Researchers Are Building a Timeline of Documents That Influenced Governments’ Decisions Made in Response to the Covid Pandemic

Professor Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson are gathering documents, such as position statements or briefings, related to government responses to Covid.

The aim is to provide a permanent record of the documents used and produced to make decisions on the events surrounding the SARs-CoV-2 pandemic.  So far, they have started a “Timeline” of these documents for the UK and have made enquiries about where these records can be found for Canada and USA.

“Over the coming months, we shall review some of these documents and explain the main issues,” the two researchers said.

Due to a shortage of resources at their disposal, the Timeline is limited to six periods that Prof. Heneghan and Jefferson consider to be the most important: March 2020; April 2020; September – October 2020; November – December 2020; Jan-Apr 2021; and, 14-21 December 2021.

Carl Heneghan is a professor of Evidence-based Medicine at the University of Oxford, Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (“CEBM”) and NHS Urgent Care general practitioner (“GP”) who regularly appears in the media. Tom Jefferson is a clinical epidemiologist and a Senior Associate Tutor at the University of Oxford.

In early September Prof. Heneghan and Jefferson noted that the back peddling regarding decisions made in response to the Covid “pandemic” had begun. 

First, there was Rushi Sunak, former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, who listened in on SAGE meetings and knew that there was dissent in the ranks but the minutes did not reflect that.

Next, the UK Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, burned the midnight oil doing his own research and found out that perhaps the Covid omicron threat was a tad overblown. He bravely stood up for keeping the world open.

Now that we have a new Prime Minister in the UK, let’s see who else joins the contest, Prof. Heneghan and Jefferson mused. “Who will be inspired to go next?”

Could it be the modellers? Maybe the variant-ologists are next? Or the suppressors – the zero Covid gang? How about the advisors who may have said things they knew were wrong at the time but as part of the government machinery they had no control over their affirmations? Or possibly the interventionists who spun their words on the imposition of fear?

“This might be entertaining and could go on for some time, were it not for the human, economic and democratic disaster it has left present and future generations to deal with,” Prof. Heneghan and Jefferson wrote.

The events that influenced these decisions are essential to interpret the decisions and actions at the critical points in the pandemic narrative.

In the previous post, we reported just a few of the key events that took place in the ten days before Christmas 2021. To us, the statements and decisions are erratic, contradictory and nonsensical.

We think that we should build a freely available timeline, hopefully by country, of the important decision timepoints and the statements made to support those decisions.

The back-pedalling race begins, Trust the Evidence, 7 September 2022

Together the two men are collecting the evidence and have started to build a UK Covid Response Timeline.  The Timeline now consists of 768 documents spanning the six selected periods between March 2020 and December 2021

“Over the coming months, we shall review some of these documents and explain the main issues,” Prof. Heneghan and Jefferson wrote. “We’ve opened up the comments to all, as we would appreciate any thoughts, reflections and particularly any vital documents we have missed with their links.”

Yesterday the two men gave an update. “Our Timeline has generated a lot of interest,” they wrote. “We are grateful to all those who commented. If any reader has further documents with the links produced during [the] six periods, we will add them to the sheet. The danger of the disappearance of the documentation is real, but we do not have the resources to download, index and curate over a thousand documents.”

In yesterday’s update, they also noted the progress of enquiries made regarding documentation for Canada and the USA.  For Canada the response to their enquiry read:

I’m on a [Canadian Institutes of Health Research] CIHR-funded team that’s essentially doing a forensic analysis of Covid policy in Canada. As almost all Covid policy here has taken place at the provincial level, we’re doing a deep dive into four jurisdictions (BC, ON, QC, and NS) to come up with detailed timeline analyses, amongst other things. I’m happy to share our data when it becomes publicly available. But some of this information (e.g. on vaccine rollouts across the provinces) is already available on the website of the North American Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (NAO) at (Link) 

Our project website is www.governhealth.ca/, and will probably be hosting the provincial C19 timeline analyses.

You may also be interested in the Repository of Canadian C19 Orders at (link)

 – and don’t forget that the European Observatory also has information on covid policy at (link).

UK Covid Response Timeline – update, Trust the Evidence, 3 October 2022

The response to their enquiry in the USA was: “Despite our best efforts; the US does not seem to have the same. Neither films nor timelines, at least not at the same level of sophistication.”

Further reading: