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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.
Examples:
20 July, Spectator: ‘How many Covid diagnoses are false positives?‘
12 August, Telegraph: ‘The statistical quirk that means the coronavirus pandemic may never end – a large number of false positives will creep in once case numbers drop very low and testing remains very high‘
5 September, Daily Mail: ‘Covid tests could be picking up DEAD virus cells from weeks’ old infections and ‘false positives’ could be exaggerating the scale of the pandemic, claims study’
BBC Website: ‘