COVID-19: systems reporting on the global pandemic

I have been reporting vociforously on the global pandemic from multiple angles. On the one hand, I started by attempting to ensure I was providing a big systems lens to help people understand how this happened, what it really means, and where it suggests we’re going.

My first major piece situated the pandemic in the context of a number of systems frameworks, setting out the potential risks of societal and institutional crisis (aka synchronous failure), as well as arguing that it signals the acceleration of a ‘global phase shift’. The follow up to this was a shorter, sharper piece in Yes! Magazine aiming to empower people with some tools to think systemically about the crisis and what that implies for positive local, contextual action. I also wrote a big think piece explaining why the Black Lives Matter movement had erupted in the context of the pandemic, tracing the crisis of racism back to empire and fundamental ecological dysfunctions in our relationship to the Earth System.

All this work was fairly widely read. The first piece was read and bigged up on Twitter by one my favourite musicians, Rou Reynolds of the British rock band Enter Shikari. The second also got wide pick up - Yes! has its own very large readership of hundreds of thousands, and the piece led to several talks and panel discussions around the issues which reached many more. The third was also read widely - I was contacted by many people, including white people, thanking me for writing something which lent them huge clarity on what Black Lives Matter means, and once again did quite a few podcast interviews around it.

But while keeping an eye as always on the big picture, the urgency of saving lives and livelihoods right now threw me into more investigative work. That started with a prescient piece urging the UK and US governments to take appropriate action to avoid a devastating crisis that could kill hundreds of thousands of people, and potentially millions in the absence of any safeguards at all. i got a fair amount of flak for writing that, but it turns out I was absolutely right and, really, with earlier action more lives could have been saved (and less damage caused to the economy).

This was followed by a series of granular COVID-19 investigations published by Byline Times, where I broke exclusive after exclusive tearing down the abject failures, corruption, and incompetence of the official UK Government response to the pandemic, while setting out the best available science on an effective public health response.

On 30th March, I published a major exclusive interview in The Independent with former World Health Organisation director Dr Anthony Costello, now a member of Independent SAGE and a sought-after authority on the pandemic and public health responses. In this interview, thanks to Costello, I was able to set out a robust 8 week strategy to stop the virus and transition to a ‘new normal’ while avoiding a cycle of draconian lockdowns. While at the time the piece didn’t have the impact I’d hoped, it put these key public health ideas out there on a mainstream footing when barely anyone was talking much sense, and paved the way for more and more people to begin to realise what an effective public health strategy might look like. This piece still stands up today as a powerful resource (you can read it outside the paywall thanks to Byline here).

Apart from sifting through hundreds of pages of SAGE and NERVTAG documents to give people the lowdown on what was really going on with Govt planning, I guess the biggest theme of this reporting was that the Govt had at some stage been pursuing a ‘herd immunity’ strategy. I also broke one of the first stories on PPE corruption, as well as a major investigation on the Dominic Cummings ‘genomics’ agenda behind the Govt’s COVID-19 response. This work went viral and had a great impact on the public discourse. It definitely seems to have played a key role in pushing the Govt toward finally publicly disassociating from the herd immunity approach.

It was also highly prescient. My last story during the first lockdown highlighted warnings from SAGE that lifting the lockdown without a robust test, trace and isolate system in place would guarantee a devastating second wave, and the need for another draconian lockdown. A second lockdown could, then, have been avoided - if the Govt had invested in strengthening that local public health capacity as so many of its own advisors were warning repeatedly. It didn’t.