then asked the questions to get the right answers
Dr Clare Craig and Dr Ros Jones
Baroness Hallett published the Covid-19 Inquiry’s fourth report on 16 April 2026. It seems as if the verdict had effectively been reached before the first recommendation was written. The vaccination and therapeutics programmes were, it said, “two of the success stories of the pandemic.” The rollout was “an extraordinary feat.” One study, the report noted, estimated that vaccination had saved around 475,000 lives in England and Scotland (a modelling concoction thoroughly debunked, see below).
They are the foundation on which the whole report is based. Once an inquiry treats as established fact that a programme was a success, the only questions left are questions of delivery: how to manufacture faster, how to reach more people and how to rebuild the public trust that “false information” is said to have eroded. Its five recommendations follow from that and nothing else: a pharmaceutical advisory panel, vaccine-equity strategies, better monitoring of uptake, regulator access to linked health records and reform of the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme. Every one of them is about how to repeat the exercise more effectively next time.
The harder question, whether the benefits and the harms had been measured correctly the first time, was treated as already answered. That is the central failing of Module 4. Safety was discussed. But the Inquiry began from a conclusion. If an inquiry begins from a conclusion it cannot step back to examine it.
The 475,000 figure
The single most consequential claim in the report is that vaccination saved roughly 475,000 lives in England and Scotland, a figure built from estimates of about 449,000 lives saved in England and 25,000 in Scotland by March 2023. It is worth being precise about this number.
It is the output of counterfactual modelling: an estimate of how many people would have died in a hypothetical world without vaccination, a world that was never observed and cannot be checked against anything that actually happened.
Such an estimate depends entirely on its assumptions: the assumed efficacy of the vaccine, the durability of the protection, the level of prior infection and background immunity and critically the susceptibility of the population to any one variant. Change any of these and the number changes with it. A figure of this kind carries real uncertainty. Honest reporting would put that uncertainty in front of the reader rather than present a single headline total to four significant figures.
The Inquiry, of all bodies, had no excuse for getting this wrong, because it had already been corrected for doing precisely the same thing. In its Module 2 report it stated that modelling “has established” that locking down a week earlier would have cut deaths in England by some 48 per cent, around 23,000 fewer deaths. The Office for Statistics Regulation then wrote to the Inquiry to warn that this language risked being a misleading representation of the underlying analysis and that the executive summary risked misleading readers about what the figure even referred to. The Inquiry’s own secretary accepted that “established” had been too definitive and did not reflect the uncertainty inherent in all modelling.
The pattern is therefore on the record. Where modelling supported the conclusion that the government had acted too slowly, the Inquiry presented it as established fact and was rebuked by the statistics regulator for doing so. In Module 4, where modelling supports the conclusion that vaccination saved hundreds of thousands of lives, it has done the same thing again, this time with a number twenty times larger and, if anything, even less qualified. The lesson the regulator tried to teach in February had not been learned by April.
Moreover, in the body of the text, it is clear that the highest of all the numerous estimates of ‘lives saved’ was the one chosen for the Video statement and the Report in Brief submitted to the press who proceeded to amplify this erroneous figure.
What about the harm?
The report recognised that the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme is failing the people it was meant to serve and it recommended reform. But acknowledging a need for reform to compensation and investigating the harm caused are very different things. The difference in effort in approaching these two questions is striking.
Indeed, even on the first day of the hearings, when the opening impacts video was about to be shown, the lead KC, Hugo Keith, interrupted proceedings with “May I have your permission to say a word? I think it is in the public interest it is important that I seek to emphasise that the references in this video to the obvious and well-known fact that in very rare cases vaccines have serious side effects, as indeed do all medicines, must not be used as a platform to seek to undermine the vital public health role that vaccination plays in keeping the public safe from disease or to try and seek to argue that at a population level vaccination is not overwhelmingly beneficial.”
These benefits were described in the vocabulary of triumph: “extraordinary feat,” “success stories,” “saved lives.” The harms were handled in the cooler language of administration: “issues of recent public concern,” the “current system for financial redress.” The benefits were accepted. The harms were minimised, with terms like “very rare” or “extremely rare”. There were serious questions to answer about the reliability of pharmacovigilance, the likelihood of under-reporting through the Yellow Card system, the true characterisation of specific injuries but none of these were pursued with anything approaching the energy spent on celebrating the rollout. The injured appear in the report as an unfortunate footnote to an unimpeachable success.
Regulators need reform, but why?
The report sets out reforms to the regulatory system. It recommended that regulators be given better access to linked healthcare records. Why does it need that if it performed so well? The Inquiry have assumed the framework the regulator used did a good job and refining it with better data is all that is needed. But it never seriously questioned whether the framework itself could be improved.
