The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has released its report, concluding that the government’s pandemic response was flawed due to one thing – timing.
The Inquiry has learned nothing. They learned nothing because they didn’t want to learn anything for fear of exposing too much.
The Inquiry’s conclusions are a comforting fairy tale for the people who caused the damage, Roger Bate says.
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They’ve Learned Nothing – Because That Would Expose Too Much
By Roger Bate, as published by Brownstone Institute on 23 November 2025
The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has finally released the core political chapters of its long-awaited report. After nearly three years of hearings, millions of documents and tens of millions of pounds spent on legal fees, the conclusion is now unmistakably clear: They’ve learned nothing, as I detail in my latest research.
Worse, they may not want to learn. The Inquiry’s structure, its analytical frame, even its carefully curated narrative all point in the same direction: away from the possibility that Britain’s pandemic response was fundamentally misguided, and toward the politically safer claim that ministers simply “acted too late.”
On 20 November 2025, Jay Bhattacharya captured this perfectly in a single sentence on X: “Fact check; not locking down at all (like Sweden) would have saved lives in UK. Hard to believe how much money the UK spent on its sham covid inquiry.” That tweet was provocative – but it was also accurate in its diagnosis of the Inquiry’s deeper pathologies.
The Inquiry’s Central Mistake: Asking the Wrong Question
From the outset, the Inquiry has framed Britain’s pandemic response as a timing problem. Lockdowns were assumed to be necessary and effective; the only question was whether politicians implemented them quickly enough. The result is a dry recitation of process failures and personality clashes inside Downing Street, all of which are said to have delayed the inevitable “stay-at-home” order.
But that framing was never neutral. It was baked into the Inquiry’s analytical choices – especially its uncritical reliance on the same family of models that drove the UK into lockdown in March 2020.
The centrepiece of that modelling tradition is Imperial College London’s Report 9, the document that forecast hundreds of thousands of UK deaths absent stringent lockdowns. That report assumed near-homogeneous mixing, limited voluntary behaviour change and high fatality rates across the population. Under those assumptions, lockdown becomes not a political choice but a mathematical necessity.
The Inquiry has now rerun the same machinery and, unsurprisingly, produced the same conclusion.
Its headline claim – that delaying lockdown by a week caused roughly 23,000 additional deaths – is not a historical finding. It is not based on observational data. It is simply the output of an Imperial-style model with a different start date.
The Inquiry has restated the model, not tested it.
The Evidence They Chose Not to See
The Inquiry’s blindness becomes fully apparent when we ask the obvious comparative question: if the lockdown paradigm were correct, what would we expect to see among countries that refused to lock down?
We would expect chaos. We would expect mass hospital collapse. We would expect mortality catastrophes to dwarf the UK.
We would expect, in short, to see Sweden in ruins.
Instead, we see the opposite.
Sweden kept primary schools open, avoided stay-at-home orders, relied heavily on voluntary behaviour and preserved civil liberties throughout the pandemic. After correcting early care-home errors, Sweden recorded one of the lowest age-adjusted excess mortality rates in Europe.
The Swedish experience is not a footnote. It is not an “exception.” It is the control case – the real-world test of the lockdown paradigm.
And it falsifies it.
A serious Inquiry would have begun with Sweden. It would have asked why a country that rejected lockdowns achieved better mortality outcomes than Britain while preserving education, normal life and basic freedoms. It would have integrated that evidence into every chapter. It would have examined whether voluntary behaviour changes, targeted protection and risk-based messaging can substitute for mass coercion.
Instead, Sweden is barely mentioned. When it appears at all, it is described as an anomaly. The Inquiry behaves as though Sweden is politically inconvenient – not analytically essential.
Because it is.
The Modelling Was Wrong. The Inquiry Can’t Admit It.
If the Inquiry were genuinely interested in learning, it would examine whether the models that drove the UK’s response were flawed. It would review the assumptions underpinning Report 9. It would test them against real-world data from multiple countries. It would commission adversarial modelling groups. It would bring in critics. It would examine alternative frameworks.
