This report concerns the core political and administrative decision making in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

I think it's total nonsense.

It's disastrous actually for any credibility that the inquiry was clinging onto.

The models were just way, way, way off.

I mean, if you can imagine, they had a sort of COVID curve of deaths and then

the actual deaths were almost flat along the bottom. They were so inaccurate. The inquiry could

at least say, look, lockdown is clearly an extreme and damaging intervention. Was it really

necessary? But they don't seem to want to do that.

Hello, I'm Fraser Myers, Deputy Editor of Spikes.

I'm delighted to be joined by Michael Simmons, economics editor of The Spectator, and host of the new podcast Reality Check.

Welcome, Michael.

Thanks for having me, Fraser.

I really wanted to have you on to talk about the COVID inquiry, because you've done some brilliant skewering of some of the statistics they've been

putting out. Now, the COVID inquiry to remind people, chaired by Baroness Hallett,

it's now in its third year, some five years after the inquiry. It's got a projected cost of over 200 million

pounds. And one of the modules has come to the rather startling conclusion that had we just

locked down a week earlier, then we might have saved 23,000 lives. Michael, you take issue with that figure. I think it's fair to say. Yeah, I think it's

total nonsense. And the way it's been included is kind of, it's disastrous, actually, for any

credibility that the inquiry was clinging onto.

Let's start with the figure itself.

When it's first mentioned in the sort of introduction bit of this particular report

in the inquiry, Hallett uses the phrase, modeling has established and then goes on to bring up the 23,000 figure.

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