I fell for it. Hook, line and sinker.
In the spring of 2020 I was wiping down shopping bags, afraid to touch a gate whilst walking in the countryside, and watching a Chinese government video of workers in hazmat suits spraying city streets with disinfectant. I had young children in school and elderly parents to worry about. When the scientists appeared at the lectern alongside the politicians, I listened. Most of us did.
Five years on, enough evidence has accumulated — and enough emotional distance has opened — to ask a question the UK public enquiry studiously avoided: were the policies themselves correct?
That is a different question from whether decisions were made on the right timeline, or whether Dominic Cummings drove to Barnard Castle, or whether there were parties at Downing Street. Those questions matter for accountability. They tell us nothing about whether lockdown was the right tool in the first place.
Who Actually Died
Start with the numbers, because policy should be grounded in them.
The average age of death attributed to COVID-19 in the United Kingdom was approximately 84 years. The overwhelming majority had significant co-morbidities — heart disease, diabetes, obesity, respiratory conditions — that placed them at elevated mortality risk in any given year. This is not a callous observation. It is the essential context for any proportionate policy response.
Old people die. That is not a failure of the health service or the government. It is biology. A society that cannot state that plainly is not equipped to make rational decisions about which interventions are worth their cost.
The COVID Inquiry, which concluded in 2024, heard enormous quantities of emotional testimony from relatives of elderly people who died in care homes and hospitals. That testimony was moving and it deserved to be heard. But it was not a basis for policy analysis. The Inquiry spent far more time establishing that rules were broken at Number 10 than asking whether the rules themselves were justified.
The Economic Damage We Don't Talk About
The United Kingdom borrowed approximately £400 billion in pandemic-related spending. Much of that was the furlough scheme — widely praised at the time, and arguably the single measure that did protect the fabric of the labour market. But the totality of the fiscal response has left a structural legacy that constrains every public spending decision made since.
The damage to education is harder to quantify and less discussed. Children missed between one and two full years of schooling at critical developmental stages. The attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers — already a stubborn feature of English education — widened measurably. Youth mental health deteriorated sharply. These are not abstractions. They are outcomes that will shape a generation's earnings, prospects and wellbeing.
The people who designed lockdown policy — senior civil servants, SAGE members, ministers — worked from home, continued to be paid, and did not have young children staring at laptops in cramped flats. The people who bore the heaviest cost of those policies often did not.
Sweden: The Country That Didn't
Sweden decided not to lock down. Schools stayed open for children under 16. Restaurants and bars remained open, though with restrictions. The government relied on voluntary behaviour change rather than legal compulsion.
Sweden's excess mortality outcome was not dramatically worse than comparable European countries and in some assessments was better than the UK's on an age-standardised basis. The Swedish economy contracted less severely. Swedish children did not lose a year of schooling. Swedish society did not acquire the habit of compliance with state restriction of movement.
Sweden was furiously criticised at the time. It was described as reckless, callous, an experiment on its own population. That criticism has aged badly. The Swedish experience does not prove that lockdown was wrong in all contexts. It does prove that lockdown was not the only possible response — and that the countries which chose not to lock down did not suffer the catastrophic consequences that were confidently predicted.
The Vaccine Question
The mRNA vaccines were developed at remarkable speed, and for the vulnerable and elderly they reduced the risk of serious illness and death significantly. That is a genuine achievement worth acknowledging.
But the public messaging around vaccines went considerably further than the evidence warranted. Vaccines were presented as the route back to normality — "get vaccinated and you can't pass it on." That was not accurate. The vaccines substantially reduced transmission initially, but provided limited and rapidly waning protection against Omicron and subsequent variants. This was not a minor caveat. It was central to the justification for vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and the social pressure applied to those who declined.
The result was a public messaging failure that eroded trust — trust that will be expensive to rebuild the next time a genuine public health emergency requires a rapid collective response.
Masks, Misinformation, and the Gates I Was Afraid to Touch
The evidence on masks remains genuinely contested. The Cochrane Review — the gold standard for systematic evidence assessment — found in 2023 that wearing masks in the community made little or no difference to influenza-like illness outcomes. That finding was disputed, but it has never been satisfactorily refuted. The precautionary case for masks is understandable. The evidence that they worked as presented is weak.
The misinformation was not confined to one side. Early official guidance downplayed the virus. Then it catastrophised. The street-spraying footage from China — sinister, authoritative, filmed with great production value — shaped public perception of how the virus spread. Surfaces, it turned out, were not a meaningful transmission route. I knew none of that standing at a country gate in April 2020, choosing not to touch it.
Misinformation in a public health emergency is inevitable. The question is who amplifies it — and official sources amplified plenty.
The Politicians Who Found Their Cause
Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon discovered something in the pandemic: a daily lectern, a captive audience, and a subject that permitted almost unlimited governmental authority. The daily briefings — the graphs, the scientists flanking the ministers — created a theatre of competence that bore little relationship to the coherence of the underlying policy.
The hypocrisy was spectacular and well-documented. The Downing Street parties are the most famous example. But the broader pattern — rules for thee, not for me — ran through multiple governments and multiple countries. It corrodes public trust in a way that a graph cannot repair.
And anyone who spoke publicly against the prevailing orthodoxy was cancelled, derided, or dismissed regardless of their credentials. Dissenting epidemiologists, dissenting economists, dissenting lawyers — they were characterised as Covid deniers and ignored. Some were wrong. Some were right. The suppression of legitimate scientific debate was not a feature of a healthy public discourse.
Where Are We Now?
Long COVID is real for a subset of those infected — the estimates of its prevalence have contracted substantially from the alarming early projections, but persistent fatigue, cognitive difficulty and autonomic dysfunction affect a meaningful number of people and deserve continued research attention.
The question of the virus's origins remains unresolved. The Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in proximity to the first identified outbreak. The US intelligence community is split on whether the pandemic originated in a lab. The Chinese government has not permitted the independent investigation that would resolve the question. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an open question with serious geopolitical implications that has been allowed to drift unresolved.
What Should Happen Next Time
I would not follow the same rules again. I suspect most people would not. That loss of trust is the most consequential legacy of the pandemic response — not the parties, not the contracts, not the PPE procurement failures.
The next public health emergency will require public cooperation to be effective. That cooperation will not be freely given to institutions and politicians who failed the tests of transparency, proportionality and personal compliance with the rules they imposed.
A genuine policy review — not the procedural post-mortem the UK Inquiry delivered — would ask hard questions. Were lockdowns proportionate given the age and health profile of those at risk? What was the true cost, including educational damage and economic scarring, and was it outweighed by the benefit? Why were alternative interventions — including nasal spray prophylactics, vitamin D supplementation, and the early treatment protocols that showed promise in some settings — suppressed or ignored rather than evaluated?
What civil liberties, once suspended, become difficult to restore? And what kind of institutional culture generates the confidence — the certainty — required to impose them?
Five years on, those questions have no satisfactory answers. They should be asked anyway. The next pandemic will not wait for us to finish being polite about the last one.