In the aftermath of the world’s catastrophic response to Covid-19, some governments have begun conducting inquiries into what went wrong. Yet owing to a combination of politics, face-saving, and outright corruption, these inquiries have generally been toothless. For example, a report published last year by the UK House of Commons concluded, backwardly, that if the UK had gone into strict lockdown three days sooner, disaster would have been averted.
Conclusions like these are as insulting to the public’s intelligence as was the response to Covid itself. The response to Covid led to the sharpest economic collapse since the Great Depression, global famine, a mental health crisis, runaway inflation, a transfer of over $3 trillion from the world’s poorest to the very richest, the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of young people, and the worst education crisis since the Second World War.
50 key questions, of how suddenly in dealing with Covid, established protocols were ignored and new ones were invented.