Questions the Covid Inquiry must ask

Plus: What's driving Britain's anti-migrant protests?

Dear all,

A little update on my latest pieces. I’ve got a new article out about the UK’s Covid-19 Inquiry, which begins its preliminary hearing today. In it, Toby Green and I look at some of the questions the Inquiry should ask — and answer — if it’s serious about addressing the true causes of the pandemic catastrophe. Such as:

• How and why did Britain’s and the world’s political-scientific establishment cohere around a completely untried and untested model — “national lockdown” — for dealing with the Covid outbreak, which had not only never been implement but had never been conceived of before 2020?

• Why was the UK’s pre-2020 pandemic planning — which emphasised balancing the costs/benefits of interventions according to the principles of proportionality and flexibility, minimising the disruptions to everyday life, and protecting the vulnerable — thrown out of the window?

• Why was no risk/benefit analysis conducted in relation to lockdowns given that the collateral damage of the shutting down of society — in terms of physical and mental health, education, culture, the economy, incomes, etc. — was easily predictable and indeed had been predicted?

• Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence that Covid was not a risk for children/young adults and that schools were not major sources of spread, and the obvious damage the closure would have on the education and mental health of children/young adults?

• Why was there an almost exclusive focus on Covid to the detriment of all other aspects of public health, including cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, childhood vaccinations and mental health — all of which have worsened since the pandemic?

You can read the rest of the article here.

I had two more pieces out last week. One was about the surge in anti-migrant protests in Britain, where I argue that it’s not primarily driven by racism — but by a desire to have a say over the form, pace and scale of immigration.

The other one was about the New York Times’s decision to take the European Commission to court over Ursula von der Leyen’s refusal to release the text messages she exchanged with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in which she personally negotiated the purchase of up to 1.8 billion doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. This is the latest episode in what is shaping up to be one of the most colossal political-corporate scandal in the EU’s history.

I hope you enjoy them.

Best regards,

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thomasfazi

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)