After an epic journey involving two lorries, three flights and two boats, an eagerly awaited cargo finally reached one of the remotest islands on earth. By the time the blue cool box made it from a depot in Merseyside to the Pitcairn Islands, the volcanic outcrop in the South Pacific had been cut off from the world for 14 months.
In the most extreme example of using the geographic advantages of island status to avoid contagious disease, local authorities had shut the borders as soon as the pandemic began. The contents of the plastic container that arrived aboard a shabby-looking skiff – enough phials of Astra Zeneca’s finest jabs for all 36 inhabitants – were regarded as the way out.
If Matt Hancock had his way, next time there’s a whiff of a nasty virus heading our way, the UK would follow Pitcairn’s example. Giving evidence to the public inquiry this week, the former health secretary claimed the single greatest lesson to be learned from the Covid crisis is not that lockdowns are a disaster but that they should be the first tool plucked from the box.
In future, the UK should use its island status “more aggressively,” he declared. Next time, he wants lockdown action that is “wider, earlier and more stringent than feels comfortable at the time”.
If anyone still took the man seriously, this would be terrifying. What happened on Pitcairn – where cutting off all ties with the outside world was relatively painless – perfectly illustrates the ridiculousness of his pandemic planning prescription.
At first, the strategy worked beautifully. While everywhere else was in meltdown, the British overseas territory – some 5,500km off the coast of New Zealand – had zero Covid. Closing the borders was hardly a great culture shock: there are more migratory birds than day-trippers at the best of times.
It barely has an economy to crash. In any case, Rishi Sunak, the then chancellor, was as generous to British citizens in this part of Polynesia as he was with furloughed British workers, sending them 500 US dollars each a month for essentials that arrived by supply ship.
Pitcairn finally reopened
Rather sweetly, the islanders put their faith in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to come to the rescue, Charlene Warren, Pitcairn’s mayor, voicing her confidence that “Her Majesty’s Government” would eventually roll out the vaccination programme to British overseas territories – as indeed it did.
The arrival of the jabs one stormy Wednesday morning in May 2021 heralded the beginning of the end of the islands’ isolation. Allowing a generous margin for the vaccines to kick in, Pitcairn finally reopened to international travel in May 2022. And guess what? Within a few weeks, one islander after another came down with Covid.
Lockdown had worked – but only while it lasted. As the long-suffering population of China can also attest, highly infectious diseases that are temporarily suppressed by shutting down society have a nasty habit of roaring back.
As each day passes, evidence mounts of the dreadful cost of imprisoning millions of healthy people in their own homes. Many of those who not only failed to question the policy at the time but angrily demanded yet more restrictions are beginning to admit that they were wrong. Not so Hancock, who is doubling down.
Shutting his eyes and ears to all the awful facts and figures about our broken economy and broken healthcare system, he says he would do it all again and again.
The single biggest mistake in pandemic planning, he claims, was to have accepted what all the major international health bodies had always argued until the panic of March 2020: that highly infectious viruses like Covid 19 cannot be stopped in their tracks.
As is now abundantly clear, this was sound advice. To Hancock however, it smacks of a “lack of ambition” – a deficit of which he certainly does not suffer. Not having lockdown at the first sign of trouble was, he argues, a “colossal failure”.
Among countless frustrations with the multimillion-pound public inquiry is the way in which star witnesses such as the former health secretary are allowed to talk such twaddle without any challenge from counsel.
Utility of lockdowns went unchallenged
One after another, key figures have made assertions about the impact of so-called “austerity” and the role of the state without any pushback, while the inquiry focuses on minutiae, such as whether they did or did not attend some meeting or other. Accordingly, what Hancock loftily referred to as his “central contention” about the utility of lockdowns went totally unchallenged.
What Hugo Keith, the lead KC, might have asked is what happens if governments follow his prescription, making lockdowns the default response, and no vaccine is developed?
Long after it became clear that Covid was only likely to be fatal to the very elderly and vulnerable, there was no guarantee of a jab. There rarely is.
Over the last four decades, there have been multiple viral pandemics: AIDS/HIV (1981); the influenza virus H1N1 (2002); Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS, 2012); Ebola (2013); and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS, 2003). No commercial vaccine is available for any of these horrible diseases.
Had the grand plan in the face of these threats been for everyone who lives on an island to hide under the duvet until scientists and pharmaceutical companies worked their magic, we’d still be there today.
Thankfully Hancock is no longer in charge, or stockpiling pasta and loo roll would be an entirely rational response right now. Can someone please take pity on us all – and buy the man a one-way ticket to the Pitcairn Islands?
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Another nasty virus on its way? Matt Hancock wants to do it all again - The Telegraph
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