Scottish COVID-19 inquiry|1 Oct 2025 (morning session)
Panel. Former Supreme Court Justice Lord Jonathan Sumption. Professor David Miles. Professor James Wilson. Professor Michael Parker. Professor Nicole Busby. Professor Paul Cairney.
Introduction
Appearing across the next 2 days at the largest panel so far assembled at the inquiry is;
Professor David Miles, Professor of Financial Economics, Imperial College London
Professor James Wilson, Professor of Philosophy, University College London
Lord Sumption, historian and former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom
Professor Michael Parker, Professor of Bioethics, University of Oxford
Professor Nicole Busby, Professor in Human Rights, Equality and Justice, University of Glasgow
Professor Paul Cairney, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, University of Stirling
A chilling introduction by Stuart Gayle KC where the panicdemic crystal ball is rolled out with conclusions identical to those from the Bill and Melinda Gates funded Catastrophic Contagion exercise from October 2022.
‘‘The next pandemic may obviously effect children.’’
Here is what former UK Justice of the Supreme Court Lord Jonathan Sumption thinks about lockdown.
Testimony highlights
Blanket measures not justified.
Cost of lockdown in the hundreds of billions.
Cost of lockdown now impacting NHS, education and defence.
Adverse impacts to last decades.
‘‘The costs (of people not being able to make a living) are NOT trivial.’’
‘‘The reason why government’s since then (lockdown) have struggled to stay within fiscal limits is to a SIGNIFICANT extent because of those ENORMOUS costs (of lockdown).’’
‘‘The effects..will play out for DECADES.’’
-Professor David Miles
‘‘I think the World Bank estimate for the total financial cost is £410 billion in the UK.’’
-Lord Sumption
Fact check
The extraordinary cost of the UK lockdown figure quoted by Lord Sumption is indeed correct. 1
COVID lockdowns unprecedented in human history
Pandemics ‘a modern phenomenon’.
COVID response was experimental.
‘‘I’m not aware of ANY historical precedent for a lockdown in the sense of a measure which is designed to isolate BOTH healthy and unhealthy people.’’
‘‘This was an EXPERIMENTAL measure for which there was no precedent.’’
1960’s vs 2020
UK public now more risk averse aka snowflakey.
Restrictive measures considered in 60’s but not adopted.
Public now less concerned with freedom and more with safety.
‘‘What the history does tell is the public is ALOT more sensitive and ALOT more risk adverse now than it was in the 1960’s.’’
‘‘It was deliberatly decided that it was better not to worry people.’’
‘‘It reflects a quite significant change in public opinion.’’
Messaging in another pandemic
Public trust is key.
Public maybe more resistant to lockdown in future.
‘‘If lockdown is seen as a necessary action, and in some circumstances it WILL BE…public trust was important last time it will PROBABLY be harder to garner NEXT time i would imagine.’’
-Professor Nicole Busby
Gov/media scared ‘‘the shit’’ out of people
Extreme fear propaganda used during lockdown.
Sensible advice from CMO before lockdown.
‘‘Messaging should not be desinged simply to frighten people into complying…i think that there was too much of the use of messaging as propaganda to frighten people.’’
-Lord Sumption
‘‘In one of the very early statements i read in this inquiry it was from an elderly lady who had a number of medical conditions…she said in her statement the problem i had with the messasing i was receiving was i had the SHIT scared out of me.’’
-Stuart Gayle KC. Senior Counsel to the inquiry.
Statement highlights
Lord Jonathan Sumption:
‘‘No government should enter upon any radical program of coercion, without considering all relevant factors and having a clear idea of what all the consequences of different approaches are likely to be.’’
-2.2
‘‘In my view, in a lockdown regime vaccine passports raise no substantial ethical or legal concern.’’
-3.1
‘‘In my view the vaccines which became available towards the end of the pandemic were sufficiently effective for vaccination to provide an objective justification for distinguishing between those who have and have not been vaccinated.’’
-3.2
‘‘Lockdowns indiscriminately affect the entire population regardless of vulnerability and are therefore difficult to justify if more selective measures are available. Treating people differently affected by the pathogen as if they were the same is on the face of it irrational.’’
-6.2
‘‘Care homes present an insoluble problem. They cannot be sealed off from the outside world because staff have to come and go..
..And the consequences of isolation can be damaging to the residents’ health, since it lowers morale, increasing vulnerability to a range of diseases, and it seriously increases the incidence of dementia and its speed of its development.’’
-6.3 (d)
‘‘There is some epidemiological evidence that isolation may impede the development of natural immunity not only to COVID-19 but also to other diseases.’’
-6.3 (e)
‘‘The lockdowns adopted by many countries between 2020 and 2023 were a historically unique phenomenon. Human societies have quarantined infected persons throughout recorded history: see Leviticus 13 for an early example. The imposition of compulsory isolation for an entire community, the great majority of whom were apparently healthy, was new and untested.’’
-6.4
‘‘It is now acknowledged that the English government embarked on a policy of lockdowns without any cost benefit analysis and without any serious consideration of its consequences for anything other than the spread of COVID-19 itself.’’
-6.6
‘‘It is not uncommon for hospital capacity to be exceeded, for example in periodical winter flu epidemics. Should the consequent limitation on hospital capacity justify the lockdown of an entire population with limited exceptions at the discretion of ministers? I think not.’’
-7.3
‘‘The problem was that governments panicked and made new plans on the hoof after the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Italy, without regard to previous plans.’’
-12.2
‘‘Too much of government messaging during the 2020-2022 pandemic was propagandist and manipulative.’’
‘‘I do not believe that my fellow citizens need to be talked down to or treated like children. If you treat people as responsible adults, they are more likely to behave like responsible adults.’’
-14.1
Links to other witnesses statement evidence;
Thoughts
What has been stated…
Lockdowns experimental and caused severe harm to populations.
Public were ‘scared shitless’ due to propaganda not any virus.
Isolation of care home residents made them MORE suceptible to disease and lowered immune function.
FULL lockdowns still NOT ruled out in a future response.
Lockdown terminology should be removed. Others terms preferred in future messaging.
Restrictions of some kind all but inevitable in another pandemic.
A future pandemic could target children.
Lord Sumption remarked in relation to human rights that article 2 of the ECHR, the right to life is NOT a qualified right but article 8, the right to family and private life is. Rather worringly article 3 (another absolute right) of the ECHR, the prohibition of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment was NOT discussed. Conditons met have been confirmed at the Scottish inquiry.
Thanks for your attention.
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