The Christmas and New Year period, and the Prime Minister’s refusal to implement additional restrictions during it, may mark a turning point in the Covid-19 pandemic. I certainly hope that we have finally reached the stage where policymakers stop treating modellers’ worst-case scenarios as predictions and give due weight to the wider social impact of new or revived controls.

We should have some sympathy for modellers. The situation is fast moving, with a high degree of uncertainty. Understandably, policy customers want to know the reasonable worst-case scenario because it is easiest to plan backwards from that. But the modelling community must also accept some responsibility for the way that its leading figures have used contacts in media, science policy and politics to promote interventions that lack an evidence base.

It is time to consider the forces that now stand in the way of a transition to managing Covid as an endemic infection. There is still some debate over whether omicron is an inherently milder infection or whether vaccines and previous Covid exposure are helping to lessen the severity of a variant whose virulence is not much different to its predecessors.

For public policy, it may not matter. If the main problem is periodic high rates of sickness absence in critical sectors, the solutions lie in improving the resilience of institutions rather than restricting everyday lives.

What are the obstacles to this shift? Two are clearly influential: the material interests of those who are profiting from the pandemic, and the political interests of groups who want to reshape the way in which British people think about health and illness.

There is a growing Covid industry of companies selling security interventions. Some vaccine manufacturers are enthusiastically promoting repeated boosters. The private gains from PPE sales are so notorious that the Treasury should be considering a war profits tax. There is a burgeoning trade in ventilation and air-filtration equipment. Behind the push for vaccine passports are software companies with digital ID packages in search of customers.

There are, however, less obvious interests. People outside universities may be surprised by the degree to which scientific research depends on competitive grant and contract funding. Team leaders must behave much like small-business owners to maintain the staffing, equipment and materials for their labs. Covid research funding is an opportunity to secure that base. No academic is entirely disinterested, though some of us reflect on that more than others. But there are also deeper political interests. These are less blatant than the Welsh or Scottish governments apparently using the pandemic to differentiate themselves from the English.

In Britain, we have never thought that the goal of medicine was absolute control of nature. The Medical Research Council closed its Common Cold Research Unit in 1990. Britain is a world-leader in palliative care rather than aggressive intervention for terminal illnesses. British clinicians are well used to asking themselves hard questions about whether continued treatment is a kindness.

Some, however, would have us remodel our approach to health and illness to reflect more closely American thinking, where it is far more accepted to throw anything and everything at health risks. This raises big policy questions that need to be debated seriously, outside the heat of a pandemic. Do we really want to try to prevent every infection in all young children or infants by a medical intervention? Do we want to prolong the life of every frail person by aggressive interventions, regardless of the suffering or indignity we may be inflicting?

In the meantime, ministers should continue to push back against restrictions by applying the test that should have been applied from at least April 2020: would we in November 2019 have considered implementing the non-pharmaceutical intervention in question ahead of a flu season? If the answer is no, an evidence-based justification should always have been required to introduce it – and certainly to continue with it today.

Robert Dingwall is Professor of Sociology at Nottingham Trent University