This is Part 6 of a six-part series on the effects of Covid lockdowns on children, young people, and education. Part 1 and Part 2 summarised the so-called ‘science’ of lockdowns. Part 3 explained children's and parents' feelings and experiences, and Part 4 explored educators' feelings and experiences. Part 5 presented the effect that the Covid era imposed on higher education and examined the efficacy of the UK Government’s decision to close educational institutions.
Part 6 explores ethical concerns in relation to Covid measures. Professor Ian Brighthope calls these “the defining ethical questions of the era”. Professor Jay Bhattacharya, has said the measures were “a symptom of replacing the culture of questioning in science and medicine with a culture of authority. It didn't matter what was actually true … what mattered was whether you were aligned with authority.”
There is a question of whether the conduct of those in power met, in the words of Lord Paul Bew, Chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, “the high ethical standards the public has a right to expect” during the Covid era. At the time, the UK Government established the Moral and Ethical Advisory Group (MEAG) to advise Sir Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, and senior ministers on complex ethical dilemmas to ensure ethical considerations were not ignored. Did this group do what was required?
Alberto Giubilini, Senior Research Fellow in practical ethics at the University of Oxford with a specialisation in public health ethics, spells out the importance of ethics: it is the only method available to justify actions, especially to citizens of liberal democracies.
The UK Government has laid out the ‘Seven Principles of Public Life’ through the Nolan Principles (1995), which are “accepted as the basis of the ethical standards expected of public office holders”. Professor Mark Philp, Chair of the Research Advisory Board to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, discussed these principles:
Political ethics concerns the principles that guide and constrain the interpretation and understanding of the role and function of public office … those who exercise this power and authority are accountable to those over whom it is exercised … both in terms of whether they have fulfilled the formal responsibilities of their office, and in terms of whether the public approves of the policies that they have used their office to enact. These last two judgments involve a distinction between formal accountability (did they act ‘properly’?) and political accountability (do we approve of what they did?) Political systems that blur the distinction risk subordinating ethical considerations to expediency.
Professor David Paton and Professor John Keown set out criteria for assessing ethical behaviour during this time. They pointed out that the decision to shut down a society is an ethical one, and that “following the ethics” is key to avoiding panicked or disproportionate responses to public health emergencies. They add that it was surprising that “prudent ethical reflection” was missing from the development and enforcement of lockdown policy, especially since widely accepted ethical criteria for determining when coercive public health measures such as lockdowns are justified had been available to politicians long before 2020.
Indeed, the World Health Organization already had a measured pandemic preparedness plan in place. The UK’s version includes an ‘Ethical Framework’ which is meant “to help people think about the ethical aspects of their decisions”. The key principles “should underpin all pandemic preparedness and response activity”: precautionary, proportionality, and respect. Proportionality is “the response to a pandemic should be no more and no less than that necessary in relation to the known risks”. Respect is “keeping people as informed as possible, giving people the chance to express their views on matters that affect them and respecting people’s personal choices about their treatment and care”. The policy is clearly designed to avoid “disproportionate”, unethical, and panicked responses.
Paton and Keown wrote that coercive public health measures must meet at least five ethical requirements. They must be effective, necessary, and proportionate to the health risk. Officials should minimise their harmful impact, and policymakers must be transparent and provide the public with an explanatory justification for their policy.
The BMA has set out principles of medical ethical behaviour: patient autonomy and choice, communication, honesty, openness, truth-telling, trust, and mutual respect.
How Were Medical Ethics Principles Breached?
Dr Liz Evans has defined the principles of medical ethics as ‘first, do no harm’, bodily autonomy, patient-centred care, privacy, informed consent, and confidentiality. She explains the breach of these principles in a Christian context:
For me, it was primarily a pandemic of ethical violations. It is my opinion that significant suffering and death were caused not by covid but by the failure of the government, public health authorities and, most importantly, the medical profession to uphold the ethical principles that have always framed and constrained the delivery of healthcare to ensure that we first do no harm.
Medical ethics are grounded in a Christian understanding of humanity … that each person is a unique being of infinite value to be treated with dignity and respect. They enshrine into law and professional codes of practice the doctor’s duty to treat every person with autonomy and dignity, to seek to do good … beneficence, and to do no harm … non-malfeasance. All medical interventions carry a risk of harm. So there is a duty to act with care and proportionality.
Ethical codes hold healthcare professionals accountable ... It is undeniable that medical ethics were egregiously violated from March 2020 onwards. Governments failed to uphold basic morality. Healthcare professionals abandoned medical ethics.
