Official inquiries into the pandemic response have produced a great deal of material. The question The Great Avoidance asks is not how much they examined, but how the examination was distributed.
An inquiry has finite attention. What it spends that attention on is itself a decision, and it is a decision made largely outside public view — in terms of reference, in the framing of chapters, in which witnesses are called. The result is that some of the most consequential decisions of the period have received sustained scrutiny, and others of comparable consequence have received very little.
Significance and scrutiny are not the same axis
Plot the measures taken during the pandemic against the volume of inquiry attention they attracted and the two do not track each other closely. Procurement, which involved large sums and clear opportunities for failure, attracted a great deal. Measures that touched far more people for far longer — and whose effects are correspondingly harder to establish — attracted less.
There are unglamorous reasons for this. Procurement leaves documents, contracts and identifiable decision-makers. A months-long restriction on ordinary activity leaves a diffuse effect distributed across a whole population, which is harder to investigate and harder to attribute. Inquiries gravitate toward what is tractable, and tractability is not a measure of importance.
Where this leaves the record
The consequence is a public record that is detailed in places and thin in others, in a pattern that reflects investigability rather than significance. That matters because the record is what the next response will be built on. Questions never asked do not appear in it as gaps; they simply do not appear.
THE ARGUMENT The concern is not that inquiries reached wrong conclusions. It is that on several of the largest questions they did not reach conclusions at all, and the absence is not visible in the documents they produced.The country-by-country comparison, and the full account of which questions remain open, is set out in The Great Avoidance.
