Thread by @AndrewPRLevi

The Covid inquiry indicated by ⁦@BorisJohnson⁩ will be in the context of over 1M people bereaved by the disease in the UK.

1M could have been avoided, it appears, if the govt hadn’t made multiple, serious errors.

Who cares?

A 🧵/1. pnas.org/content/117/30…

UK vaccine distribution, which has been better than many, worse than some, doesn’t bring dead people back. Nor does it reverse bereavement. Of 130,000 Covid deaths in the UK, the vast majority were entirely avoidable. /2.

Even taking a lenient view of a series of catastrophic failures last year, 100,000 were. US research suggests a “kin bereavement multiplier” of 9. This looks at family, not friends. Including the latter would give a higher multiplier. /3.

It’s reasonable to suppose a million people in the UK have suffered deep loss as a direct result of the failures of UK pandemic response. Perhaps for each of those people, someone else feels hurt & angry on their behalf. Maybe it’s two people. If so, that brings us to 3M. /4.

Can the government just shrug that off? Almost certainly yes. The remaining 64M people in the UK either won’t care, or won’t care enough. We’ve seen it already, in the way the Covid bereaved have been largely ignored. And in other areas. /5.

The appalling treatment of 3M EU citizens, for example. Where’s the mass outrage been? The sad truth is, whether it’s millions or a few (such as the people shot dead by the Army at Ballymurphy), if it’s a small minority it’s likely to be ignored, explained away, forgotten. /6.

So the chances are, hardly anyone cares. Or, at least, no one who “matters”.

Sometimes things turn out differently. Campaigning can dramatically multiply the profile, saliency & political impact of an issue.

Will someone do that, & if so how, for the UK Covid nightmare? /7. End