Anti-Vindication

In late 2024, I wrote about vindication for those who kept their minds in the COVID-countermeasure era, those who preferred science over narrative, those who warned against the side-effects of the countermeasures, etc. That text included a discussion of an extensive report from the U.S. House of Representatives.

We now have late 2025, a new report (cf. below), and depressingly little additional progress. In particular, many strongly partisan sources still push long debunked narratives or takes on various issues. For instance, Wikipedia^w still pushes a narrative of “it was most definitely a wet-market transmission and anyone who says otherwise is a dangerous conspiracy theorist”. (Contrast this with the much more balanced take of Grokipedia^e, which correctly states that the issue is still up in the air, but that many qualified judges and institutions, neither dangerous nor conspiracy theorists, see it as more likely than a wet-market transmission.)

In particular, the results of the U.K “COVID inquiry” are recently in, around a year after the House report—and just as bad as expected. For instance, in last years (!) anniversary text, more than 20 months ago, I wrote of my own low expectations and warnings by/in the Telegraph that the inquiry was “fundamentally biased”.

These low expectations and warnings appear fully justified.

I have, I admit, not gone through the effort of studying the report in person (unlike the House report), but I have read three very interesting texts found at or through Brownstone on the topic ([1]^e, [2]^e, [3]^e). These all confirm the situation.

For instance, [2], with the title “They’ve Learned Nothing: How the UK Covid Inquiry Repeats—and Conceals—the Fundamental Errors of the Pandemic Response”, has the abstract (quoted in full):

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry was established to examine the most consequential domestic policy decisions in modern British history. Yet its central conclusions reflect the same modeling assumptions, policy paradigm, and intellectual blind spots that shaped the original pandemic response. The Inquiry’s claim that the UK “locked down too late” is not an empirical finding but the predictable output of an unchanged modeling architecture derived from Imperial College’s Report 9. By failing to interrogate the modeling itself, refusing to consider Sweden as a legitimate comparator, and avoiding a genuine cost–benefit analysis of non-pharmaceutical interventions, the Inquiry has demonstrated that “they’ve learned nothing.” More troublingly, the Inquiry appears structurally unwilling to learn. A candid investigation would expose deep institutional failures in government, science, and public health. The potential political costs of such an admission provide a powerful incentive to frame the pandemic as a problem of timing and administration rather than strategy. This paper argues that the Inquiry’s approach is analytically narrow, strategically misleading, and ultimately protective of the very institutions it is meant to evaluate.

Further statements (more selectively quoted; I strongly encourage a reading of the full original) include:

The central argument of this paper [i.e [2]] is that the Inquiry has “learned nothing” because it has chosen not to. Analytically, it has reproduced the same modeling framework that produced lockdowns in the first place. Institutionally, it has strong incentives to avoid conclusions that would show just how badly core actors—ministers, officials, and scientific advisers—performed.

The issue of modeling is also interesting with an eye at repeated, naive, claims by COVID-fanatics that “Vaccines saved a gazillion lives!!!”, which base on no more than the assumption that a gazillion would have died without vaccines. That this assumption is dressed up as a model does not alter that it is a mere assumption.

The UK’s initial pandemic strategy was defined by Imperial College’s Report 9 (Ferguson et al. 2020). That document used a deterministic SEIR model to project infections, hospitalizations, and deaths under various policy scenarios. The model was built on several critical assumptions.

[Goes on to explain that and how these critical assumptions were flawed.]

The model did not attempt to incorporate the collateral harms of restrictive policies: missed cancer diagnoses, delayed surgeries, mental-health deterioration, disruption to routine care, educational losses, or long-term economic damage.

This continues a pattern of narrow-minded over-focus on specifically COVID, as opposed to even health in general, let alone a truly holistic perspective, which was behind very much of what went wrong at the time.

One of the Inquiry’s most quoted findings is that delaying the first national lockdown by one week led to approximately 23,000 additional deaths (UK Covid-19 Inquiry 2024). That estimate is presented as if it were a historical fact. It is not. It is a model output. When earlier restrictions are fed into an Imperial-style model, the structure of the model guarantees that peak infections and deaths will be lower. That is what the equations are built to show.

(Also note above remark on modeling.)

The implicit assumption is that without legal restrictions, people would have continued to socialize, travel, and work in patterns similar to pre-pandemic norms.

Real-world data from the UK and elsewhere tell a different story. [Details given. Gist: even without legal restrictions considerable behavioral changes would have taken place—as they, indeed, did in my native Sweden, which is discussed in more detail elsewhere in [2].]

Generally, well beyond COVID, politicians and the like seem to have an extremely selective, naive, and/or biased view of how the behavior of the people will or will not change as circumstances change—and, especially, when it comes to political interventions. (Note e.g. parts of a text on game theory and politics.) Another common issue is the misconception that citizens are incapable of taking care of themselves, make their own decisions, whatnot, and must be led by the hand by an assumed to be all-wise and infallible government.

The Inquiry’s terms of reference explicitly required it to consider the “relative benefits and disbenefits” of non-pharmaceutical interventions. To date, however, it has not produced a systematic cost–benefit analysis of lockdowns, school closures, and related restrictions.

This point is particularly interesting to me, because I have long lamented that decision makers failed to make a cost–benefit analysis before making decisions during the COVID-countermeasure era—now this failure is continued in the evaluations. Inexcusable!

Sweden provides the most important empirical test of the lockdown paradigm. [...]

Over the full period of the pandemic, Sweden’s age-adjusted excess mortality was among the lowest in Europe, and considerably lower than that of the United Kingdom (Eurostat 2023). It also avoided the most severe educational disruptions and preserved a much higher degree of civil-liberty normality. Sweden’s experience therefore falsifies key elements of the Imperial model: that lockdowns are essential to prevent catastrophic mortality; that voluntary behavior change is too weak to matter; and that targeted protection cannot work.

The persistence of the “lockdown too late” narrative is easier to understand once institutional incentives are considered. A genuine audit of the pandemic response would not merely point to poor communications or chaotic decision-making inside Downing Street. It would reveal systemic misjudgments that cut across government, the civil service, and the scientific establishment.

And often misjudgments that were obvious to impartial observers even at the time. Cf. e.g. many of my own writings from the COVID-countermeasure era. (If on a more general level than what went on specifically in the U.K.)