Hallett Inquiry Report: Of, by, and for Lawyers

Hallett Inquiry Report: Of, by, and for Lawyers
by Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone Institute

On 20 November 2025, the Hallett inquiry into the UK Covid experience published its 800-page Module 2 report. An inquiry of, by, and for lawyers, it is a carefully curated political whitewash with no forensic exploration of the truth and no hope of any accountability. 

It collapses the most consequential public policy decisions in British history into a problem of mere timing caused by process failures. Far from revealing what happened, it is a testament to the refusal of the state to admit error. Many leaders are happy to engage in serial apologies and consider reparations in the name of the state they represent for incidents of alleged wrongdoings deep in the past well before their time, especially if these demonstrate their progressive pieties. But they seem incapable of acknowledging, saying sorry for, and offering compensation for instances of states behaving badly during their own time in office.

Far from mollifying critics looking for acknowledgement and accountability, the report will bring back the anger and rage associated with governments’ Covid excesses. It reveals the chair, former Court of Appeal Judge Baroness Heather Hallett, to be science- and numeracy-illiterate, with an inability to grasp complex facts and little capacity for logical reasoning. ‘Had a mandatory lockdown been imposed’ one week earlier, the report concluded, ‘modelling has established that the number of deaths in England in the first wave up until 1 July 2020 would have been reduced by 48% – equating to approximately 23,000 fewer deaths’ (Vol. I, p. 5).

This is a truly astonishing assertion. It demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of modelling. They do not ‘establish’ any conclusions. Rather, they are built on assumptions and their outputs are speculative and often contentious forecasts – guesstimates – dressed in pretend mathematical precision.

Professor Neil Ferguson, whose modelling is relied on for the assertion, is widely discredited for a history of predictions on other diseases that proved to be excessively alarmist by orders of magnitude. Every time his Covid modeling was able to be measured against reality, it came up short. Sweden falsified the modeling which predicted the loss of 35,000 lives in the first wave without immediate lockdown; the actual figure was 6,000. It saved more lives than the UK. Rather than an exception that proved the rule, Sweden was the control case that falsified the narrative by sticking to the pre-pandemic script and therefore must never be mentioned.

Besides, Ferguson’s paper on which Hallett relies also conceded that an earlier lockdown could have resulted in a larger second wave by deferring and not averting further infections. There is another way of showing that inconvenient truth. On 5 May 2021, in an article on the Pearls and Irritations site in Australia, I wrote that Figure 1 is ‘graphic evidence of the policy-invariance of Covid-19 with regard to non-pharmaceutical interventions, where the infection, hospitalisation, and mortality curves have followed their own logic and remarkably similar trajectories.’

A second interesting feature about the graph is the broad convergence of the end of the first curve by the end of summer in 2020. Czechia had instituted lockdowns early, and its performance until that date, enthusiastically lauded in the MSM, appears to justify Hallett’s claim that more lives could have been saved had the UK gone into strict lockdown a week earlier. But the explosion of Czechia’s mortality toll in autumn 2020 is the truer picture, decisively invalidating Hallett’s assertion of the net difference in mortality. As David Livermore, a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia, comments in the Daily Sceptic in his article on the Hallett report: ‘At best [Czechia’s] early lockdown delayed deaths; at worst it displaced the pandemic into the winter when people, with less sunlight and lower vitamin D levels, are more vulnerable to respiratory viruses.’

Hallett’s overall, seemingly predetermined conclusion, at a cost of £192 million (US $250 million), is that the lockdowns were too little and too late. Prime Minister Boris Johnson should have panicked sooner and deeper. She failed to engage with any cost-benefit analysis, refused to assess the full range of short- and long-term harms of lockdowns and wilfully ignored the contrary example of coercion-lite Sweden, whose key pandemic control measures were recommended guidance, whose Covid and all-cause mortality metrics were not worse than average European results on any study and significantly better than almost all in most studies, but whose collateral harms were considerably less.

Human beings are family- and community-oriented social animals. Sharing food and drink at home or in restaurants, enjoying the cinema, watching live sport, appreciating a concert or a play are not optional add-ons but fundamental to our daily life as human beings. The misnamed ‘social distancing’ by contrast is profoundly anti-social and rubs against every fibre of human civilisation.

By way of analogy, consider deaths from road injuries. According to Our World in Data, in 2021 there were 1.2 million road fatalities worldwide: 52,800 in Europe, 41,300 in the US, 3,300-4,300 each in France, Germany, and Italy, 1,600 in the UK, and 218,400 in India. By definition, thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of deaths could be averted in individual countries and over a million in the world by banning cars altogether.

Such a ban is not even remotely on the agenda for consideration because of the absurdity of focusing on one single-cause mortality at the cost of all other social and economic variables that underpin modern social life. Yet, Baroness Hallett clearly believes that the Johnson government should have focused solely on Covid deaths, collapsed the National Health Service into a Covid Health Service, and simply ignored the collateral costs and damage to the very fabric of British life just as she continues to do in her report.

Hallett is also critical of the 2021 Omicron variant lockdown that was rejected because had the variant been more severe or the vaccine less effective, ‘the consequences would have been disastrous’ (Vol. I, pp. 8, 438). The scientists were wrong, the government was proven correct, but the Baroness is so much in awe of the former that she criticises the latter for its right judgment call. Remarkable. On this logic, we should never be permitted to cross the street even when the light turns green at a pedestrian crossing. Quelle horreur. Just because we made it across safely does not mean that we could not have been killed in the endeavour.

The long-suffering British taxpayer may be owed a full refund of the £192 million expenditure racked by the inquiry thus far, and the government should shut it down forthwith.

Hallett Inquiry Report: Of, by, and for Lawyers
by Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society