Karam Bales looks at what the Inquiry has revealed so far and why some right-wing media have a vested interest in delegitimizing it

With the Covid Inquiry now fully underway, it’s been interesting to see the reaction in the media as details emerge of the chaos, negligence and callousness that was rampant behind the doors of Number 10. Much of the media are reacting in shock to what’s being revealed while sections of the right-wing media are attempting to delegitimize the inquiry entirely because it doesn’t look like the inquiry will conclude as they want it to, that nearly all measures were ineffective and we should have just let Covid rip through the population.

These sections of the media have consistently promoted a strategy of herd immunity via infection, going as far as to platform anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. They therefore have a vested interest in the results of the inquiry, especially as evidence released by the inquiry shows newspapers some had a financial incentive for lobbying to let the virus rip, due to a fall in sales during lockdown. The inquiry has also shown that those around Johnson believed the right-wing press were influencing his policy decisions in the run-up to the second wave while they were publishing articles claiming there would be no second wave.

If the inquiry doesn’t find that fewer measures were required during the first and second wave then a number of newspapers must take a share of the responsibility for thousands of preventable deaths. However for the rest of the media, it’s a surprise they seem surprised: as a member of the National Education Union’s executive committee in 2020-2021 and leading an alternative provision unit inside a mainstream secondary school, I experienced the chaos on the frontlines and witnessed the gaslighting of trade unions and scientists, not just by the government but also by the media.

A peer-reviewed analysis of news broadcasting found that for the week after ITV’s Robert Peston announced the herd immunity strategy in the Spectator the media failed in their role to provide public information as they tried to sell us a policy of mass infection with limited scrutiny or criticism. Besides the government, the pandemic has also been a failure of media and on a number of occasions the Opposition.

Schools were one of the most contested areas of the pandemic response. Unfortunately Labour failed to support the trade unions in their fight for safer working conditions. What do we now know about the government’s response in regards to schools?

The initial plan was to ride out one big wave with only a short period of measures to flatten the curve to prevent the complete collapse of the NHS. By February, the government knew Covid was airborne and that there was asymptomatic transmission. Despite this, a planning document produced by Matt Hancock in early February predicted that by April, while schools would be nominally open, many would actually be closed, presumably due to too many staff having been infected to be able to keep the schools open.

This shows the government’s negligent approach to the safety of education workers, which is also exemplified by the revelation that the government refused to introduce masks into schools simply because of an infantile attitude that they couldn’t be seen to be agreeing to any of the unions’ demands. It should be astonishing that the government refused to take simple measures to reduce risks to the school population simply to appease right-wing rags such as the Telegraph, but unfortunately this information didn’t come as a surprise. Too many times those sections of the media that weren’t actively campaigning on behalf of the virus were too willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, particularly in regards to schools.

I remember Mary Bousted as NEU General Secretary being criticised in interviews by the BBC and LBC for refusing to support government policy without having seen the evidence the policy was based on. “Don’t you trust the government?” they asked.

Here’s a reminder of some of the claims made in the media as the second wave was sweeping through the country: Children are more likely to be struck by lightning than be infected. Only one teacher has died of Covid. There’s no evidence of a child infecting an adult. Only children who were likely to die from another infection like flu have died from Covid. Education workers are at no greater risk than other occupations. Long Covid in children is normal post-viral fatigue.

None of this was true, and most stories on schools came complete with pictures of children wearing masks when the Department for Education was actively preventing masks from being worn in classrooms. BBC’s Newsnight even had a graph of Public Health England data on the settings with the most outbreaks which entirely omitted education – which in total was almost double the next setting which was pubs and bars.

The inquiry has shown that in October scientific advisors thought children were as likely to be infected and to transmit the virus as adults, and an Office of National Statistics report published at the time found that since schools had reopened, children were much more likely to bring infection into a household than adults. Current Occupational Health guidance states long Covid is a “massive problem” with education being one of highest-risk occupations.

