Authored by Roger Bate via The Brownstone Institute,

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has finally released the core political chapters of its long-awaited report. After nearly three years of hearings, millions of documents, and tens of millions of pounds spent on legal fees, the conclusion is now unmistakably clear.

They’ve learned nothing, as I detail in my latest research. 

Worse, they may not want to learn.

The Inquiry’s structure, its analytical frame, even its carefully curated narrative all point in the same direction: away from the possibility that Britain’s pandemic response was fundamentally misguided, and toward the politically safer claim that ministers simply “acted too late.”

On November 20, 2025, Jay Bhattacharya captured this perfectly in a single sentence on X: “Fact check; not locking down at all (like Sweden) would have saved lives in UK. Hard to believe how much money the UK spent on its sham covid inquiry.” That tweet was provocative—but it was also accurate in its diagnosis of the Inquiry’s deeper pathologies.

The Inquiry’s Central Mistake: Asking the Wrong Question

From the outset, the Inquiry has framed Britain’s pandemic response as a timing problem. Lockdowns were assumed to be necessary and effective; the only question was whether politicians implemented them quickly enough. The result is a dry recitation of process failures and personality clashes inside Downing Street, all of which are said to have delayed the inevitable “stay-at-home” order.

But that framing was never neutral. It was baked into the Inquiry’s analytical choices—especially its uncritical reliance on the same family of models that drove the UK into lockdown in March 2020.

The centerpiece of that modeling tradition is Imperial College London’s Report 9, the document that forecast hundreds of thousands of UK deaths absent stringent lockdowns. That report assumed near-homogeneous mixing, limited voluntary behavior change, and high fatality rates across the population. Under those assumptions, lockdown becomes not a political choice but a mathematical necessity.

The Inquiry has now rerun the same machinery and, unsurprisingly, produced the same conclusion.

Its headline claim—that delaying lockdown by a week caused roughly 23,000 additional deaths—is not a historical finding. It is not based on observational data. It is simply the output of an Imperial-style model with a different start date.

The Inquiry has restated the model, not tested it.

The Evidence They Chose Not to See

The Inquiry’s blindness becomes fully apparent when we ask the obvious comparative question: if the lockdown paradigm were correct, what would we expect to see among countries that refused to lock down?

We would expect chaos. We would expect mass hospital collapse. We would expect mortality catastrophes to dwarf the UK.

We would expect, in short, to see Sweden in ruins.

Instead, we see the opposite.

Sweden kept primary schools open, avoided stay-at-home orders, relied heavily on voluntary behavior, and preserved civil liberties throughout the pandemic. After correcting early care-home errors, Sweden recorded one of the lowest age-adjusted excess mortality rates in Europe.

The Swedish experience is not a footnote. It is not an “exception.” It is the control case—the real-world test of the lockdown paradigm.

And it falsifies it.

A serious Inquiry would have begun with Sweden. It would have asked why a country that rejected lockdowns achieved better mortality outcomes than Britain while preserving education, normal life, and basic freedoms. It would have integrated that evidence into every chapter. It would have examined whether voluntary behavior changes, targeted protection, and risk-based messaging can substitute for mass coercion.

Instead, Sweden is barely mentioned. When it appears at all, it is described as an anomaly. The Inquiry behaves as though Sweden is politically inconvenient—not analytically essential.

Because it is.

The Modeling Was Wrong. The Inquiry Can’t Admit It.

If the Inquiry were genuinely interested in learning, it would examine whether the models that drove the UK’s response were flawed. It would review the assumptions underpinning Report 9. It would test them against real-world data from multiple countries. It would commission adversarial modeling groups. It would bring in critics. It would examine alternative frameworks.

It did none of these things.

The behavior of the public is a perfect example. Imperial-style models assume that people remain near-normal in their social contacts without legal mandates. But mobility data, workplace activity, and school attendance show that Britons began adjusting their behavior weeks before Boris Johnson held the lockdown press conference. High-risk individuals adapted earliest. Businesses reacted to perceived risks earlier than the state. Families responded faster than the Cabinet Office.

The models were wrong about behavior.

Yet the Inquiry’s analysis still treats people as if they only respond to orders, not information.

The result is a fantasy counterfactual: a Britain that would have carried on as normal in March 2020 had the government not intervened. That Britain never existed.

Where Is the Cost–Benefit Analysis?

The Inquiry promised to evaluate the “relative benefits and disbenefits” of non-pharmaceutical interventions. It has not done so. There is no integrated accounting of:

the millions of missed cancer screenings

the explosion in mental-health morbidity

the delayed cardiovascular care

the long-term educational loss from school closures

the widening inequality gaps

the years-long damage to the NHS backlog

the economic scarring that will shorten future lives

Lockdowns always look good when you only count Covid deaths. But public health is cumulative. It is intertemporal. Saving a life today by destroying ten years of someone’s earning power is not a victory.