It did none of these things.
The behaviour of the public is a perfect example. Imperial-style models assume that people remain near-normal in their social contacts without legal mandates. But mobility data, workplace activity and school attendance show that Britons began adjusting their behaviour weeks before Boris Johnson held the lockdown press conference. High-risk people adapted earliest. Businesses reacted to perceived risks earlier than the state. Families responded faster than the Cabinet Office.
The models were wrong about behaviour. Yet the Inquiry’s analysis still treats people as if they only respond to orders, not information.
The result is a fantasy counterfactual: a Britain that would have carried on as normal in March 2020 had the government not intervened. That Britain never existed.
Where Is the Cost–Benefit Analysis?
The Inquiry promised to evaluate the “relative benefits and disbenefits” of non-pharmaceutical interventions. It has not done so. There is no integrated accounting of:
- the millions of missed cancer screenings;
- the explosion in mental-health morbidity;
- the delayed cardiovascular care;
- the long-term educational loss from school closures;
- the widening inequality gaps;
- the years-long damage to the NHS backlog; or,
- the economic scarring that will shorten future lives.
Lockdowns always look good when you only count covid deaths. But public health is cumulative. It is intertemporal. Saving a life today by destroying ten years of someone’s earning power is not a victory.
The Inquiry refuses to engage with these trade-offs. It is easier to condemn “late lockdowns” than to ask whether lockdowns were the wrong tool altogether.
The Real Reason the Inquiry Learned Nothing
The central failure of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry is not analytical. It is institutional.
A real investigation would expose catastrophic judgment errors across the political and scientific establishment. It would show that ministers outsourced strategy to a narrow modelling group. It would reveal that the harms of lockdowns were not only foreseeable but foreseen. It would vindicate critics who were ridiculed or censored. It would anger parents whose children suffered educational harm. It would enrage families whose loved ones died because routine care was suspended. It would shatter public trust in Whitehall and SAGE.
That is precisely what the Inquiry cannot do.
Instead, it offers a politically safe narrative. The strategy was sound. The problem was timing. Ministers were slow. Advisors were frustrated. Downing Street was chaotic. But the solution next time is simple: lock down earlier, lock down harder, lock down smarter.
It is a comforting fairy tale for the people who caused the damage.
The Truth Is Already Clear
Bhattacharya’s November 2025 tweet may have been blunt, but it crystallised what the Inquiry is unwilling to say. Sweden shows that not locking down at all could have saved British lives – not merely reduced collateral damage, but saved lives.
That is the final heresy. And that is why the Inquiry cannot confront it.
Learning would expose too much.
The UK did not simply lock down too late. It locked down unnecessarily. The Inquiry should have been a reckoning. Instead, it became a shield – protecting institutions rather than illuminating truth.
Britain deserved better. The world deserved better.
Until we admit what went wrong, we remain doomed to repeat it.
About the Author
Roger Bate is a Brownstone Fellow, Senior Fellow at the International Centre for Law and Economics (Jan 2023-present), Board member of Africa Fighting Malaria (September 2000-present), and Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs (January 2000-present).
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There was no pandemic. There was no virus because virology is about as valid as leeches. Look into how they ‘isolate’ a virus…its utter bollox. People were murdered in care homes with midazolam and morphine. The tests were totally bogus. And politicians were having parties, taking off their face nappies when they thought no one was looking. Fancy walking into a cafe with a mask on and believing that when you sat down it was OK to take it off…little businesses closed, big business open? BS. Those stupid screens. The floor markers. All those signs everywhere. Where did they come from
All planned. All laughable when you think about. A murderous not a vaccine that has killed and injured millions….as far as I am concerned no government that indulged is legitimate. I am not property of the state. I am not beholden to it. I withdraw my consent to be governed. All they have is violence. We outnumber them hugely. If they offer violence we shall repay with interest. Time to get rid of them and start again.
