It’s five years this month since the United Kingdom joined many other nations in choosing to go into lockdown in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

Now, the public inquiry into the British government's management – and in many cases, mismanagement – of that crisis rumbles on, as it hears evidence of how members of Boris Johnson’s administration awarded contracts worth billions to their own friends and associates and how billions of pounds were squandered buying useless personal protective equipment from companies that had no prior knowledge or experience of medical procurement.

One company alone, PPE Medpro, a firm incorporated in May 2020 and associated with billionaire businessman Doug Barrowman (a Scotsman resident in the tax haven of the Isle of Man), had that June been awarded government contracts worth more than £200 million after the woman who would (in less than six months) become Mr. Barrowman's wife – a former fake tan and diet pill entrepreneur – Conservative member of the House of Lords Baroness Michelle Mone – had recommended it to Tory ministers. It has since been alleged that they and their family have benefitted from related payments worth tens of millions of pounds.

However, earlier this month, the couple claimed they were the victims of a "politically motivated witch hunt" after the COVID inquiry's chair turned down their request to be granted a special status that would have allowed them to access inquiry documents, make statements, and apply to ask questions of witnesses. The chair responded that their application to be given this status had been received 468 days after the stated deadline.

The hard-done-by Ms. Mone has continued to live up to her name.

But back to the grift and the graft of 2020. Three years ago, it was announced that the government had wasted 75 percent of the funds it had spent on personal protective equipment in the first year of the pandemic as a result of highly inflated prices and equipment that failed to meet its basic requirements – including £4 billion of unusable PPE that would have to be burnt.

While all these commercial shenanigans were going on, unknown at the time to the media and the general population, the most senior figures in big bad Boris Johnson's government had been partying away like there was no tomorrow, smuggling cases packed with wine into Downing Street, even as the rest of the country stayed home to save lives and watched on tablets at a distance as their loved ones, trapped in clinical isolation, suffered and died.

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It has been estimated that COVID-19 claimed at least seven million lives. During its first year, it caused about as many deaths per month as the average monthly civilian and military fatality toll directly caused by the Second World War.

For those in comfortable situations in relatively affluent and peaceful Western post-industrial societies, coronavirus came as a stark reminder of what life is like outside their protected bubbles – what life has been like for much of the population of our planet for most of human history.

For those in less privileged positions, COVID-19 only, of course, added exponentially to the pains of their daily struggles.

Even in the wealthier nations, lockdowns meant very different things for different people. While some were able to work from home (an unexpected benefit that many appear unwilling to give up half a decade on), those involved in key areas of industry – manufacturing, the production of foods and medicine, core retail, transport, emergency services, and, of course, healthcare – were obliged to continue to labor on in increasingly hazardous conditions, very often with poor, little or no protective equipment and minimal safety protocols.

Yet all those who lived through the pandemic – those who survived to tell the tale – have one thing in common: they will doubtless tell the stories of that first catastrophic year to their children and grandchildren for many years to come.

And they, in turn, will keep alive the histories of those who risked their lives to sustain and care for others and of all those who lost their lives in doing so, which is why many of us continue to be outraged by those conspiracy crazies who carry on peddling their absurd claims that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax propagated by the healthcare industry in a bid to sell its fake vaccines. 

It is an insult to all those who died as a result of this terrible disease and to all those who sacrificed their lives to save others.

The fact that these peddlers of such dangerous and discredited lies include a man who last month became Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services may for some validate his claims – but should in truth represent the most damning indictment of the most corrupt and deranged administration Washington has ever seen.

But then perhaps we must accept that such madness is only to be expected of an administration led by a president who, during his first term in office, proposed the idea that we might treat those infected with the virus by injecting them with bleach or by opening up their bodies to the magical healing power of direct sunlight. As usual with the man of orange, the fact that the cure he recommended would end up killing its subjects didn't seem to matter much at all.