The Inquiry refuses to engage with these trade-offs. It is easier to condemn “late lockdowns” than to ask whether lockdowns were the wrong tool altogether.

The Real Reason the Inquiry Learned Nothing

The central failure of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry is not analytical. It is institutional.

A real investigation would expose catastrophic judgment errors across the political and scientific establishment. It would show that ministers outsourced strategy to a narrow modeling group. It would reveal that the harms of lockdowns were not only foreseeable but foreseen. It would vindicate critics who were ridiculed or censored. It would anger parents whose children suffered educational harm. It would enrage families whose loved ones died because routine care was suspended. It would shatter public trust in Whitehall and SAGE.

That is precisely what the Inquiry cannot do.

Instead, it offers a politically safe narrative. The strategy was sound. The problem was timing. Ministers were slow. Advisors were frustrated. Downing Street was chaotic. But the solution next time is simple: lock down earlier, lock down harder, lock down smarter.

It is a comforting fairy tale for the people who caused the damage.

The Truth Is Already Clear

Bhattacharya’s November 2025 tweet may have been blunt, but it crystallized what the Inquiry is unwilling to say. Sweden shows that not locking down at all could have saved British lives—not merely reduced collateral damage, but saved lives.

That is the final heresy. And that is why the Inquiry cannot confront it.

Learning would expose too much.

The UK did not simply lock down too late. It locked down unnecessarily. The Inquiry should have been a reckoning. Instead, it became a shield—protecting institutions rather than illuminating truth.

Britain deserved better. The world deserved better.

Until we admit what went wrong, we remain doomed to repeat it.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla said during a recent appearance on public media that “Poland could also become a threat to us…We see that Poland’s interests differ from Germany’s…We are seeing double standards on the Nord Stream issue. Poland did not extradite a wanted criminal, a terrorist, to Germany.”

He’s not wrong, but he’s also not right for the reasons that people might think, namely the assumption that Poland might one day pose a military threat to Germany.

The present piece will clarify the matter.

It’s true that “Poland’s interests differ from Germany’s”, though not necessarily in the economic sense since Poland became a larger export market for Germany earlier this year than China, and Poland has benefited from the German-led EU’s subsidies (that benefit Germany even more though). Their different interests largely pertain to the future of the EU, which Germany envisages becoming a federation under its leadership while Poland wants it to be a loose union of states that retain more of their sovereignty.

Nord Stream embodied these differences since Germany could have leveraged what would have been its leading energy role in the EU had the second pipeline come online to coerce the Central & Eastern European (CEE) countries into making more concessions on their sovereignty to Berlin-backed Brussels. Poland feared this scenario for self-evident reasons, while the US didn’t want the rise of a de facto German-led “Federation of Europe”, so they plotted together to prevent this from happening.

Poland’s Swinoujscie LNG terminal opened in 2015, and it’s now poised to serve as the entryway for US LNG into CEE as explained here, which will erode German influence there. In parallel, the US supports the Polish-led “Three Seas Initiative” of more robust integration among the CEE states, which is one of the means through which Poland plans to revive its long-lost Great Power status. These aforesaid policies were then given an unprecedent boost after the Nord Stream attack that the US arguably orchestrated.

Had the Ukrainian Conflict ended as a result of spring 2022’s peace talks, then the opportunity for blowing up that pipeline would have closed, hence the importance of Poland aiding the UK in its efforts to convince Zelensky to keep fighting by allowing the unlimited transit of military aid to that end.

In the three years since that attack, the German economy greatly weakened, which Poland and the US expect to accelerate the erosion of German influence in CEE and facilitate its replacement with their influence.

Poland can’t replace Germany’s economic influence there even though it just became a $1 trillion economy, but the lopsided trade deal that the EU agreed to with the US could eventually see the latter doing so instead.

Polish influence can instead take the form of leading CEE’s containment of Russia now that it commands NATO’s third-largest army, thus creating a wedge between Germany and Russia like the US also wants, and rallying the region behind its vision of the EU’s vision in opposition to Germany’s.

Chrupalla was therefore correct in claiming that “Poland could also become a threat to [Germany]” since the successful implementation of the abovementioned grand strategy would shatter German hegemony over CEE. What he didn’t mention, and perhaps he hasn’t (yet?) realized it, is that the aforesaid is a joint Polish-US plan that’s been operational for years already. If it wasn’t for US support, Poland could never pose any strategic threat to Germany, so it’s really the US that already poses the greatest one of all to it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

The UK military continues monitoring and shadowing Russian ‘research vessels’ as well as naval ships off Britain’s waters which are widely understood to be Russian Navy intelligence collection ships.

