A TIMELINE OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: A COMPREHENSIVE RECORD OF THE UK GOVERNMENT’S RESPONSE TO THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS IAN SINCLAIR RUPERT READ Edited by JOANNA BOOTH Copyright © 2021 by Ian Sinclair and Rupert Read This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http:// creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042 , USA . Print ISBN: 978 1008 97611 5 Imprint: Lulu.com Created with Vellum Endorsements ‘Sinclair and Read have done something really important here: they have assembled a detailed record of the responses to Covid since it hit the UK. Equipped with this information, readers can make their own minds up about who is responsible for the disaster that has unfolded since March 2020. This ’neutral’ fact based approach might succeed where other approaches have failed: finding a way of convincing those who remain uncertain or skeptical about the Government's culpability for this monstrous tragedy. When you read this clear, factual timeline of events with an unprejudiced eye, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Government response was often complacent, mistaken, delayed and flawed, causing tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.’ Peter Tatche , human rights campaigner ‘This timeline is timely! We desperately need to examine and under stand what the government did and did not do in the face of this pandemic. We need to know were they negligent, incompetent or worse that is, guilty of pursuing policies that endangered the population? This book helps us decide. Please read it. Our lives depend on it. It might happen again.’ Michael Rosen, poet, and author of Many Di Verent Kinds of Love: A Story of Life, Death and the NHS iv Endorsements ‘Rupert Read and Ian Sinclair clinically expose a failure of the state to protect the citizen through lack of preparedness, indecision and delay that has led to the worst loss of life in this country since the Second World War. Their timeline pulls no punches and spares no reputations. It will form part of the framework that will help us understand what happened to us and create accountability for those that held that power. The truth contained in this stark timeline is also a warning of how we must do so much more to prepare for the existential crises to come in future years. We are all survivors now and this contribution will support us on the road we will all have to take for truth and justice in our collec tive healing from the pandemic.’ Andy Towler, retired senior police oYcer with a deep background in dealing with disaster and emer gency who worked as strategic adviser to the police lead for Civil Contingencies and as part of the wider UK Govt response to Covid 19 ‘Sinclair and Read's timeline is a comprehensive, exhaustively docu mented accounting of the full history of the UK government's response to the global pandemic. Incorporating every significant event, incident, and process including facts often given little or no attention by tradi tional media outlets since the prior to the beginning of the pandemic until early 2021, this book is an essential resource for anyone who wants to understand exactly how the UK ended up with the worst of all worlds one of the highest COVID19 death rates along with the worst economic performance in the world. It o ers a simple, powerful and reliable chronology of events that transcends political polarities and ideological biases. A must read for journalists, policymakers, lawyers, concerned citizens, public health experts and future historians.’ Dr Nafeez Ahmed, Special Investigations Reporter, Byline Times ‘The UK handling of the COVID 19 pandemic has been nothing short of disastrous with many thousands of unnecessary lives lost and families left grieving for loved ones. At some point the British government will have to be held to account. Here, Sinclair, Read and Booth have provided what is destined to become a key source for the legal battles ahead and for historians seeking to understand how things went so badly wrong in the country that has always led the world in e ective public health interventions. Never again must we be caught out as we were in Endorsements v 2020. This important work should enable the real lessons of the pandemic to be learned and an accountable and e ective public health system rebuilt from the ashes of an avoidable catastrophe.’ Professor John Ashton, author of Blinded by Corona: How the Pandemic ruined Britain’s Health and Wealth and What to do about it 'With the success of the vaccination programme, the fear of mass deaths is fading. But unless we know how we ended up with the highest death rate in the world we cannot hold our government to account or make the necessary changes to prevent another public health catastrophe. This detailed timeline of what went wrong and when is a vital part of the accountability process.' Professor Mo y Scott Cato, former MEP 'The stru le of man against power is the stru le of memory against forgetting ' Milan Kundera About the Authors PROFESSOR R UPERT R EAD IS AN EXPERT ON THE PRECAUTIONARY Principle , and co author with Nassim Taleb et al of The Precautionary Principle . He writes regularly on the pandemic from this perspective, most notably in Byline Times. His most recent book is Parents for a Future: How Loving our Children can Stop Climate Co apse , with UEA Press . IAN S INCLAIR IS THE AUTHOR OF THE M ARCH T HAT S HOOK B LAIR : A N Oral History of 15 February 2003 , published by Peace News Press . JOANNA B OOTH IS A BOOK EDITOR AND FREELANCE JOURNALIST working primarily on local council stories. She has worked in higher education and as a data analyst. She currently writes at ephemeraldigest. co.uk . Table of Abbreviations ADPH Association of Directors of Public Health BAME Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic BEIS Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy BMA British Medical Association BMJ British Medical Journal CQC Care Quality Commission DHSC Department of Health and Social Care DNR Do Not Resuscitate DPIA Data Protection Impact Assessment HCID High Consequence Infectious Disease ICU Intensive Care Unit IEP Institute for Economics and Peace MERS Middle East Respiratory Syndrome NERVTAG New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group NEU National Education Union ONS O ce for National Statistics ORG Open Rights Group PHE Public Health England PPE Personal Protective Equipment PTSD Post traumatic Stress Disorder 4 IAN SINCLAIR & RUPERT READ RCN Royal College of Nursing RCP Royal College of Physicians SAGE Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies SARS Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome TTI Test, Trace and Isolate TUC Trades Union Congress UCL University College London UEA University of East Anglia UEFA The Union of European Football Associations VCP Vaccine Confidence Project WHO World Health Organization Introduction ‘They really are scared that the verdict of history is going to condemn them for contributing to the deaths of tens of thousands of British citizens. They are desperately trying to rewrite the timeline of what happened. And we must not let them do that .’ 1 Richard Horton, Editor in Chief of The Lancet , April 2020 The impetus for this book came from a sense Rupert had, in February March 2020, of the then emerging coronavirus pandemic in the UK as being, in the words of Richard Horton, a ‘national scandal’, especially when compared to the appropriately rapid and precautious response to Covid 19 that occurred in many other island states such as Taiwan and New Zealand .2 After being invited by Rupert on 1 April 2020 to join him in compiling a timeline of the crisis, Ian led on developing the content of the timeline, and Rupert added to it and arranged for its publication in what is becoming a keystone of alternative media in this country, the Byline Times .3 The original timeline published by Byline Times was also borne out of a realisation and frustration the media were failing to hold the govern ment to account, and failing to educate the public about the dangers the 6 IAN SINCLAIR & RUPERT READ virus presented to the nation. Like many people, in the first weeks of the crisis, journalists and newspapers seemed stunned by the sheer speed of events and the paradigm shift politics and society were under going. Arguably too, as with previous national crises, much of the media were very sympathetic to the government’s position in the early part of the pandemic . To highlight just one egregious example from the liberal, critical end of the mainstream press, on 14 March 2020, the Guardian published a full page article titled ‘Which activities are safe and which should people avoid?’ written by science correspondent Hannah Devlin. Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, is quoted exten sively in the piece, saying he would not stop visiting his elderly relatives, that it was OK to visit the pub, and that from the perspective of indi vidual risk there was not a strong argument for avoiding big sporting events. 4 Just over a week after this reckless journalism was published, the Prime Minister announced an unprecedented national lockdown . Of course, there have been many important and critical news reports much of our timeline is made up of them, after all but to quote Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, ‘That a careful reader looking for a fact can sometimes find it with diligence and a sceptical eye tells us nothing about whether that fact received the attention and context it deserved, whether it was intelligible to the reader or e ectively distorted or suppressed .’ 5 After the Byline Times piece received a lot of positive attention on Twitter and elsewhere, Ian and Rupert agreed to continue to update the timeline.