Covid and the very fine performance of Dominic Cummings

 

Yesterday, like so many of you, I was glued to the PC (I don’t have a telly), watching Dominic Cummings’ hearing – all 7 hours of it. What stamina! What performance! The tear-choked voice, the ‘humility’, the repeated confessions of having made mistakes: what exquisite drama! One thing it certainly was not: a damp squib. 

First though, a big disclaimer: I have, on purpose, not read any reports, ‘analyses’, interpretations (a.k.a. opinion pieces) and ‘fact checks’ in the MSM. A glance at the headlines was sufficiently stomach-turning. I avoided the early articles yesterday evening – well, my eyes had mostly given up service anyway – and I avoided them this morning. We have watched the whole thing ourselves, just as they esteemed MSM writers did. We are perfectly capable of thinking for ourselves, of drawing our own conclusions. We can do without the spin from the biased MSM.

Before the hearing I wondered if the mud-slinging, the breathless ‘reports’ based on Cummings’ tweets, the pre-emptive spin the broadsheets indulged in, might meant that the direction of the inquiry had already been determined by the chairmen of the committees, Mr Greg Clark MP for the Science and Technology Committee and Mr Hunt MP for the Health and Social Care Committee. I wondered if certain questions wouldn’t even be asked. It turned out that this was indeed the case. 

Before I get to that, I’ll mention two things DC actually did say. These are remarks he let drop, meant to show that he, DC, wasn’t alone in his critique of both BJ and Matt-the-Han. For example, DC mentioned many times that the Cabinet Secretary agreed with him. At that time – until September  2020 – this was Mark Sedwill, well known to us from his Brexit-blocking work in Ms May’s cabinet. And here is DC-the-Brexiteer, on first name basis with ‘Mark’!

Even more jaw-dropping was DC’s remark that ‘he got Simon Case’ into No 10. Simon Case is the current Cabinet Secretary, the Sedwill replacement. This sits ill with DC’s continuous ‘humble’ statements of not having been the ‘most powerful man’ in No 10. How can such humble person actually ‘get’ the replacement for the most powerful civil serpent unless he actually is far more powerful than he maintained?

This gives a different colour to DC’s testimony. I’ll also point out that he referred to a certain Mr B. Gates to whom he spoke, for example when saying that Gates told him that the work on the vaccines shouldn’t be done in sequence but in parallel. DC followed that advice, and as we all know, that’s how the vaccines were developed and produced – for good or ill, the reckoning on that is still out. I’ll mention in passing that DC told the MPs that ‘we’ could’ve had the vaccine much earlier if ‘we’ had started the development in January. 2020. Oh? Was that due to DC having been in contact with Mr Gates even then or even earlier? That’s another question which was not asked. 

There were more unasked questions, for example if the SAGEs, never mind DC, had made any effort to investigate treatments for covid so that patients didn’t end up in ICUs. Were Hunt, were the MPs too dazzled by DC to ask – or were they more intent on posturing, showing their oh so critical attitude? 

There were also no pertinent questions asked about the role of SPI-B. That was astonishing since DC kept saying that the many anti-lockdownians in government and Whitehall, especially during the run-up to the first lockdown in March 2020, were arguing that we, the people, wouldn’t swallow the South Korean or Taiwanese restrictions of our civil liberties. So how come we did knuckle under? Hunt did mention SPI-B but DC was perfectly scathing about behavioural scientists. Thus that line of inquiry fizzled out like yon proverbial damp squib. Astonishing – utterly astonishing. 

Let me also note here that DC, so full of praise for South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore and their Test & Trace regime, did not mention Japan. Not once! For me this underlines strongly my understanding of DC as a technocrat who would and in fact did sacrifice democracy on the altar of covid. 

Even more astonishing was the fact that DC, so obsessed by ‘data’, clearly didn’t question the covid data which we all know to be questionable at the very least. He seems to have accepted the scare models as gospel truth – not just the early Ferguson model but the later one in September last year when Whitty told the nation that we’d all die if no lockdown was put in place. DC had swallowed whole their statement that the NSH would ‘be destroyed’ by all those covid patients. I am not really astonished  – DC is, after all, a self-confessed ‘fanboi’ of Vallance whom he kept praising. 