In the latest development, British media reported Sunday that the Royal Navy recently intercepted two Russian naval vessels as they passed through the English Channel, according to a statement by the UK Defense Ministry.

Illustrative: Russian MoD image

The ships have been identified as the corvette Stoikiy and the tanker Yelnya, the former which is part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The Royal Navy’s patrol vessel HMS Severn was dispatched to shadow the Russian vessels as they moved west through the Dover Strait – which is the northwest part of the channel just before entering the North Sea.

BBC and CNN have indicated that for part of the shadow mission, monitoring of the Russian ships was handed off to NATO partner assets.

“In addition to the ships stationed around the UK coast, Britain has deployed three Poseidon surveillance aircraft to Iceland as part of a NATO mission patrolling for Russian ships and submarines in the North Atlantic and Arctic, the ministry said,” CNN writes.

Britain’s military has indicated that its HMS Severn continued tracking the corvette Stoikiy “from a distance” and at all times remained prepared to react to “any unexpected activity”.

Russia’s embassy in London has meanwhile emphasized that Russian vessels international waters in reality “pose no threat to Britain’s security.” This comes after alleged incidents where Russian vessels aimed lasers as British warplanes operating above to monitor the ships’ activities.

And last week the embassy firmly stated, “London, with its Russophobic path and increasing militaristic hysteria leads to further degradation European security, providing the premise for new dangerous situations.”

Western allies believe Russian naval ‘research vessels’ like the Yantar are assisting with Moscow-backed ‘sabotage campaigns’ in northern European waters. For example the last couple years have seen allegations of Russian vessels cutting telecoms cables under the North Sea and elsewhere.

“We call on the British side to hold off taking any destructive steps which might aggravate the crisis situation on the European continent,” the embassy added.

A view from HMS Severn as it tracks Russia’s RFN Stoikiy in the English Channel.
📸MoD 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/wGsLO006Nc

— Massimo Frantarelli (@MrFrantarelli) November 24, 2025

Russian officials and institutions have been under intense scrutiny in the UK ever since the Ukraine war began, and relations are steadily worsening. London officials believe that Russian government-linked entities in Britain could be involved in ‘sabotage operations’ targeting NATO and Europe’s defense sector.

Authored by Greg Collard via Racket.news,

New liber-net report maps an expansive network of government and private censors across Germany…

Many organizations and federal agencies involved in censoring Americans under the guise of mis/disinformation have shut down in the last couple years. Racket’s Twitter Files exposed the level of censorship slime oozing from organizations such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Election Integrity Project, and the Virality Project. On the government side of things, there was the Global Engagement Center, the Foreign Influence Task Force, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which still exists but is no longer involved in mis/disnfo work.

That’s not to say America is perfect when it comes to free speech, but as Sen. Rand Paul said in September, “throughout government, the censorship apparatus that Biden had put in place is gone.”

However, if you look to Germany, the strongest economic power in the European Union, it’s easy to see where America was going. It has about 330 organizations working with federal and state levels of government to suppress speech and about 425 grants — mostly from the government — that fund this work, according to research from liber-net, a free speech group that tracks censorship.

The most high-profile cases of German censorship, at least in America, have been raids of people who authorities determined had engaged in “digital violence” for offenses that include insulting someone. These raids were the subject of a high-Zprofile “60 Minutes” segment last February. Prosecutors and police largely depend on a system of government-certified and government-funded “flaggers.”

While these incidents understandably get the most attention, the censorship apparatus is much more deeply ingrained in German society, says Andrew Lowenthal, the CEO of liber-net.

“Germany is the most important country doing this type of content controls work in the entirety of the EU and I would argue has a significant influence on the EU. There’s not really any light between civil society and the government.”

As a result, there’s a constant “atmosphere of intimidation,” says Thomas Geisel, a former mayor of Dusseldorf and now a member of the European Parliament.

“People are afraid to speak their mind. That people always have to find some sort of way of expressing their mind in a politically correct way has created a narrower space for discourse, and I think that is really threatening our democracy.”

Liber-net’s report includes a searchable database of organizations involved in content control and the grants that fund their work, categorized from 1-5 flags, with five being the worst for its censorship advocacy.

The report indicates that government funding for content controls peaked in 2023 at about $36 million (converted from euros, as all dollar amounts in this article are) among the German federal and state governments as well as the EU. While the combined funding among the three has decreased to around $23 million, the amount from the German federal government remains roughly the same and has increased since last year.

Source: liber-net. Amounts in euros.

