Rishi Sunak’s self-serving Covid rhetoric should fool no one | Letters

Rishi Sunak thinks we need a balanced view on lockdown (Sunak accused of ‘rewriting history’ by saying No 10 ignored lockdown harms, 25 August). How about factoring in lengthened waiting times and more deaths as a result of the NHS being stretched to breaking point by the failure to control Covid, delayed lockdowns and the premature ending of restrictions? How about comparing days of children’s education lost from lockdown with days lost through Covid running hot? Does he really believe the right’s attribution to lockdown of all the bad outcomes that resulted from the failure to control Covid?

Does he remember why “eat out to help out” was referred to as “eat out to die out” when the data was in? As for counteracting “fear”, does he think Covid was not to be feared? And does he remember Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance squirming as reluctant human shields at the 5pm briefings for a prime minister who was trashing good scientific advice to delay lockdown and ending it too soon, yet indulging bad scientific advice from maverick medics at the urging of his chancellor?
Calum Paton
Emeritus professor, Keele University

Rachel Clarke has every reason to be scathing about Rishi Sunak’s retrospective reassessment of the government’s Covid response (Sunak is so desperate to be prime minister that he has decided to rewrite Covid history, 26 August). But he raises some important issues, in many ways echoing the arguments put forward in Toby Green’s book The Covid Consensus. Looking back, it was striking that a policy with such a wide-ranging impact on all aspects of society seemed to be driven by a narrow range of expert advice. Yes, there were epidemiologists and virologists, but there was a relative paucity of public health doctors and a complete absence of social scientists, beyond psychologists.

In addition, lockdown strategies, which were rapidly adopted as mandatory by international bodies such as the World Health Organization and International Monetary Fund, had devastating consequences for countries with largely informal economies.

For example, countries in west Africa were effectively forced to adopt lockdown strategies, but were unable to enact the massive economic interventions possible in countries such as the UK. Yes, we should be sceptical about Sunak’s motivation for criticising lockdown, but surely we should take every opportunity to carefully re-examine a public health strategy that has never been used before and sadly may need to be considered again.
Dr Peter Hindley
London

Rishi Sunak’s disgraceful, self-serving attack on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies reveals the morality-free zone behind the matey grin. Are there no depths to which the current crop of Tory careerists will not sink to pander to their libertarian mob in order to achieve their deserved destiny? It is the scientists whom we have to thank that the loss of life has not been even worse. Sunak insults every single one of the 200,000 dead and their families.
Alan Clark
London

Rishi Sunak is peddling dangerous nonsense. Scientists were not “empowered” in the pandemic. The power rested entirely in the hands of the government. The…