Another point DC made repeatedly was ‘groupthink’. He kept beating his breast, figuratively and in retrospect, wailing that they’d all been in a bubble. To me, this looks like a cheap way of deflecting blame: all the SAGE and No 10 bubble dwellers couldn’t help but do as they did. However, should such an intelligent guy like DC not have noted this groupthink much earlier? Didn’t he realise that there’s one excellent way of getting out of groupthink, namely by breaking up that group, by introducing others into this group?

No, he couldn’t – because I regard DC as the main creator of that bubble, with the help and support of Vallance and ‘Mark’ Sedwill. Being inside this self-created bubble he couldn’t destroy it at that time. 

There’s another remark DC dropped in an aside which illustrates this perfectly. In the run-up to the autumn lockdowns in September, he told the MPs, that somehow BJ had been talking to ‘that chap Henegan from Oxford’, and to ‘someone called Gupta or something’. The contempt he had for those two eminent scientists was dripping from those words.

How it is possible for a ‘data guy’ to so disdain Professor Henegan, Director of the CEBM – that’s ‘evidence-based’, Cummings, you plonker – is jaw-dropping. That DC didn’t even think it worthwhile to recall the name of Professor Sunetra Gupta is even worse. This cannot be blamed on some misogynist streak in DC because he kept praising ‘brilliant’ women who did ‘brilliant work’ creating databases and stuff. For me it’s a clear indication that the lockdown bubble dweller Cummings was incapable of taking anything on board which went against SAGE and especially Vallance. That is unforgivable. 

Speaking of unforgivable, I must mention DC’s sickening attitude to human beings when he talked about vaccines which he alleged could’ve been produced earlier. Mentioning that the discovery of the mRNA vaccines had been reported in January 2020, he said that trials, including ‘human challenge’ trials where people would’ve been injected with the covid virus to see if the vaccines ‘worked’, should have been set up then. He said that ‘financial incentives’ could’ve been given to those injected with the virus and that e.g. £1m could’ve been given to those who died in that trial. I’m feeling sick again just writing about this.

Rounding up, the whole exercise was a perfect ‘political drama’, a perfect performance by DC, from his tear-choked voice when begging for forgiveness for his mistakes and ‘failures’, to his acerbic accusations, especially of Hancock but also of the PM who ‘didn’t listen’. Btw – Hancock will be in that ‘hot seat’ in two week’s time – that should be interesting!

DC’s praise for ‘brilliant Sunak’ and his ‘brilliant treasury team’, DC’s praise for Dominic Raab who ‘did brilliantly’ when the PM was in hospital clearly demonstrated that this was as much about politics and about sticking knives into backs as an investigation of what happened from the time covid appeared. Did this performance produce enough evidence for ‘lessons’ which should be learned? Yes, if one wanted to know how not to do it, how not to use data which were more than questionable. I still cannot believe that this hugely intelligent ‘data guy’ didn’t query these data once, not once! 

There’s much more meat in DC’s testimony. I won’t let this drop and will write about this later. I’ll just mention that he totally undermined the spin about SAGE being innocent, not having wanted a lockdown – I wrote about that on Tuesday (link). His Uriah Heep like ‘umbleness was stomach-turning. His arrogance towards those not inside his charmed circle, his own bubble, was breathtaking. It’s no surprise that he attached himself to and listened to such figures like Vallance, Sedwill and Gates – he humbly confessed that he didn’t know anything about anything and thus obviously needed the input from those powerful men. Where were DC’s powers of critical thought in all this? Gone AWOL?

My take-home impression was that from the start DC was driven by fear – not his self-confessed fear of political fall-outs from making wrong decisions but plain personal fear of dying of covid – a fear which was clearly driven by those early photos from China and Italy.

It pains me to have to conclude that BJ’s political instincts were right – we could have done much better had he not listened so much to Cummings. 

 

KBO!

 

[There’s a transcript of the proceedings of the 1st and 2nd session and most of the 3rd session here in the DM.]

 

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