It is very easy to trash politicians and their advisers about what happened during the pandemic.
They made good and bad decisions based on what they knew at the time. As far as I know, they did their best.
I am put in mind of a saying of Donald Rumsfeld in the year 2000 about the hunt for Bin Laden. At the time, I laughed at it, because I thought it was gobbledegook, but now, I think he was onto something important which actually fits in with the problem faced by politicians during covid.
"There are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Effective intelligence work must consider them all."
When Covid became known to our politicians around January 2020, the first information was that a strange new form of pneumonia was circulating in the Chinese mega city of Wuhan, but that soon began to change.
First it was proving fatal in a few people. Then it was proving fatal in a lot of people - especially older people.
There were questions about how it was spreading:
Airborne?
Contact with infected surfaces?
The UK Department of health was very constrained by its prior pandemic planning which was pretty scant. They had a few sheets of A4 basically - all about new strains of influenza. That was what they expected, but covid wasn't influenza. It was an escaped experiment from a lab and extremely easily passed from person to person, absolutely unlike EVERY zoozosis transfer we have ever seen. They always pass person to person with difficulty at first until having been inside humans for a while, they naturally evolve to jump from person to person. Covid-19 was not like that. It spread like wildfire from the moment it appeared.
The point I am making here is that the politicians had no idea what they were dealing with and at first they were reacting on misinformation - partly from the Chinese desire to play things down, and partly from the mind set of our Department of Health that had prepared a scant document about new influenza outbreaks based on the fear of what happened in 1918 with the so called Spanish Flu outbreak which actually started in America.
Then the covid epidemic got hold in Northern Italy. Lombardy had close contact with manufacturing businesses in Wuhan.
The situation in Lombardy looked horrific.
The hospitals were rapidly overwhelmed. People were arriving outside them with gravely ill relatives but the capability to cope was already beyond limits, and the patients could not be admitted.
Families of elderly relatives were distraught as their loved ones, unable to breathe, died in car parks without medical attention.
Covid ran riot in old people's homes. There were care homes where the staff ran away in terror, faced with rooms full of dead inmates. Police were called to care homes where all the residents were dead and the staff had fled in terror.
By about February 2020 the Known Knowns were pretty horrific. The known unknowns included how well the NHS, Care Homes, food and goods distribution systems would cope. The news from Lombardy was that this disease could be a massive national disaster.
Unknown unknowns included what it might do to any category of people and how many would possibly die or be utterly ruined. Some elderly people were gradually suffocating with pneumonia, while others had nothing more than a bad cold.
Most younger people were having a bad cold, but some were ruined, and some died. Take as an example Derek Draper husband of a BBC presenter and someone I once met in person. He wasn't old or obese. He didn't fit the profile of a vulnerable person, but he was gravely ill, recovered slightly, but was left pretty much a cabbage. He died a couple of years later at 56.
At first there seemed to be no obvious treatment for the bad cases. It became obvious over weeks that the victims own immune system reacted so virulently to the infection that it was killing them.
Various drugs were tried. Some had no measurable effect, but were greatly esteemed by the uninformed public online. Ivermectin was one such. Donald Trump went on record musing about why perhaps bleach could be taken and would maybe be a good idea.
In the end a very cheap steroid seemed to be about the best treatment to dampen down the thing which was killing most of those who died. The fatal immune system over reaction to the virus. It didn't work for all, but it did work for many.
Vaccines looked like the only way to escape. People of great talent were working on them.
People in government didn't know how bad it could get, or whether it would bring our society to total chaos. They made decisions with what knowledge they had.
Many now question those decisions.
Hindsight gives us 20/20 vision.
They brought in lockdown.
Stay at home
Do not go to work unless you are an essential worker
We will borrow massive amounts of money and pay 80% of your wages
They made heroic efforts to produce a vaccine - the Oxford vaccine produced in bulk by AstraZenica.
Government paid all the costs. It was shown to help reduce likelihood of infection. It was shown to lessen the severity of infection if you did develop it.
Severe reactions were few, but they did occur.
Across the world other vaccines were developed very quickly. Some worked better than others. Some had more or fewer side effects or severe reactions.
Were the decisions perfect?
Of course not.
How could they be.
Did all concerned do their best?
I think they did, given what they knew when they took action.
It is an unequivocal fact that millions of people died from covid-19.
A very small number died of vaccine reactions. The number is tiny in comparison the those that were saved by those vaccines.
It is an unequivocal truth that many many millions of people are alive today who would have died if vaccines and social restrictions had not been used.
How would YOU and I have done if we had been in charge? All I can say, is that I am glad that I was not presented with that responsibility.
