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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