On January 5 two years ago, the World Health Organisation issued a seemingly innocuous bulletin under the headline “Pneumonia of unknown cause – China”. It was the first inkling of a novel coronavirus outbreak which by then had infected around 50 people in the city of Wuhan.
The WHO’s assessment was reassuring, even complacent given what we know now but didn’t then. “Based on the preliminary information from the Chinese investigation team, no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission and no health care worker infections have been reported,” it said. Immediately, the finger of suspicion was pointed at the fish and live animal markets in Wuhan, helpfully (from Beijing’s point of view) drawing attention away from another possible source, a laboratory where experiments were conducted on precisely these pathogens.
One of the many great mysteries of the subsequent response to the pandemic has been the extraordinary efforts to which some in the West have gone to exculpate China from this disaster. Here is a totalitarian dictatorship which even to this day refuses to pass over all the information needed to understand the trajectory of the pandemic, yet which is somehow seen as a victim. For some time even to suggest that the virus might have escaped from a lab (and no-one was saying it was deliberate) was to be denounced, presumably because it was a view pushed by Donald Trump. Facebook even censored any reference to the possibility of a lab leak as fake news.
Now, many scientists at least accept that this possible cause of the pandemic is “credible” if not proven. It probably never will be. The consequences of it being true, of course, are profound since it would show an appalling laxity of bio-security at a laboratory which would have been responsible for 3.5 million fatalities and the deaths of millions more from unrelated medical conditions that have gone untreated. The damage to livelihoods, education and mental health is incalculable.
It is galling, then, to pick up a lateral flow test kit and see the words Made in China emblazoned on it, which if they were being given to the world for nothing would at least be some contribution to the damage caused but for which we have paid a great deal of money. Moreover, the Government has spent billions on lateral flow test kits manufactured in China while British firms have struggled to obtain approval for their own.
The so-called Operation Moonshot project was supposed to create a home-grown production industry yet just one UK company has so far passed strict regulations. Firms like Avacta Life Sciences based in Yorkshire say they have a world-beating product which is certified for use in Europe but not in the UK. Why not? Other manufacturers tell a similar story. Given the recent shortage of test kits, it beggars belief that regulatory hold-ups are making matters worse while also leaving us dependent on companies based in China.
In view of the deepening diplomatic tensions between the West and Beijing, is this sensible? Neale Hanvey, MP for Kirkaldy and Cowdenbeath, who has been banging on about this for some time, has an adjournment debate in the Commons tonight to draw further attention to the issue. As he said in PMQs before Christmas: “Can the Government please explain why they have pulled the plug on the UK diagnostics industry when additional capacity is so obviously required? It is beyond illogical.”
The Government says the companies do not pass rigorous quality controls but the manufacturers say theirs are more accurate than the Chinese tests; so what is going on? Someone in the Government needs to get a grip of this for as long as they insist on mass testing as a requirement for us all to live a normal life, from attending school to going into work.
And there, of course, is the rub. The big question that needs to be asked now is: should we test at all? The evident mildness of omicron compared to previous variants suggests that we need to treat Covid the way we deal with all other respiratory illnesses, with a mix of treatments and vaccines. We do not test and isolate for a cold or flu, though the latter usually requires days in bed to recover. One reason we have many more positive cases than most places in Europe is because we test more and we do that largely because the kits are handed out for free whereas elsewhere they have to be paid for.
The mass testing of perfectly healthy people would have been considered insane just a few years ago, yet is now a national orthodoxy. Lining up children before they go to school to have a swab stuck up their noses to check for a disease that they probably have not got – and which will affect them very mildly if they do have it – is not only bonkers, it is inhuman, as is requiring they wear masks in the classroom.
Mass testing may have made sense at the start of the pandemic when, in the absence of a vaccination, it seemed to offer the only way through other than letting the disease take its natural course with consequences that we cannot know. Boris Johnson hoped that Operation Moonshot would give people freedom to mingle, and yet here we are, still told to work from home if we can.
Even if the jabs are less effective at stopping omicron, they appear to have helped turn it into a relatively benign virus that no longer warrants the unhinged response we still see both here and around the world. In China, the ancient capital of Xi’an with a population of 13 million has been in a lockdown of such severity after just a few cases that people have not been able to get food. They may die of malnutrition but at least they haven’t got Covid.
Beijing’s policy of mass testing, quarantines and sudden lockdowns has been followed in Europe and elsewhere and yet the virus, albeit in a milder form, is more rampant than ever. The really frightening thought is that when we come to mark the third anniversary of the outbreak, we may still be trapped in this baleful cycle. If “living with Covid” as an endemic disease is to mean anything, it must involve targeting vaccines annually only at the most vulnerable, not the entire population, and the end of mass testing.