Dr Evans further stated that the Church “abandoned basic theological principles” and supported “gross violations of medical ethics” by staying silent as society lost its moral compass. Additionally, the Church failed to analyse its actions of abandoning the elderly, ignoring the vulnerable and those in need, and closing its doors at a time of spiritual need. It failed to challenge a situation which destroyed the mental health of adults and children and ruined the educational chances of a generation. One church leader told me that not only would he not reply to my letters about the devastating Covid measures, he would not even open them!
Professor Sunetra Gupta, one of the world’s leading epidemiologists, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration. Her witness statement submitted to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry explains how the establishment breached ethical criteria, asserting that the policies were harmful, disproportionate, ineffective, and unnecessary in a penetrating analysis and indictment of the Government’s policies:
Given the conditions under which the majority of the world's population lives, if there was one thing we could be sure of, it was that people would die — of hunger, malnutrition, disease and malaise — as a result of lockdowns. This has now been painfully corroborated, as has the effect on more affluent nations, where much of the significant social, economic, psychological and developmental harms have been suffered by the poor and the young.
The blind adoption of lockdown … is a tragedy for which the whole of society is now paying a hefty price.
She pointed out that in March 2020, it was already clear that the majority of the population were at very low risk of severe disease and death. She also made it clear that there is no evidence to support the notion that locking down earlier would have been successful. Significantly, she concluded, “In effect, we betrayed the Precautionary Principle by adopting a strategy certain to cause harm, but whose benefits were entirely unclear.”
Professor Ian Brighthope, in his submission to the Australian Covid-19 Royal Commission in 2024, explained how the ethical criteria were breached, and he spoke forcefully about the absence of proportionality analysis in the New Zealand Royal Commission, saying that the scientific approach, the lockdowns, masking, social distancing, hygiene, testing, and tracking and tracing were introduced based on flawed science. He said they were “essentially ineffective and dangerous to the population's health”, unnecessary, disproportionate, unjustified and harmful, since Covid was “no more than a bad flu and posed very little risk to people of good health”. He raised serious ethical issues: the coercion to vaccinate, the lack of informed consent provided to patients, and the very high levels of vaccine injuries and deaths.
The US House of Representatives’ Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Committee on Oversight and Accountability report provides a further damning indictment. It reported that school closures, lockdowns, and associated non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were not supported by available science and evidence, unnecessarily had severe consequences for Americans’ physical and mental health, and adversely impacted academic performance that will continue for years. It described the policies as ineffective, unnecessary, disproportionate, harmful, and, far from being informed, the public was misled.
Dr Gerry Quinn et al.’s May 2025 research also represents a comprehensive rebuttal of the scientific justification for government policies in an ethical context. Among the main conclusions were that mRNA/DNA vaccines were heavily promoted without a clear public understanding of their novel nature, effectiveness was overstated, safety concerns were minimised, and informed consent was undermined. It said that many governments introduced a coercive policy of vaccination, often making it mandatory or at least “socially difficult” for people to make an informed choice despite there being “a demonstrable net harm”, e.g. for young adults and children whose risk of severe COVID-19 is much lower than the risk of vaccine injury from the mRNA vaccines. They wrote, “We believe these mandates breached the core ethical principles of informed consent and bodily autonomy, and we question whether it is ethical to mandate any medicine for any section of the population”. They also said the mandates breached the necessary, effective, minimise harm, and proportionality criteria.
This key issue of the absence of informed consent is one I raised in January 2023 with the Northern Ireland CMO, Dr McBride. I asked whether citizens’ rights regarding informed consent, as explained on the NHS website, were readily and clearly available, and whether patients using NHS services were told about the possible side effects of medications and the risks and benefits of treatments. I also asked him to explain and justify the proposal to vaccinate babies against Covid and the decision to close schools. My communication is available here.
To me, his failure to respond to my letters exemplifies the lack of accountability among public officials and their inattention to the BMA principles of openness, honesty, and truth-telling. I also drew his attention to the key democratic principle at stake: the mandated measures limited our freedom, and those who imposed the measures should provide evidence that they are indeed safe and effective.
Dr Alan Mordue, a retired consultant in public health medicine, concluded that the application of the core ethical principles of informed consent, proportionality, and benefits outweighing harms was “cursory to the point of being non-existent”. He added, “What we need is something that reflects the ethical and democratic foundations of our country — core principles that might help improve and protect accountability”.
Accountability in a Democratic Society
This series has argued that those in power breached established ethical codes, but the issue runs deeper; it strikes at the essence of democratic societies. Ethical codes were already in place. Is the absence of working processes to hold people accountable the fatal flaw in our democracy? “Accountability is at the heart of a democratic society”, according to Julian McCrea, former Deputy Director of the Institute for Government. The UN defines accountability as:
The notion that individuals, including public officials, should be held responsible for their actions. Political accountability means the responsibility or obligation of government officials to act in society's best interests or face consequences. In cases of crimes against humanity, accountability means that individuals should be held accountable by the state in which they occurred or by the international community.