Well said m8 spot on
That’s because its a clown show for the ignorant masses..whose brains are turning to soup as the slab jab slowly fries their brains
An honest inquiry would have dealt with these issues:
Was there really a pandemic caused by person to person spread of a pathogen? When the epidemiological data is analysed it is clear that there was no pandemic.
What caused the excess deaths during the alleged “first wave”? It is clear that these deaths were iatrogenic and entirely the result of alleged counter measures.
Is Covid-19 really a new and novel disease? It is clear that Covid-19 is a misdiagnosis based on common symptoms and false positive test results. The “flu” completely disappeared in 2020 which should tell all thinking people something.
Is the PCR test fit for purpose? An external peer review in 2020 clearly showed that it isn’t and that all positives are false positives.
Has the SARS-CoV-2 virus been shown to exist as per the scientific method? Many people have written extensively about the fraudulent and pseudoscientific methods used by virologists. SARS-CoV-2 has never been shown to exist let alone cause any disease.
Are the modified RNA jabs necessary, safe and effective? No on all counts. This was predicted before a single jab was given. Sadly the data clearly shows that those predictions were correct.
I agree, the BIG problem is, there is an acute shortage of “all thinking people”.
I only ever come across “thinking people” on sites like this, not in ‘real life’ as it were…I wonder, why is this?
According to the Globalist Elites, too many USELESS EATER raoming the earth and exhausted the resources, resources that meant for the elites alone.
They OWNED the world and humans are expandable.
The Georgia Guidestones said the human population must maintained under 700 millions but world population exceed the threshold by 8.9 Billions.
Con-vid plandemic was to unsure georgia guidestone are followed. Need to kill Billions. So far, the vaxx jab roll-out was 70% successful.
By middle year 2026, we will be having glorious DAILY live of festive ambulance sirens due to vaxxed people having multiple health problems.
The common emergency will be Heart-Attack.
Hospiltal will be crowded with young people having Auto-Immune disease.
BTW: Where is A Yousleh Zeeter..? Are having “useless-eater” somewhere else…?
I am in England and these are my thoughts about the “Covid Pandemic” as it was unfolded to us.
I first thought how did these minute, invisible to the naked eye covid particles suddenly appear like a blanket all over the world as if from nowhere.
We were told to follow certain protocols (psyop) to prevent the spread of the “disease” such as “follow the science” (which to this day has never been presented to us) “keep your distance”, “protect the NHS” (National Health Service) “sing “Happy Birthday” while washing our hands.(I bet whoever thought that one up received a hefty bonus) etc.
But my curiosity was roused by the behaviour of these minute, invisible to the naked eye, and never yet seen covid particles, which I think has been overlooked, so taking what we were told at face value this is what I came up with.
We were told to open all the windows and sit outside if possible so the wind could blow all those nasty particles away from us but there was no mention that the wind could be blowing them towards us as well!
Then we were told they hover in the air like smoke. Since when did smoke hover in the air? At the time, due to the hot weather, fires were breaking out everywhere on open land and the news was showing voluminous clouds of smoke billowing up in the air carrying ash, leaves and whatever else with them but apparently “covid” particles are so heavy they can’t be lifted by hot air and at the same time are so light they can resist the pull of gravity which even minute specks of dust can’t do! So somehow they can adjust their weight or how else could they hover? Maybe they have wings like bees but I don’t recall seeing anything remotely resembling wings in the computer generated images of the so called particles that were presented to us. Also bees remain horizontal when hovering but the cgi showed the “covid” particles as being spherical in shape so how would they know which way up they were? Maybe they have eyes as well.
Then we were told they could stick to surfaces. How? Do they have suction pads? Again the cgi showed nothing remotely resembling suction pads.
So to recap these amazing particles can choose to be blown by the wind, hover, rest, or catch a ride by attaching themselves to static or moving surfaces depending on how the mood takes them, and have the mechanisms by which to do so! What does this imply? Self-awareness, consciousness, decision making. And yet “The Science that was presumably followed” to prove this was never given to us, but just presented to us as “an oven-ready turkey”.
