Tom Harwood: If you’re ever in a room where absolutely everyone agrees... you’re doing something very wrong

A damning new joint report from the Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees has slammed the UK’s early pandemic response. Whilst the vaccine rollout was acknowledged as among the best in the world, our first months of pandemic handling were among the worst.

We ignored warnings from elsewhere, particularly East Asia, and submitted to deadly scientific group think.

This is a story of a failure to challenge scientists. A failure of - too rigidly, too blindly ‘following the science’, whatever that means. A failure to challenge early scientific assumptions, to lift our eyes to more distant horizons, and to learn from east Asia. Japan never had to have a national lockdown.

Why? It understood an airborne disease is better dealt with through ventilation, masks, and avoiding crowds. Not by wiping down surfaces as we bizarrely obsessed with in the UK. Closing borders clearly limits viral spread, yet our scientists initially advised against that.

Preventing large gatherings clearly slows the spread too, yet our scientists initially advised to keep them. Of course, if you are to lock down at all, the sooner you do so the shorter it needs to be to squash out the virus.

Pull the trigger earlier and there’s less infection to get rid of. You can get back to normality sooner. Yet our scientists urged delay. Delay that led to a longer lockdown, and more social, health, and economic harms.

More than we needed to endure. At the start, the only politician who genuinely challenged that scientific group think in the UK was an independent. It was Rory Stewart. In every nation of the UK politicians of all parties in, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, failed.

Particularly on care homes. Yet now, remarkably, the Labour Party is trying to make political capital out of it all. This morning Keir Starmer shared a message calling the committees’ findings “A damning report into monumental errors made by ministers in responding to the pandemic.”

But what was the Labour Party saying at the time, back in March 2020? Well the Chair of the Labour Party Anneliese Dodds appeared on a BBC radio programme on 8 March 2020.

She was disagreeing with Rory Stewart’s calls for restrictions - he was on the same programme, and instead she the Government’s strategy. She said "I’ve been very impressed by the work of the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Advisor. The problem is if you move immediately into, for example measures like stopping large scale events, that can have unintended consequences."

In other words, she was following the scientists. Opposing stopping large scale events on 8 March 2020. Indeed, Dodds went on to explicitly defend the government’s lethargic Action Plan in the same interview.

I don’t think this is a reflection of passivity, just to make that clear. The Action Plan that the Government has set out, and I mean okay the Government are of a different political persuasion to mine, but they have stated that at some point we will have to shift from the containment stage to the delay stage.

They set out the risks from potentially doing that too early.

It’s clear that politicians of all parties, with the exception perhaps of perhaps Rory Stewart, got this wrong. The Labour Party and SNP just as much as the Tories.

The lesson to draw from this is precisely the opposite lesson than that which far too many have been parroting throughout this crisis.

The lesson of our early response to this crisis is not "follow the scientists", not blindly listen to what they say. It’s talk to the scientists, challenge the scientists, work with the scientists, and if you’re ever in a room where absolutely everyone agrees - no questions asked – you’re doing something very wrong.