What is required is the building of care, ethical sensibilities, and precautiousness into the very warp and weft of our lives.

...something which particularly concerns us in the leaked documents is the unsurprising but nevertheless depressing fact that the US Government is clearly pressuring our Government to drop the ‘Precautionary Principle’. This is a key protection for us and for nature; if the Trump and Johnson Governments had practiced precaution in relation to the coronavirus pandemic (as some other countries such as New Zealand did), they wouldn’t now have hundreds of thousands of graves on their hands and consciences. This would therefore be a particularly absurd moment to ditch the Precautionary Principle.

The precautionary case is strengthened by each of these points: it is a case for suppression/elimination, and against the reckless willingness to infect most of the population.

Evidence is accumulating that there is a significant link between low levels of the vitamin and higher mortality rates — although most agree it is too early to categorically say one way or the other and more work is needed. One piece of this evidence was very suggestive data from Italy showing extreme Vitamin D deficiency in most of those in a set of Covid-19 post-mortems.

Indeed, throughout this crisis, when our government failed to act in a precautious way, we the people made the right moves – together, encouraging and encouraged by our family, friends and community.

Speaking on BBC Question Time on 26 March 2020, Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, described the government’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic as “a national scandal”. A look through the key moments in the crisis explains why.

An official Government document published in January 2020 confirms that, by delaying action in response to the Coronavirus, officials breached their own internal cross-government standards concerning risks to “human, animal or plant health”. 

In the wake of an investigation by the Sunday Times, followed by an unprecedented Government response, the release of this document raises a number of urgent new questions about the Government’s COVID-19 strategy.

Models have been bandied about in the UK which have cost lives, in recent weeks. Reliance on models always carries with it that kind of — deadly — risk.