The myth that the UK's governing elite know best has been blown out of the water by this pandemic

Excellent article. Nicely written. Thanks for posting.

Whataboutism, needlessly partisan and baseless nonsense, Mr. Rhydderch-Roberts. Mr. Morgan Jones states, right at the very beginning of the article, that Dominic Cummings isn't exactly unaccustomed with the concept of self-preserving obfuscation. Yes, many nations in the EU dealt with this unprecedented situation more poorly than others did, some nations dealt with the pandemic very well. That isn't the subject of this hearing, or this article. I'd like the same scrutiny of the Labour led Welsh government too - for a small, largely rural nation with 1 land border we sure had a high death rate. Far be it for any of us, with so much still unknown, to fully laud or condemn any institution based solely on an epidemiological or virological basis; that'll come in time. But words from the horse's mouth itself, directly pertaining to the performance and methodology of an institution? C'mon, mun. It's quite obvious that is the nature of both the testimony and this article. Diolch Ifan, another valuable opinion piece that adds to our national dialogue.

It has but only for those who were previously blind to this reality

Covid-19 was/is not some kind of static event, and nowhere does the author suggest it was. However, its dynamics were predictable from previous outbreaks. For instance, the difference between the 2014 Ebola and earlier Ebola outbreaks affords us a striking analogy for the difference between SARS and Covid-19. Earlier Ebola outbreaks limited themselves by quickly killing most of their victims, whereas the 2014 Ebola was slower to kill and hence more able to spread — a lesson that will not have been lost on public health official & academics who reviewed SARS during 2014–20. Given these predictable dynamics, the UK government's response was incompetent. An early warning of their incompetence came when we learned that they had totally misunderstood the concept of herd immunity. I'm pretty sure the UK Chief Medical Officer does understand actual herd immunity, and the best explanation I can suggest for his bizarre utterances in March 2020 would be that he had to be emollient with some very difficult people. No prizes for guessing whom I'm thinking of here. The talk of “herd immunity” must have come from people who don't understand what a mutation is, or how natural selection works. Covid-19 arose by a random copying-error in some earlier virus, probably in 2019, just as SARS did a few years earlier. Quite by chance, the 2019 mutation (i) enhanced the virus's ability to invade &/or replicate in human cells (probably via an increase in affinity for human ACE-2), and (ii) ocurred in a virus particle that got inhaled by a human, and that's how the pandemic started. So, it should be obvious that if you let the virus replicate in more humans, you are creating opportunities for more mutations, and strong selective pressure for those mutations that help the virus to evade natural or vaccine-induced immunity. Complacency about Covid-19 in the summer of 2020 looks like it was predicated on the belief that the virus had somehow become less infectious while circulating in millions of people in the preceding weeks. The folly of such a belief will be obvious to most readers: if you're not sure, re-read my previous paragraph and you'll be able to work it out. So what was the UK government thinking of?— some kind of accelerated evolution towards non-virulence? Beats me.

They pretend otherwise because the UK's had years if not centuries of practise.Believing what is basically crap, that the upper class know best. Time for this fooshness to stop and here in Cymru we can make it stop.

This was in the Guardian yesterday, reporting on Prime Ministers Questions:"Johnson refuses to deny claim he said Covid was 'only killing 80-year-olds' when he resisted second lockdownStarmer says there is a pattern of behaviour here: lack of planning, poor decision-making and a lack of planning. He says it is alleged Johnson said Covid was only killing 80-year-olds when he resisted the second lockdown. Did the PM use those words, or words to that effect? He says not having a lockdown last autumn was one of the government’s biggest errors. Johnson says this will be a matter for the inquiry. There was a circuit breaker in Wales." Yes there was a circuit breaker in Wales - a decision taken by our devolved government in Caerdydd and not by Westminster. Is Boris Johnson trying to claim credit for a decision that wasn't his? I seem to recall that at the time the government in Westminster was highly critical of the Welsh Government for making this decision, as was the right-wing English nationalist press.

Yes thank God we have the Welsh governing elite to lift us out of poverty and dismal low aspiration - er.....I've just noticed we are the poorest country in Western Europe with the lowest social mobility.