UK: The Covid-19 inquiry cover-up begins

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“The inquiry is becoming a farce and an exercise in cover-up.”.

After the complete shipshow that was the British government’s response to Covid-19, plans are afoot to ensure that the public inquiry into the failures of policy doesn’t reach any useful conclusions. Witnesses are to be excluded from giving evidence about the Covid care that their relatives received, according to The Guardian.

Families of those who died from Covid-19 have been barred from submitting individual testimony to the official public inquiry about the standard of care received by their loved ones during the pandemic, the Observer can reveal.

Instead, the inquiry chair, Lady Hallett, is proposing they submit “pen portraits” to a private research company as part of a parallel “Listening Project” that will not have the power to demand the disclosure of documents or investigate claims about their relatives’ care.

“It would appear that Lady Hallett would rather outsource the grief of bereaved families to the Listening Project than engage with us constructively,” said John Sullivan, whose daughter, Susan, died in March 2020 at Barnet hospital after being denied access to an intensive therapy unit because of her Down’s syndrome and supposed cardiac comorbidities. “The inquiry is becoming a farce and an exercise in cover-up,” he said, ahead of the first hearing on Tuesday.

Guardian: Bereaved families fear Covid inquiry cover-up after ban on testimony

 

Delay, obfuscation and cover-up have always been the primary purposes for calling public inquiries in Britain, but this decision takes deception, misdirection and evasion to a whole new level.
Whatever happened to public accountability and the acceptance of responsibility?

 

On the 17th March 2020, Patrick Vallance told the UK parliament that 20,000 deaths from coronavirus would be a good outcome:

 

 

On the 29th August 2021, Boris Johnson was said to ‘privately accept’ up to 50,000 annual Covid deaths:

Boris Johnson ‘privately accepts’ up to 50,000 annual Covid deaths as an acceptable level

 

 

In November 2022, the tally of UK coronavirus deaths stood at over 200,000.

 

 

It’s not as though Britain wasn’t warned of what was in store for it either. 
“The situation is catastrophic, unimaginable,” warned this Times article on the 14th March 2020 about the Covid outbreak in Lombardy, Italy:

Giuseppe Natalini, head of intensive care at the Fondazione Poliambulanza hospital in the northern Italian city of Brescia, one of the places hit hardest by the coronavirus, does not mince his words.

“The situation is catastrophic, unimaginable,” he said. “If someone had told me on February 20 [the day before the first cluster of cases was diagnosed in Italy] that today we would be in this situation, I would not have believed it.

“Two or three weeks ago I would have considered the strict measures that have been in place in Italy disproportionate and alarmist. Now, absolutely not.”

 

 

London’s Covid-19 wall of commemoration is pictured below. 
The relatives of those who died of Covid-19 deserve answers. The entire country deserves answers.

 

** This post was originally published on October 2, 2022 **