Small cracks are emerging in the mainstream Covid consensus following three weeks of proceedings in Wales, which wrapped up this week. Building on 10 months of public hearings so far, testimonies in Cardiff brought to light specific revelations that, if taken seriously by the inquiry, could help reorientate the way Baroness Hallett and her team have approached what should be a core concern: did lockdowns and other mandatory social distancing rules cause more harm than good?

Mark Drakeford, Wales’s outgoing First Minister, told the inquiry that local Covid lockdowns were a “failed experiment”, while epidemiologist Dr Chris Williams, who advocated for earlier lockdowns, admitted that trying to contain a virus like Covid was “essentially impossible after a while”.

They were not the only ones. Dr Roland Salmon, ex-director of Public Health Wales’s communicable diseases unit, went further by criticising school closures, firebreak lockdowns, and social distancing policies in places such as grocery stores and pubs, which even received some surprising coverage from the BBC. Meanwhile, Education Minister Jeremy Miles told the inquiry they needed “more impact assessments” about the harms of lockdown. Available assessments made in 2020 in Wales clearly predicted dramatic harms to population health and wellbeing.

We also heard from former Welsh Secretary Simon Hart, who informed the inquiry that stricter pandemic rules in Wales were different from England “for the sake of being different”. Welsh government ministers themselves suffered from “significant confusion” about the Covid rules they were responsible for implementing. This echoes similar concerns in England. In fact, the Welsh government appears to have acted unlawfully when it shut schools in March 2020 (such power officially resides with school governing bodies). Many of the criminal charges meted out to those who breached lockdown rules were also unlawful, the inquiry heard.