The Covid Inquiry’s Module 4 report, published this week, claims that 475,000 lives were saved by vaccination in England and Scotland. A further 7,000 are attributed to Wales. These figures are presented as findings. They are not findings. They are the outputs of a WHO model.
The inquiry itself has already identified this as a problem in a different context.
In its Module 2 report, Baroness Hallett found that scenarios were wrongly treated as forecasts, that ministers failed to grasp the distinction and that the reasonable worst-case scenario was what Professor Whitty called a “slippery concept”. The inquiry recommended multiple scenario planning precisely to guard against treating a single modelled worst case as a prediction.
