There are still unanswered questions over Scotland's Covid response

Five years ago this week, Scotland and its parliament woke up to Covid-19. 
We were somewhat late to the pandemic, and there was surprisingly little panic. Perhaps the enormity of what lay ahead was too much to absorb. 

Parliamentary business on Tuesday 10 March 2020 included a statement from then health secretary Jeane Freeman on the new coronavirus variant. 

She explained we were in “the containment phase” and there was “no community transmission”. 

Then it was parliamentary business as usual, with a stage three vote on the Scottish Biometrics Commissioner Bill. 

But Covid-19 wasn’t going anywhere, and Freeman returned to the chamber that Thursday. Like the general public, MSPs were getting jumpy. 

Monica Lennon asked why a major football match was going ahead? Willie Coffey asked why travellers flying into Scotland from around the virus-stricken world were untested?
The cabinet secretary assured MSPs scientific advice was being followed. 

By then we’d all seen the images from China – workers dressed for a nuclear apocalypse, spraying disinfectant on emptied pavements. 

TV bulletins from Italy showed gasping patients lying in hospital corridors, medics weeping with exhaustion. 

Meanwhile, the Scotland v France game went ahead at Murrayfield. 

Catherine Calderwood, then Scotland’s chief medical officer, told us it was fine: “Health Protection Scotland has looked at all the available evidence, including the situation in the UK and France, and has concluded that there is no scientific reason for cancelling Scotland’s Six Nations fixture at the weekend.” 

I remember being at a poetry reading, of all things, in a Royal Mile pub. Cheerful French fans were everywhere, making friends with the locals. There were even sing-songs. It felt wrong, but we were following scientific advice. I squirmed in my seat, then headed home early. 

It was a strange time. There is a scene in the satirical Karl Kraus play The Last Days of Mankind which reflects the complacency of the Belle Epoque chattering classes on the eve of the First World War. 

In an early scene, just one man in the Viennese cafe sees looming catastrophe: “The world dances on the edge of a volcano, and all we do is sip coffee and read the newspapers as if history won’t touch us.” 

He is mocked: “Ah, always the pessimist! Relax!” 

We will never be able to press Calderwood on why she allowed the rugby to go ahead or question her apparent complacency on the eve of our own generation’s global catastrophe. 

She was excused from giving evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry on the grounds of an unspecified ailment. 

Calderwood, famously forced to resign for breaking Covid restrictions she demanded of others, continues to work in a university.

A recent story in the Sunday Mail revealed she applied for a job at the time she claimed to be too sick to answer questions from lawyers representing the Covid bereaved. Serious allegations about her decisions – or lack of them – were however made in expert evidence to the enquiry. 

The evidence of Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, is of particular concern. 

Woolhouse and his team assessed official health reports from Wuhan, where the outbreak began, in early January. 

After modelling the spread, he repeatedly contacted Calderwood by email, warning of the serious and urgent nature of the threat. 

When he finally got to meet her on 28 February, after a colleague intervened to secure access on his behalf, he advised social distancing measures should be implemented “within days”. 

But “within days” Calderwood did the opposite, telling rugby fans they were safe to go to a big game. It’s worth underlining that Calderwood is an obstetrician, while Woolhouse is an expert in global epidemics. His evidence is worth reading in full, because it casts doubt on that stock phrase “following scientific advice”. 

Those statements to parliament in March did not reflect the advice he passed to Calderwood in numerous emails and several meetings. He said: “I was not convinced by any of the responses I received to my emails in January 2020. This is because I considered the threat to be extremely serious and equally urgent but felt there was little sense of either from the CMO Scotland…” 

Woolhouse also wanted to avoid total lockdown and expressed astonishment that no analysis of its harms had been done before it happened on 23 March. 

He repeatedly advised mass testing as a way to avoid lockdowns but was told by one official this was “unrealistic.” 

He explains that scientific advice was often reached by consensus, and one assumes that involves compromise. The judge presiding over the enquiry concluded that decisions were sometimes hampered by “groupthink”, and we must conclude that the hallowed “scientific advice” was no exception. 

It’s disgraceful but not surprising, in my view, that Calderwood, a public servant with a senior NHS role, has not been held to account. She is part of Scotland’s protected elite who continues to enjoy a comfortable existence denied to those she was supposed to keep safe.