Despite this being known at the time, we now have confirmation that Johnson did say he would rather “let the bodies pile high” rather than impose a lockdown in September 2020, spurred on by Dr Death (Rishi Sunak) and the “pro-death” Treasury, after their meeting with alternative experts, including Sunetra Gupta who has argued for allowing infections in schools to build up the elusive herd immunity. When SAGE recommended a circuit breaker including schools, Johnson held off and was later forced into the November lockdown which didn’t include schools.  Kier Starmer had called for a circuit breaker which didn’t include schools.

The inquiry has yet to go into the details behind the chaotic end of term before Christmas when Education Secretary Gavin Williamson threatened to take Greenwich Council to court to force them to reopen for three more days, even though this was on the same day that Matt Hancock announced what would become known as the Alpha variant had been identified. The media didn’t remark on the fact that most Private Schools had already been closed for a week.

Seemingly too nervous to face the ire of the newspapers, Starmer didn’t support Greenwich Council and he sat on the fence in the run up to 4th January when primary schools were supposed to reopen. However, Starmer was quick to criticise the government after Johnson declared the January lockdown after many schools didn’t return due to the mass walkout of education staff enacting health and safety legislation.

We do not know the physical cost of negligence towards the safety of schools. After three years of investigations and Freedom of Information requests, I discovered the Department for Education hasn’t tried to keep an accurate record of the number of education workers who have died from Covid, and the Office of National Statistics estimates that over 60,000 children currently have long Covid.

The inquiry is supposed to be learning from mistakes made, and there is an opportunity for Starmer to make amends for leaving education workers to fight for themselves, their students and their communities. The announcement of a commission to go after Covid fraud and expose the corruption that appears to have occurred is a promising start, but there is much more that could be done. The pandemic exposed the need for better support for sick workers which hopefully Labour’s proposals for an improvement for workers’ rights will address.

At considerable expense the Houses of Parliament have provided a clean air environment for parliamentarians. The same right to clean air and a lower risk of infection from all airborne pathogens should be extended to schools and other workplaces. Department for Education data show the majority of student absence is due to illness, with Covid still being the most common cause when the last report on ‘ghost children’ was published.

There has also been little attention paid to how the UK is becoming an international outlier with primary vaccination withdrawn for anyone who isn’t already vaccinated, including children who never had the opportunity, and a winter vaccine programme which is available only to the over 65s and those with a narrow list of clinical conditions. Compare this to the US where everyone over six months old is eligible for updated vaccines.

Meanwhile as deaths and hospitalisations are on the rise again, surveillance and sequencing systems are being dismantled leaving us incredibly vulnerable to reacting too slowly should a new variant emerge. How are we supposed to learn lessons to be better prepared for the next pandemic when we still haven’t corrected the mistakes of the current one?

Karam Bales is a former member of the National Education Union Executive, writing in a personal capacity.

Covid Action adds:

The inquiry has so far revealed several failures and shortcomings in the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, such as:

– The government was too focused on the risk of a flu pandemic and did not consider the possibility of other types of viruses, such as coronaviruses, with different characteristics and transmission rates.

– The government did not learn from the experiences of Asian countries, such as Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, which had dealt with previous outbreaks of SARS and MERS and had implemented faster and more effective contact-tracing and quarantine policies.

– The government did not act with sufficient speed and urgency in the early months of 2020, when the virus emerged in China, and instead relied on assumptions that Covid could not be contained or stopped.

– The government did not follow through on the recommendations of a mock-up training exercise in 2016, codenamed Exercise Alice, which simulated a major outbreak of the MERS virus and advised to scale up testing capacity and examine different options for isolation.

Charles Persinger, a member of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families For Justice and the Covid Action UK Steering Committee said: “Judging from the contempt shown within the government and civil service towards each other, just imagine the contempt they had – or indeed still have – for the public.”

We call on the press to ask the Government if it is still official policy to assume that “Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people”, and if so, is that guiding their current approach to the ongoing pandemic?

Covid Action is a grassroots, activist campaign of individuals and affiliated labour and trade union organisations who came together in November 2020 to challenge the UK government’s approach to the pandemic. Hashtag #CovidActionNow. Website: https://covidaction.uk. Socials: @covidactionuk on all major platforms

Image: Boris Johnson Coronavirus Press Conference https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/49652234143. Creator: Number 10 | Credit: Pippa Fowles / 10 Downing Street Copyright: Crown Copyright. Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.