The “subtle instruments”

In some cases, government money goes to private organizations that act as a middleman for the government. For example, all of the money the private German Research Foundation distributes is provided by the German federal and state governments, and the EU (1%). The foundation awards money to various mis/disinfo causes. In June, it even requested proposals to expand “the term ‘disinformation’ to include claims that may be factually true,” according to liber-net.

The report says the German government has certified four organizations as flaggers, or in the government’s framing, organizations with “specialized expertise and experience in identifying and reporting illegal content.” The Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur), which enforces the EU’s controversial Digital Services Act, awards grants to these flaggers.

Among them is a group called REspect!. It’s been a government-certified “trusted flagger” since October 2024, which means “deletion requests submitted by REspect! to the platforms must be given priority and processed within a shorter time,” according to a REspect! report. The group received funding directly from a government grant program called “Demokratie leben!,” which translates to Live Democracy!

REspect! has an online portal for people to submit their complaints, which are then forwarded to the proper authorities such as the Bavarian Police. That was the case for one person who had the audacity to call a German politician a “Dummschwätzer” on Facebook — which roughly translates to “blowhard” — as documented by the Bundestag in a list of attacks against politicians and political parties.

Translation via ChatGPT: “Report of an offense via the online portal of the Bavarian Police through the reporting office REspect! Reporting an online insult. The GS (Green Party member of the state parliament) was called a ‘Dummschwätzer’ (‘blabbermouth’ / ‘loud-mouthed idiot’) on Facebook.”

Another “trusted flagger” is HateAid, which received its certification in June after proving its bona fides in other aspects of Germany’s censorship apparatus since its founding in 2018, garnering at least $5.2 million in government funding, according to liber-net.

HateAid purports to be a defender of free speech. From its homepage:

However, HateAid, armed with public funding, will go after people who express the wrong opinion. Take the Russia-Ukraine war, according to liber-net:

HateAid has also notably pursued the censorship of those protesting Berlin’s backing of Kiev; it has classified the hashtag “Kriegstreiber” (or “Warmonger”) as “pro-Kremlin propaganda” whose effect is to “undermine the credibility of politicians” supporting Berlin’s war efforts.

HateAid even warns that the “warmonger” hashtag from “small pro-Kremlin accounts” can shape public debate because they respond to channels with large audiences, such as those of politicians and journalists (bold emphasis is HateAid):

These are retweeted or commented on preferentially in order to spread the narrative of the “warmonger”. In this way, even small accounts can share propaganda with enormous reach. As a result, they enter the centre of society, where they are also perceived and taken up by citizens who are reading along. In effect, they are free riders on the reach of these accounts and can thus shape the public debate.

The CEO of HateAid, Josephine Ballon, was part of the 60 Minutes piece mentioned above. She declared that “free speech needs boundaries.”

“Free speech needs boundaries… Without boundaries, a very small group of people can rely on endless freedom to say anything that they want, while everyone else is scared and intimidated,” says Josephine Ballon, CEO of HateAid. https://t.co/YjlBa7YJ3s pic.twitter.com/xqI88oiiO2

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 17, 2025

Without speech boundaries, Ballon argued that people will be afraid to participate in political discussions.

“This is not only a fear, it’s already taking place. Already half of the Internet users in Germany are afraid to express their political opinion, and they rarely participate in public debates online anymore.”

There lies the rub: is that because people are afraid of being criticized or attacked online, or because people are afraid of being turned over to authorities by the government’s “trusted flaggers” such as HateAid and REspect!?

Geisel says Germany’s censorship apparatus is having a similar effect as anti-speech laws in Russia, which, after invading Ukraine, made “discrediting the armed forces” a crime.

“It’s a lot more subtle [in Germany], but the result is very similar in that you simply don’t speak your mind anymore because there are more subtle instruments preventing you from speaking your mind.”

He points to the highly publicized case of political scientist Ulrike Guerot as an example. Guerot was a political science professor at the University of Bonn until she was fired in 2023 after outrage over a book she co-authored, “Endspiel Europa,” which translates to “Endgame Europe.” Guerot argued that “Ukraine had the role of starting a war with Russia on behalf of the West, which was then to be backed militarily and logistically by NATO member states…”

Officially, Guerot was fired for plagiarism, although she maintains there were only minor problems and that the accusations were a pretext for firing her over her views.

Guerot said liber-net’s report is eye-opening because it maps out a censorship network that makes clear to her the problem is worse than she realized.

“It draws the line between the dots and you say, ‘Ah, this is connected to this and they got the money from there.’ And that’s why it’s called a censorship network. It’s like a spider net, and there are the dots and it’s all connected. And in this respect, I must admit it was absolutely breathtaking.”