UK Covid Inquiry accused of systematic omissions and pre-determined conclusions

In a hard-hitting presentation to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Pandemic Response and Recovery last week, a leading medical expert has accused the official UK Covid-19 Inquiry chaired by Baroness Hallett of deliberately excluding evidence on lockdowns, care-home policy, infection fatality rates and vaccines.

Consultant pathologist Dr Clare Craig said: “The UK Inquiry examined political decision-making first, endorsing the eventual policies as essentially sound, or even insufficiently strict. As Baroness Hallett considers ample evidence of severe policy-induced harm, the recommendations made by the Inquiry will be constrained by that endorsement. Viral infections have a predictable trajectory with predictable peaks. Detailed US wastewater data, for example, continues to demonstrate this beyond doubt. No credible evidence exists, globally, that lockdowns or other policies had any effect on such waves. Plenty of evidence exists that lockdowns, justified by flawed modelling, resulted in catastrophic, sometimes fatal harms.

“Baroness Hallett has acknowledged the serious harms caused by lockdowns but nevertheless her Module 2 report stated that in her view the only way to avoid lockdowns was ‘to take sufficiently decisive and robust action’ through earlier ‘circuit breaker restrictions’ - lockdowns to prevent lockdowns. Furthermore, she has criticised politicians for making vital decisions based solely on modelling. Nevertheless, she stated, based solely on modelling, that 23,000 lives would have been saved by ‘mandatory lockdown …on or immediately after 16 March 2020.”

Dr Craig went on to highlight several other grave concerns in her presentation:

Care homes

• The “generational slaughter” in care homes was wrongly attributed solely to hospital discharges. Genetic sequencing proves sealing care homes did not delay the spread of covid because it was airborne, exposing everyone simultaneously.

• Blanket Do Not Resuscitate orders (including on young adults with learning disabilities), denial of visitors, withdrawal of routine GP visits, staff absence, denial of antibiotics, and widespread prescribing of midazolam and morphine for respiratory infection caused excess deaths.

• People with learning disabilities suffered 3.7-fold excess mortality which even after age and health adjustment was 70% above expected levels. Viruses, unlike people, do not discriminate based on mental capacity. This alone ought to be a gigantic scandal.

Infection Fatality Rate (IFR)

• Fear of the virus led to policy-induced deaths through denial of normal care and over use of respiratory-depressant pain-killing drugs on patients struggling to get enough air. These were wrongly labelled “covid deaths”. This created a lethal feedback loop. Unnecessary iatrogenic (doctor-caused) deaths inflated perceived IFR leading to more fear leading to harsher policies leading to more deaths.

• So far this critically important issue has received almost no attention.

Vaccines

• Vaccine efficacy and safety were explicitly excluded from the Inquiry’s remit despite its scale.

• In his opening speech, lead counsel Hugo Keith KC pre-emptively declared vaccines “entirely effective”, “undoubted successes” and offering the “promised land” – an interesting and emotive set of conclusions to assert during the evidence stage of a formal Inquiry.

• Basic immunology has established that injected vaccines cannot induce durable mucosal immunity against respiratory viruses (a scientific reality repeatedly asserted by Dr Anthony Fauci and others, for many years). This critical issue was never put to any expert witness. Since they could not work, they did not work.

• The two-week post-vaccination period of marked immune suppression – during which recipients remained classified as “unvaccinated” in official statistics – created a well-documented statistical illusion of benefit. Illusory effects on severe disease and death means the vaccine had no effect on severe disease and death.

• Multiple key safety questions (eg cardiac risks, process quality of mass-manufactured batches, duration and quantity of spike-protein production, lipid nanoparticle distribution, etc.) were ruled out of scope.

• Relevant testimony from vaccine-injured individuals and families was repeatedly shut down by counsel.

Dr Craig further highlighted two recent revelations not yet examined by the Inquiry:

• Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty intervened to prevent the government’s own Moral and Ethical Advisory Group from discussing child vaccination (Telegraph).

• Several prominent SAGE members had hundreds of millions of pounds in undeclared grants from the Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest private funder of pharmaceutical research (Daily Mail).

APPG Chair Esther McVey responded to the evidence the Group heard, saying: “Many of us feared the Covid Inquiry would be a whitewash and the presentation we heard today hammered that home. A huge and deadly price was paid because of covid policies, not least lockdowns. Particularly shocking to hear was the treatment of the elderly and young adults with learning difficulties, who had life-saving care removed; the tragic scandal of what went on in care homes; the denial of any kind healthcare; and the careless use of respiratory-depressant drugs to those most at risk of dying.

“Crucial and inconvenient topics like lockdown harms, use of morphine in care homes or vaccine efficacy and why the vaccines could not achieve the claims made for them, have been excluded so far from the Inquiry reports. Expert testimony challenging the evidence base was cut short or ignored. In the case of Carl Heneghan, Oxford’s Professor of Evidence Based Medicine, Hugo Keith character assassinated him and Baroness Hallett dismissed his evidence, squandering a vital opportunity to ask necessary questions. It is unsurprising that Baroness Hallett contradicted herself with what sounded like pre-determined conclusions in her latest report: lockdowns were harmful but should have started earlier and modelling should not be used to justify major policy but somehow still proved that 23,000 lives would have been saved by earlier lockdowns.”

Co-Chair Graham Stringer MP added: “It is a shame that the scientifically correct approach adopted by the Scottish Inquiry was not followed by Baroness Hallett in the UK Inquiry. Lord Brailsford rightly started by asking what actually happened, what were the outcomes and only then turning to how the decisions were made. Instead what we got were decisions that were judged without understanding the now well-known and damaging consequences of such public health policies. And now, worryingly, we are again seeing schools locking down this winter and the UKHSA advising people to wear masks, contrary to the evidence.

“It is well known that anxiety has a direct effect on health, but it was still shocking to hear the factor that best predicted Covid death after age and learning difficulties was anxiety. How will the UK avoid the unnecessary escalation of fear and anxiety in future health crises? Unfortunately we cannot rely on the Covid Inquiry to recognise the importance of such an effort. This, and many other important lessons, will clearly not be learnt.”

Concluding the presentation, Dr Craig stated: “A great deal of critical evidence was placed before the Inquiry. But it looked away from the parts that mattered most. Whenever evidence supported the narrative the Inquiry wanted to tell, it was amplified. Whenever evidence challenged that narrative, it was set aside.”

Biography of the speaker:

Dr Clare Craig is a consultant pathologist with more than two decades of experience across cancer diagnostics, national screening programmes and genomic medicine. After specialising in diagnostic pathology and being appointed a consultant in 2009, she played a key role in the 100,000 Genomes Project as the pathology expert and clinical lead for data interpretation. She later worked at the forefront of artificial intelligence applications.

Since 2020 Clare has dedicated her time pro bono to public communication about science, public health and medical ethics in the context of Covid policy. She co-chairs HART, a multidisciplinary group of professionals established in 2021 to analyse evidence and policy decisions and she is the author of Expired (2023) and Spiked (2025) which examine the scientific and societal lessons of the pandemic response. Her work aims to promote transparent evidence, critical thinking and patient-centred medicine in future public health decisions.