Chapter 1 offers an overview of what the Inquiry classifies as major epidemics and pandemics. Two points stick out. First, it gets full marks for defining a pandemic: 

You may not agree with the definition, but at least we know what this is about: a widespread infection affecting many folks. Clear?

Here’s the Inquiry summary and timeline:

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The second point is the very low psychological threshold given to threats:

“Even the threat of an outbreak has a significant impact on society’s preparedness – whether an epidemic occurs or not. The potential disruption to social and economic life, and the cost (in real financial terms and opportunity) as the result of a false alarm, may be disproportionate to the burden of an actual epidemic or pandemic. There are proper limits to preparedness and resilience (as there are for security), but improvements, even radical ones, can still be made. It is critical for any government, with the public’s approval, to steer a course between complacency and overreaction.”

And then:

“Furthermore, it was and is not difficult to contemplate a virus that is more transmissible and more lethal. Covid-19 had a case fatality ratio of between 0.5 and 1%.39 By comparison, the case fatality ratios of SARS and MERS at the beginning of the outbreaks (ie before population immunity or clinical countermeasures) were approximately 10% and 35%, respectively.40 Professor Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, underscored this:”

“ [O]n the scale of potential pandemics, Covid-19 was not at the top and it was possibly quite far from the top. It may be that next time – and there will be a next time … we are dealing with a virus that is much more deadly and is also much more transmissible … The next pandemic could be far more difficult to handle than Covid-19 was, and we all saw the damage that that pandemic caused us.”41

The case fatality ratio highlighted in the report is at odds with the figure quoted by Mr Keith to the ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnstone.

The Hallett Inquiry leading KC, Mr Keith, put it to Boris Johnson that “BSE did not have a 2% fatality rate, swine flu did not have a 2% fatality rate, so when you say there was an institutional failure to realise the seriousness of the position because of Asiatic, prior Asiatic, epidemics, or because of BSE or swine flu, the difference, and it was known to government, was that Covid had a 2% fatality rate and BSE and swine flu had not.”

The table in the report refers to an IFR of 0.67 to 1.18%, whereas Mr Keith refers to the “fatality rate”. In his question preamble, he referred to the IFR, but it isn’t clear - His estimate was twice the one per cent figure that modellers often cite and more than the 0.67 to 1.18% in the table.

Nevertheless, the actual IFR is much lower. A pooled analysis of 40 studies found that the IFR is as low as 0.0003% for children and adolescents, while it can reach 0.5% for people aged 60-69. What are we to think of these inconsistencies, discrepancies and mistakes?

Even a threat is enough to impact on society. And it’s not “if”; it’s “when”, as we pointed out as a main theme in the Introduction. So, according to this chapter, while uncertainty reigns supreme, you will notice the exclusive focus on viruses as causes of major events in the table.

By the way, do not bother looking up the references; they all relate to evidence given in the inquiry by various experts, as may be the case.

The definition of a pandemic is soft and extremely arbitrary, as we have previously pointed out: 

it is open to abuse by anybody with the will and access to the two major weapons of distortion: misuse of PCR and a website. Influencers’ delight, we can say. 

In fact circulation of rhinovirus fits the definition much better than some of the more dubious entries in the table, so why this fixation with other RNA viruses? 

The table also assumes that the figures for deaths are correct and causation has been adjudicated on the basis of facts. For example, the great Spanish Influenza death toll was probably a combination of many factors and respiratory failure with heliotrope cyanosis (one of its distinguishing features) was caused by bacterial infection. 

It is essential to understand whether individuals are dying with or from the disease. The cause of death is often inaccurate and incomplete, particularly for conditions such as pneumonia. There is no accepted definition of COVID-19-related death, and as we have shown, deaths can be recorded in one of 14 different ways. We’ve previously pointed out the problems with the attribution of death, listing eight mutually exclusive causes of excess deaths that require further investigation.

The inquiry, therefore, misses a massive opportunity to investigate the causes of death as it makes assumptions that all deaths assigned as covid deaths are as such.  

However, a bigger problem is hidden in the table: ignorance and bias. 

You may not know it, but we have been in the grip of a pandemic since 1961. It is far deadlier than any of the ones in the table, but alas, it has three characteristics that make it unpalatable to manipulators: it’s caused by a bacterium, it is a disease of poverty, and the very effective treatment consists of rehydration, no drugs or vaccines. 

WHO estimates “that each year there are 1.3 to 4.0 million cases of …….., and 21 000 to 143 000 deaths worldwide”. The current pandemic is the seventh since the 1800s, and readers of our John Snow series have probably already guessed what this is about: cholera. As Snow pointed out, cholera is a disease that is relatively easy to recognise as it has typical or pathognomonic features, so we feel slightly safer with these figures than with those reported in the inquiry table.

So, the first chapter provides biased and distorted information and missed opportunities to investigate and learn from the causes of death in the pandemic. Apart from that, it's a good start, eh?