May I now say a word or two about Prof. Neil Ferguson and his disastrous computer generated predictions:-
2001 Foot and mouth. Predicted no. of deaths 150,000 Actual no. 2000
If you ran a commercial enterprise and needed a prediction e.g. an ice cream company and you wanted the expected number of sales for the upcoming summer would be you happy with the result? Would you use them again? The govt. were and did.
2004 BSE. Predicted 50,000. Actual 177.
Again if you ran a commercial enterprise would you use them a second time? The govt. did.
2005 Bird Flu. Predicted 150,000. Actual 282.
Once more if you ran a commercial enterprise would you use them a third time? The govt. did.
2009 Swine Flu. Predicted 65,000. Actual 457.
Again would you use them a fourth time? The govt. did.
2020 Covid.
Yet again would you use them a fifth time? The govt, did. Predicted 500,000. Actual. Who knows? What with all the jiggery-pokery that went on. Wouldn’t you have at least got a second opinion. The govt. DIDN’T! WHY NOT? Was this just crass stupidity or what?
( As an example I recall a case of one poor chap who within two weeks of being released from hospital after suffering from “covid” was riding his motorbike and was smashed into by a drunk driver, being instantly killed and the cause of his death was put down as “covid” but no scientific evidence was forthcoming to prove “covid” was the cause of death and being hit by an out of control car wasn’t!). We were bombarded daily with the number of bodies that were piling up. A temporary morgue was erected not far from where I live and never used. We were told it would take months or possibly years, if I recall correctly, to bury/cremate all of those bodies.
What happened to them? Did they just vanish into thin air? We were never kept informed as to how the burials were progressing. I remember John O’Looney (an independent undertaker} reported no dramatic increase in the number of funerals he was employed to carry out. Then there were all the Nightingale Hospitals (temporary hospitals that were setup) but never used
In June 2021 Boris Johnson welcomed world leaders to the G7 Summit in Carbis Bay, Cornwall. BJ and his wife Carrie walked out onto the beach to welcome the others for a photo shot. They dutifully greeted each other by touching elbow to elbow but some of the women wore short sleeved dresses or sleeveless tops including Carrie Johnson so although the “covid particles” weere allowed to pass from bare hand to bare hand they were forbidden to pass from bare elbow to bare elbow!
This was the foundation on which all the sadistic suffering, physical, mental and economic, past and ongoing, unnecessary deaths, some horrific like the midazolam murders, and all the other twisted manipulative rubbish, corruption, OOPS!, sorry, I mean “malfeasance” of tax payers money, we suffered and are still suffering from was based.
Hopefully when the next pandemic (and we are assured by that nice Mr Gates it is not a question of if but when) we will be better prepared to handle it and demand to be given the SCIENTIFIC PPOOF we will no doubt be told has been followed.
My thoughts go out to all of those who have suffered and are still suffering from this evil. But take hope that evil contains the seed of it’s own destruction.
Peace and Hope to whoever may read this and all those who don’t!.
Absolutely spot on! I was going to post something similar but I will add that if you were 1.99m’s from someone the particles would attack you….If you moved a cm, they’d leave you alone….If you sat down in a restaurant, they’d hover above you until you stood up and if you went the wrong way down a supermarket one way system, they’d be all over you….They only seemed to congregate around small businesses, so they had to be closed but the big chains were left alone….and no one knew they’d been infested with these particles until a test showed them up!
You have to realise that Ferguson’s Imperial College was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation! Then we look at the SAGE members (most were behavioural psychologists) and all had invested interests in pharmaceutical companies…You had all the contracts for PPE and the like given to friends and families of the politicians, billions spent on advertising and signage and 24hr indoctrination, sorry, news coverage. Covid was not only the biggest test of subservience but also the biggest transfer of money in history….
Thanks for filling in the gaps
A Yousleh Zeeter!
I’m sure we could come up with more if we tried.