Five years on, the scars of COVID-19 linger like a bad hangover from a party nobody wanted to attend. Trillions flushed down the drain, freedoms shredded, families shattered, all in the name of "saving lives." But was it all a tragic mistake, a frantic scramble against an unseen foe? Hardly. As Australian public health veteran David Bell argues in his blistering September 21, 2025, OpEd for Brownstone Institute, the global COVID response was no error. It was a deliberate, systemic wrong perpetrated by professionals who knew better, chose fear over facts, and prioritised power over people. Drawing on an understated gem of a paper by statisticians Simon Wood and colleagues, Bell dismantles the narrative with cold, hard numbers. This wasn't ignorance; it was iniquity. And as we teeter on the edge of future crises, ignoring Bell's wake-up call risks repeating the tyranny.
Bell's essay isn't a rant, it's a reckoning, grounded in the Royal Statistical Society's April 2025 discussion paper, "Some Statistical Aspects of the Covid-19 Response." Presented in London (a city that, Bell notes wryly, could have used a dose of such reality during the lockdowns), the paper strips away the hysteria to reveal a response engineered for excess, not efficacy. Wood et al. don't speculate on motives; they let the data do the talking. And what it says? The architects of our lockdowns, public health mandarins, modelers, and politicians, knew the costs dwarfed the benefits, yet ploughed ahead anyway.
Public health isn't practiced in a vacuum; it's tethered to economics, a fact every practitioner from med school knows. Yet, as Bell highlights via Wood, Western governments opted for the monetary printing press over prudence, flooding economies with cash while slamming the brakes on work. The result? Inflation that eroded savings and spiked deprivation, hallmarks of shortened lifespans.
Wood's analysis is blunt: "Creating money while reducing real economic activity is obviously inflationary." By mid-2022, UK inflation had surged, funnelling straight into the veins of inequality. The Office for National Statistics pegs the GDP nosedive at a record 19.4% in Q2 2020 alone, with a partial rebound that masked deeper wounds: £250 billion in lost output for 2020-2021. This wasn't abstract; it hammered the vulnerable. Marmot's longstanding data shows a five-year life expectancy chasm between rich and poor deciles, a gap COVID's disruptions widened. Post-lockdown, poverty rates climbed two points to one in four Britons by 2022, per the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, correlating with stalled or reversed health gains.
Bell drives the stake deeper with cost-benefit math. The UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) greenlights interventions at £20,000-£30,000 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) saved. Lockdowns? A grotesque overkill. Using Imperial College's doomsday 500,000-death forecast, Wood calculates a cost per life year over ten times that threshold, north of £300,000. Independent audits echo this: one 2021 European Journal of Public Health study pegs UK lockdown QALY costs at £220,000 to £3.7 million per year saved, far eclipsing NICE norms. Governments knew this; they ignored it. The poverty they unleashed, via shuttered schools, job losses, and fiscal folly, likely shaved more years than the virus itself. As Bell quips, this is Public Health 101, weaponised against the public.
No masks for the emperor? Early 2020 data screamed otherwise. The Diamond Princess cruise ship's outbreak, dissected in Verity et al.'s March Lancet paper from Imperial, showed negligible mortality for the young and middle-aged, under 0.1% for those under 50. Chinese data corroborated: COVID was a granny-killer, not a universal reaper. Yet, as Wood documents, UK posters plastered healthy twenty-somethings in masks with slogans like "I wear this to protect you." Bell calls it "one of the milder examples" of SPI-B's (Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours) deceit, a fear factory churning misinformation to justify house arrest.
The stats mock the scare. Wood compares a young woman's COVID risk to a supervolcano eruption: once every 17,000 years. Even over two pandemic years, it's outsized. Long COVID? ONS data, per Wood, was twisted to inflate prevalence, ignoring that most "cases" resolved without fanfare. Masks? SPI-B cited flawed studies for 6-15% transmission cuts, but their own references, a meta-analysis by Brainard et al., deemed it "low-quality evidence." Scottish government advice linked to an editorial debunking the very papers it hyped. Bell's verdict: negligence or lies, both damning.
This wasn't unknowns; it was knowns buried under propaganda. Governments, per Bell, used actors and tall tales to peddle terror, all while the public footed the bill, literally and figuratively.
Here's where the rubber meets the road of deception: deaths. By end-2022, UK dashboards tallied 212,247 "COVID deaths," but only 17,000 listed COVID alone. The rest? Comorbidities hastened by a virus that, for the frail, merely tipped the scales. Wood crunches it: cumulative excess deaths trailed far behind, with a 2020 life expectancy dip of one year translating to six days lost per capita. That's the whole population, mind you, not just the elderly cohort entering high-mortality years post-WWII baby boom.
ONS data backs this: from March 2020 to June 2022, non-COVID excess was actually 7,360 below five-year averages, suggesting overcounting via "with COVID" certificates. Our World in Data charts excess at 8.8% P-score in 2022, post-measures, underscoring that lockdowns' collateral; delayed care, mental health craters, piled on the toll. Bell ties it to inequality: Marmot's five-year rich-poor gap dwarfs COVID's six-day average hit. Interventions inflating poverty? A public health sin, knowingly committed.
Enter the Imperial College sorcerers, whose March 2020 doomsday code, predicting 500,000 UK deaths without lockdown, herded governments into panic. Bell, via Wood, exposes the farce: models ignored transmission heterogeneity, inflating spread by assuming uniform vulnerability. Hospital-acquired infections (half in early China/Italy waves) were misfed as community rates, juicing R0 skyward.
Critics piled on early: STAT News in April 2020 flagged "flawed methods" in Imperial's code, from brittle assumptions to overreliance on early, skewed data. Heritage Foundation's 2020 takedown notes the model's failure to adapt as reality diverged, Sweden's light-touch 6,000 deaths vs. modelled 35,000. Lockdowns timed post-peak decline, per Wood's graphs, made them seem salvific when entropy did the work. Imperial's own Verity paper admitted low youth risk, yet their models screamed otherwise. As Bell concludes, this was no oversight; it was output tailored to terrorise.
David Bell's OpEd isn't just a postmortem; it's a manifesto against pretence. The COVID response, a £300k-per-QALY boondoggle, fear-fuelled facade, and model-manipulated mess, was wrong from the jump. Professionals knew the economics would impoverish, the risks were skewed, the deaths overstated, the science shoddy. Yet they doubled down, from SPI-B's scripts to politicians' presses.
Why? Bell hints at the rot: careers over conscience, Pharma-media yokes over truth. But whatever the venom, the antidote is exposure. Wood's paper, dry as it is, arms us against repetition. As inflation bites and inequalities fester, UK poverty at 25% in 2022, life expectancy stalled, Bell's call rings true: stop pretending. Demand audits, defund the fearmongers, rebuild with facts. The next "crisis" looms; let's not hand them the script again.
https://www.eurasiareview.com/21092025-the-covid-response-was-not-a-mistake-it-was-just-wrong-oped/
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/09/22/the-covid-response-was-not-a-mistake-it-was-just-wrong/