COVID Inquiry: ‘The Headlines That Show the Media Failed to do its Job Before the Second Wave Hit’

During the COVID Inquiry, Dr Kevin Fong gave an emotional testimony detailing a the experience of frontline healthcare workers facing pressures equivalent to a “terrorist attack” every day.

Fong’s account, on 26 September, is one of only a few parts of the current Module Three that has received considerable coverage across broadcast and print media, another being Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty’s account which has been misquoted by some commentators and outlets to suggest he thought lockdowns were unnecessary.

While there has been considerable media attention regarding the first wave, the deadlier second wave hasn’t received as much scrutiny from the same sections of the media who are misrepresenting what Whitty said. The Chief Medical Officer said Ministers may have “overdone” the dangers of coronavirus in public health messages and said the NHS faced an an “absolutely catastrophic situation” when the virus first hit in 2020 but it could have been “substantially worse” if the UK had not gone into lockdown.

In October 2023, SAGE member John Edmunds gave a damning testimony to the COVID Inquiry detailing the Government’s failures in early autumn when then Prime Minister Boris Johnson decided against a circuit breaker lockdown.

The role of the media is one aspect of the pandemic the inquiry isn’t examining despite the influence it has in shaping the narrative and applying political pressure to policy makers.

Analysis of broadcast coverage over the pivotal days of 9-20 March 2020 found the representation of scientific opinion was heavily weighted towards the Government’s position and repeated references to the need for immunity to be built up through infection without scrutinising the implication.

In the context of Edmund’s testimony, the contribution sections of the media made to the debate in the run up to the larger but more preventable second wave is deserving of scrutiny as these are the elements currently seeking to rewrite the narrative of the pandemic.

“We had all the information, we knew how to do it… We could have avoided much of the autumn wave”, Edmunds said explaining that there was a choice to either “lockdown now” and take control or “let it lead us” and “force a lockdown later” with “many people dying as a consequence”.

“There’s no reason for that number of people to have died…we couldn’t have been worse prepared” for the alpha wave, he said. As of 2023, the UK reported over 227,000 deaths where COVID-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.

Edmunds cited the key reason the November lockdown wasn’t successful was because schools were open, concluding “there was no strategy no long term thinking” leading to “another 65,000 people dying over the next few months”.

After the majority of the media had spent the summer platforming claims the UK had acquired enough herd immunity to avoid a substantial second wave, as transmission increased at the end of summer many outlets promoted claims by Professor Carl Heneghan that increasing cases were an artefact of false positive PCR tests.

The media pressure continued through September up to the meeting on 20 September organised by Rishi Sunak between Boris Johnson, Heneghan, Great Barrington Declaration author Professor Sunetra Gupta, and architect of Sweden’s response, Anders Tegnel. Byline Times has previously covered the numerous private meetings Johnson held with mainly right-wing editors prior to his decision to ignore the scientific advice.

By the end of September when it became apparent that natural immunity would not prevent a second wave and that the rising case numbers weren’t an artefact of false positive PCR tests, right-wing media backed the Great Barrington Declaration‘s (GBD) calls to remove measures and allow immunity to build up via infections in the majority of the population while protecting the vulnerable.

Despite Gupta’s meeting with Johnson, and White House meetings, the GBD’s authors and associates continually claim they were censored and silenced, however, the headlines from October show considerable support from certain newspapers in the UK, while WhatApps shown to the inquiry revealed aides believed papers such as the Daily Mail and the Telegraph had a financial interest in opposing measures due to the impact on sales.

Whitty last month told the inquiry that another pandemic as big as COVID – which claimed seven million lives worldwide – is “a certainty”.

“We have to assume a future pandemic on this scale will occur,” he told the public inquiry on September 26, adding: “That’s a certainty.”

The COVID Inquiry this week moved to hear evidence about the impact on maternity services as part of its third section investigating the impact on the NHS and healthcare.