The questions a sceptical inquiry would have asked were left almost untouched. What about the MHRA’s funding model and its reliance on data supplied by the manufacturers? What about the standards applied under emergency authorisation, the speed of the approval decisions and the handling of conflicts of interest? An inquiry whose statutory purpose is to learn lessons cannot learn the most important ones if it will not ask about what went wrong. The report quotes Dame June Raine as saying that, “its regulatory decisions were based on the safety, quality and effectiveness of the medicine under review and were “in no way influenced” by the set fees it charged industry.” Her argument was that this funding enabled the MHRA to operate “independently from central government”. In reality, the fees are a derisory flat fee, such that the MHRA has the same resources to examine a trial of 44,000 people ahead of a whole population rollout under huge political pressure, as it would have had for a trial of 2,000 people for a rare disease. The Inquiry should have asked about resourcing but instead let June Raine claim she had done an exemplary job that could not have been bettered.
The report devotes a whole chapter to Authorisation including a section on ‘Novel’ technologies and scale up. The use of the quotation marks around ‘Novel’ is a subtle reminder that this is of course ‘misinformation’: “while sometimes characterised as a ‘novel’ technology, it is important to note that research on mRNA had been ongoing for decades at the time of the pandemic”. The fact that mRNA technology had failed to have a single product approved even for dying cancer patients because of safety concerns does not get a mention.
The lack of scientific curiosity among the so-called experts is profound. For example, “Professor Evans and Professor Prieto-Alhambra agreed that there was no evidence that the vaccine technologies had a harmful impact on a recipient’s genetics. This was echoed by Professor Wendy Barclay, Action Medical Research Chair of Virology at Imperial College London and a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) from 2014, who also said that she was not aware of any credible evidence that Covid-19 vaccines or any parts of them “persist in the body and move to other parts of the body” Have they been asleep for the last four years? Have they read none of the reports of vaccine-derived spike protein in cardiac muscle or tumour samples to name just two examples? Have they missed all the literature on biodistribution and persistence of spike expression for as much as 700 days post vaccination?
Even the apparent ignorance of the MHRA’s CEO, surrounding the manufacturing processes was left unprobed. When Dame June Raine was asked a cursory question about process 1 and process 2, she simply reassured Mr Keith that “the process 2 substance was required to be shown to be comparable through side-by-side comparability studies and heightened testing.” This is an admission that there was no clinical trial evidence of process 2 products. The side-by-side comparability studies were all laboratory quantification testing not clinical testing. Did they probe further on this point? Of course not.
This level of ignorance is staggering. HART readers may wish to look at the NORTHgroup.info website to read an excellent summary of the problems of DNA contamination in process 2 products.
Distrust
Finally, the report treats declining public confidence almost entirely as a problem of hesitancy to be solved. “False information online” is blamed for the falling levels of trust. The remedy implied is better communication and better targeting of the messages that people failed to accept. No acknowledgement that the concerns were based on real risk, not on ‘misinformation’. Failure to address genuine concerns, blanket unevidenced assurances and coercion are the real reasons for trust falling.
A fall in public trust is a rational and predictable response to a system which overstated the benefits, downplayed uncertainties, dismissed concerns about adverse events and steamrollered foundational medical ethics. The report treats the public’s scepticism as something to be corrected. Worse, it failed to scrutinise the conduct of institutions which caused that scepticism. The starting point was that all scepticism was itself wrong. With that starting point, comfortable conclusions could be reached. The Inquiry was too cowardly to invite any of the sceptical witnesses and subject us to proper cross-examination. Were they afraid we might have some facts to back up our assertions that these products were far from ‘Safe & Effective’?
No measurements
The question the Inquiry declined to ask is the one that matters most: “Did we measure the benefits and the harms honestly?” An inquiry that had started there would have weighed the modelling with the caution its own statistics regulator had demanded. It would have had to reconcile real world data with the claims. It would have investigated injury rigorously. It would have tested the regulators instead of assuming they got everything right. Finally, it would have asked whether public distrust was a problem to be managed or a sign of problems that need addressing.
Module 4 did not ask that question, because it knew the answer it was reaching for. That is why its lessons are about logistics and not about data, science or truth.
Whitewash or critique?
HART and several other groups submitted lengthy witness statements under a Rule 9 request, but despite assurances that these would be helpful to the Inquiry’s legal team in drawing up questions for witnesses, it seems Baroness Hallett & Co. have decided that all the information was ‘not sufficiently relevant’.
The Module 4 report has been justifiably described as a whitewash. Biologyphenom has published numerous witness testimonies on his Substack rightly showing that many of the harms were covered but it appears that Hallett’s only interest in the Vaccine Injured and Bereaved was to express sympathy and suggest the compensation system should be streamlined and maximum payments increased in line with inflation. She showed no interest in looking into the regulatory failures which had allowed this disaster to unfold.
It is the Inquiry’s conclusions rather than the hearings themselves which defined the whitewash.