Many governments have held inquiries to provide “the illusion of accountability”; however, many inquiries mirrored the UK’s witness restrictions, as explained by Dr Ros Jones, which limited their openness. Attempts to obtain answers to basic questions and to place on record the experiences of those who have been injured by vaccine injuries have been lengthy, frustrating, and, at this point, fruitless. It seems that, as Monye Anyadike Danes KC, on behalf of the Northern Ireland Children’s Commissioner, stated, “No one has taken responsibility or is likely to be held accountable for the harm inflicted on them, which in many cases was intentional harm, knowing that it would cause harm.” Lord Sumption, the former Justice of the UK Supreme Court, described it as “the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country.”
It would be instructive to follow the outcome of a report by Ethical Approach UK into the oral testimony of Dominic Cummings, a senior advisor to the Prime Minister, to the Joint Session of the Health and Social Care Committee and the Science and Technology Committee. The report concluded that his behaviour constituted Misfeasance in Public Office, and that he used the Cabinet Office as executive apparatus to instruct a regulator to act contrary to its statutory duties.
The report adds that his own admission, “it almost definitely wasn’t [legal]”, satisfies the recklessness and wilfulness criteria and further that his action meets the threshold for misfeasance in public office, violates the Rule of Law, and breaches the Nolan Principles of Public Life. The report concluded that such conduct invites criminal and civil liability and justifies urgent inquiry and investigation by the CPS and/or judicial review of any impacted decisions, identified “multiple legal and constitutional breaches” and recommended referral to the Crown Prosecution Service.
Has anything happened in response? Will these actions of Sir Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, be investigated?
MEAG was created to advise Whitty, who had an obvious responsibility to follow the principles of medical and political ethics, but according to The Telegraph, he attempted to silence the government ethics advisors who warned about the impact of Covid policies. The report includes evidence of breaching core medical ethics principles, silencing professionals, lack of informed consent, patient coercion, and failure to provide honest and clear information to the public.
The Path Forward
Hannah Arendt’s concept of a liberal democracy reflects Professor Mark Philp’s statement regarding the blurring of the public and private sphere and the dangers of a diminishing acceptance of differences in opinion and open debate. Nicholas Tate summarised her thinking as follows:
It was not just in totalitarian regimes that people were happy to abandon their freedom as long as the state continued from time to time to toss them some economic benefits. This was a feature of liberal democracies too. Arendt saw this as ‘the political infantilization of citizens’, as she called it, as an inherent feature of modern mass democracy and a serious danger to freedom in the modern world.
Politics has become prey to both private interests and the dominance of the expert, which has led to questionable ethics. As I mentioned earlier, codes of ethical behaviour for politicians, public servants, and the medical profession are in place. What appears dysfunctional is the process for ensuring compliance. As Professor Brighthope highlighted, there is a need for independent processes for holding people in power to account — processes which are supported by enforcement. It has long seemed to me that, as Brighthope says, the person appointing the chair and determining the terms of reference for inquiries has made decisions about the outcome, and whilst he refers specifically to Royal Commissions, it also appears to apply to public inquiries:
The central lesson is that the label ‘Royal Commission’ does not guarantee accountability; it is only as independent as its terms of reference, who appoints the commissioners, which evidence is tested, which witnesses are compelled and whether the inquiry is prepared to ask questions that may embarrass governments and powerful institutions.
The Institute for Government’s report highlights the issue, arguing that “the UK’s system of accountability isn’t keeping up with the realities of modern government”.
What Can Be Done?
Sam Fowles, a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for British Democracy (King's College London), reports that the Welsh Parliament is considering a law which would require politicians who make false statements to correct the record or face sanction. Crucially, an independent commissioner would enforce this. It would mean politicians could be held to account for lying in the same way as other professions, with the court making an objective decision based on the evidence rather than political allies or opponents deciding for political convenience, as it currently is. However, those in power would be introducing a new system to hold themselves accountable and subject themselves to legal processes.
As Professor Brighthope wrote:
At the heart of the pandemic response lay a series of decisions that struck directly at the foundations of medical ethics and democratic governance. Informed consent, long regarded as inviolable, was rendered conditional … Human rights were curtailed on a scale unseen … These are not marginal concerns.
Ultimately, what is at stake is the integrity of the systems upon which modern health, and indeed modern society, depends.
The integrity of these systems does indeed exemplify “the defining ethical questions of the era”.
