The UK Covid Inquiry is set to be Britain’s largest public inquiry ever undertaken to date, both in size and cost. But, according to a damning open letter sent this week to its chair, Baroness Hallett, it is failing in its mission.
The Inquiry “must address its apparent biases, assumptions, impartiality, & lack of evidence-based approach” as a matter of “urgent national priority”. This is the demand made by the letter’s authors, Prof. Sunetra Gupta, an outspoken voice throughout the pandemic days from the Department of Zoology at University of Oxford, and Dr. Kevin Bardosh, from Collateral Global and the Division of Infection Medicine at University of Edinburgh.
They, alongside over 60 signatories, have expressed deep concern that the inquiry is failing in its purported mission, both to properly evaluate the mistakes made during the pandemic and to prepare the country for the next pandemic.
If the inquiry fails to address its shortcoming, it will not only compromise its own credibility, it risks undermining public trust enough to such a degree that it could undermine credibility of all public inquiries that precede it.
The signatories are wide-ranging – from microbiologists and geneticists to sociologists and criminologists to law professors, ethicists, statisticians and so on. And their complaints are manifold. Though, they include a questioning – as Reaction has previously done – of the Inquiry’s decision to adopt a legal format: “It is focused on who did or said what, rather than asking fundamental scientific questions.”
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