I sense that we have stumbled into a monumental Covid trap. True, the Prime Minister was unable to announce fresh Covid restrictions yesterday amid Cabinet concerns about the limitations of the data on omicron. His political authority to impose restrictions has undoubtedly been weakened by further revelations about Downing Street parties and restive Tory back-benchers. Still there’s little reason for lockdown-sceptics to cheer just yet. Christmas is still in chaos, as ambiguity in No 10’s messaging leaves the public, with little clarity about whether they should go ahead with their festive plans. Worse, Boris Johnson left the door open for further measures, even an unprecedented post-vaccine lockdown.

This ought to be a seismic moment in the history of Covid. We  thought that mass vaccination would effectively bring the pandemic to an end, with booster jabs used to top up immunity every year as we learned to live with the virus. Yet the great weight of scientific opinion – which the PM and many politicians are still hesitant to go against – now evidently disagrees. A consensus has formed that vaccines are not enough to prevent endemic Covid from potentially overwhelming the NHS, and seasonal restrictions may also be needed.

If omicron turns out to be milder and takes over from delta, evolutionary biology may yet rescue us from this impasse. The great fear, however, is that even a mild strain could continue to wreak havoc, a medical non-entity for most, but a source of serious illness for too many.

In which case, the future looks bleak indeed. This is no longer a question of whether the economy and the vulnerable can cope over the next few months with tighter restrictions, but about the re-engineering of society. Could winter Zoom classes become the new normal for schools in the long term, for example? Are pubs set to become summer enterprises like ice cream vans? What are the implications for the UK’s knowledge economy if home-working becomes a seasonal inevitability? Are we geared up for an ugly showdown with the unvaccinated?

The Government should be levelling with the public about these existential questions, and the size of the stakes. Instead, it invites a climate of secrecy and hysteria. In particular, the question of how science informs political decisions remains shrouded in mystery. It is not even clear who in Whitehall decided what range of scenarios Sage experts should model when omicron emerged. Nor is it clear that omicron risks are being balanced against the harms of restrictions. In a recent Twitter exchange with Fraser Nelson, Prof Graham Medley appeared to admit that Sage has been only asked to model bad outcomes.  

This chimes with Sage adviser Prof Mark Woolhouse’s extraordinary warning to the Commons science select committee back in August 2020, that modellers are simply “doing what they are asked to do”. Sadly, his suggestion that modelling “has been used to address a very narrow set of questions”, such as the effectiveness of lockdowns and social distancing, while overlooking other possible responses such as shielding the vulnerable, was ignored.

The apparent slanting of the evidence presented to policy-makers is compounded by the temerity of many politicians. Some of them may be finding their backbones now, but it has come late in the day. We went into lockdown back in March 2020, in large part, it seems because that’s what everyone else in Europe was doing and few MPs were brave enough to question the approach. As Sweden has found, it takes gumption to go against the grain. Although lockdown-sceptic Tory MPs have sought to challenge the Prime Minister, not least on vaccine passports, they lack the numbers to derail him.  

Frighteningly, the current climate of fear is being driven not just by political cowardice, but intellectual intolerance. Coordinated academic challenge to Covid orthodoxies has fizzled out since the Great Barrington Declaration sparked controversy in October 2020. Still smarting from the backlash against the statement, which called on politicians to consider “focused protection” of the vulnerable as an alternative to restrictions, outspoken “heretics” have changed tack, optimistically talking up the potential for antibody treatments and cycles of reinfection to get us out of the pandemic instead,

Given the ostracism these scientists have faced, their reticence is understandable. When a chilling email surfaced this month from Francis Collins, director of America’s National Institute of Health to Chief Medical Officer Anthony Fauci, in which the former called for a “quick and devastating takedown of [Barrington’s] premises”, it caused barely a ripple of criticism from academics.

And yet now more than ever, we need open and balanced debate about the alternatives to restrictions. It is time to look again at focused protection. Twenty seven per cent of Covid-attributed deaths occurred in care homes as of October 2021. Yet, disgracefully, as we enter an omicron wave, we once again lack a proper shielding plan.

It is also infuriating that the obvious long-term alternative to restrictions – NHS reform – remains taboo. The Government has had plenty of opportunity since the first lockdown to figure out the best measures to boost ICU capacity. Admittedly, while creating more beds sounds easy, recruiting more specialist doctors and nurses will take years. Rolling out ICU training tradition to more medical practitioners without compromising the quality of care will also be tricky. All the more reason to make this top priority alongside the waiting list backlog. Instead No 10 continues to mindlessly chuck billions at the health service without a plan, as it primes us to protect “our dear NHS” like good citizens once again.

I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that we risk tipping into the realm of Communist China here. While Beijing’s experts are pressured into falling into line with its Zero Covid approach, dissenters who dare to point out that endless lockdowns are “squeezing dry… the last sign of life” in border towns face public vitriol. The writer Guobin Yang has described “an atmosphere of manufactured positivity” in which “truth is labelled negative energy”. In Britain we are in danger of choking on our own brand of “manufactured negativity”, as we are asked to commit to permanent restrictions in our patriotic preservation of the NHS against the fearsome ravages of Covid.  We must pull back from such a fate, before it is too late.