The Covid Lockdowns: What Did Britain Get Right – and Wrong?

The Covid Inquiry has officially become the most expensive in British legal history – £192 million and counting, according to October’s financial statements.

But for exactly £192 million less, you can join us at Worcester College, Oxford, on Wednesday 19 November, for a serious discussion with leading experts in history, epidemiology, and medicine on what Britain got right – and wrong – in its lockdown response to Covid-19.

Expect a rigorous, engaging exchange spanning science, medicine, history, and economics, followed by a Q&A and drinks reception – with attendees not even required to stand two metres apart.

Our interdisciplinary panel of experts will explore key questions:

• Could more lives have been saved through earlier and longer lockdowns?
• What have been the global ramifications of the pandemic and pandemic response?
• Could the Great Barrington Declaration’s ‘focused protection’ strategy be applied to future pandemic preparedness?
• What lessons can history teach us about balancing public health, personal freedom and societal impact?

This event is hosted by the Committee for Academic Freedom. It forms part of CAF’s Open to Argument series, which promotes lively, good-faith discussion on the topics that are often hardest to discuss openly within Britain’s universities. The event will be filmed and made available online.

SPEAKERS

🔹 Sunetra Gupta is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. She specialises in infectious disease modelling and population-level dynamics, and has published widely on the spread and control of epidemics. She is also a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration.

🔹 Hugh Montgomery is Chair of Intensive Care Medicine at University College London (UCL). He has first-hand experience managing Covid-19 patients in intensive care and has contributed to major research on respiratory failure, critical-care outcomes, and pandemic preparedness.

🔹 Toby Green is a historian at King’s College London with expertise in African history, pandemics, and the social and economic impacts of disease. He is co-author of The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor — A Critique from the Left (2023).

🔹 Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian and journalist specialising in pandemics, public health, and the history of medicine. He is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at City St George’s, University of London, and author of The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19 (2019).

CHAIR

🔹 Güneş Taylor is a molecular biologist at the Francis Crick Institute, specialising in women’s health and fertility. She regularly discusses future technologies and sex differences with leading figures such as Richard Dawkins, Yuval Noah Harari, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Robert Winston.