is....Sarah Connelly certainly has questions to answer....she did as soon as the Lancet started getting flagged as an unreliable source...
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Maybe too recent a confirmed revelation to squeeze into the inquiry given how much other stuff it will have to look at in whatever time frame it has.
It will also be tricky for much of the media channels involved to report on themselves conspiring with a government department like this🤔
Maybe a couple of DT articles is all we ever know about it for a decade or two?
 
While she's at it think Baroness Hallett should look at what went on over the stats between University of Cambridge and the ONS, there was a period, when ONS were squeezing out Cambridge's excellent work, when the R rate was Calculus defying
 
I'm not expecting too many people to be following the amount of detail I'm regurgitating from the inquiry over in the pandemic subforum, but something came up today that I feel I should draw extra attention to. Because issues like 'population triage' is why I paid attention to pandemics in the first place....

Hunt giving evidence in regards a serious flu pandemic exercise, exercise Cygnus, that was run while he was health minister:

I was basically asked in the course of the exercise to sanction the emptying of all the intensive care beds in the country, leading to the death of numerous people in those intensive care beds, on the grounds that the nursing requirement for those people in intensive care was so big, because each intensive care bed needed three or four nurses to look after one patient, that those nurses could spend -- save more lives if they operated in the community
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effectively I was being asked to flick a switch which would have led to instant deaths, and I wasn't prepared to do that.
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I'm not at all suggesting that there aren't incredibly difficult things you have to decide in any pandemic, but it's just that it felt too clinical to me, that that should be surfaced in -- almost like a regular ministerial decision -- this is what you do at this point -- when the human consequences were so striking.
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what I was aware of was this dreadful euphemism that was used to describe that decision. It was described as "population triage", which essentially was a nice way of saying making life or death decisions about large numbers of people in one go.
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in some ways I worried about the fact that I was not prepared to flick the switch, I had sort of let the side down in terms of this exercise, because I think there was, I felt, a sort of expectation that they would need someone to take those kinds of decisions
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More context and broader versions of those quotes in at least 4 of my posts here: #77
 
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