The United Kingdom's catastrophic response to COVID-19 was not primarily a failure of individuals, though individuals certainly failed. It was not primarily a failure of preparedness, though the country was woefully unprepared. The disaster ran deeper than poor communication, inadequate PPE stockpiles, or delayed lockdowns. At its root, the catastrophe was ontological: it stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of event a pandemic actually is. The UK government, its scientific advisors, and now the public inquiry examining their failures all operate within the same flawed conceptual framework, a framework that splits reality into two supposedly separate domains: the biological and the social. This split is not merely an analytical convenience or a bureaucratic division of labor. It is an ontological error, and it is lethal. The UK COVID-19 Inquiry (https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/reports/module-1-report-the-resilience-and-preparedness-of-the-united-kingdom/) is entirely blind to this.
The biological/social divide is so deeply embedded in modern governance that it has become invisible. We treat viruses, transmission rates, and infection curves as belonging to the realm of biology, studied by epidemiologists and modeled by statisticians. We treat work patterns, housing conditions, school attendance, family structures, and economic inequality as belonging to the realm of society, managed by politicians and debated by ethicists. The pandemic, in this view, is a biological event that impacts a social world, and the government's job is to "balance" biological imperatives against social and economic considerations. This way of thinking saturated every decision, every delay, and every policy failure during the UK's COVID response. And it is precisely this framework that the current inquiry, led by a senior judge and structured around legal categories, cannot interrogate because it shares the same conceptual architecture.
The phrase "following the science" became the government's mantra, but it revealed more than it intended. Science, in this formulation, meant epidemiological modeling, viral transmission rates, and hospital capacity projections. It meant biology. Everything else, the fact that care workers could not afford to stay home when sick, that multigenerational households meant higher transmission, that crowded public transport accelerated spread, that precarious employment forced infected people into work, all of this was treated as context, as social backdrop, as the realm of political judgment rather than scientific fact. But this distinction is fiction. A virus does not circulate through a “biological” space. It moves through bus routes, shifts in Amazon warehouses, corridors in care homes, and cramped rental flats. The biological and the social are not two separate worlds that must be balanced against each other. They are one fused reality, and the failure to grasp this killed tens of thousands.
Consider the care home catastrophe, perhaps the starkest illustration of how the biological/social split produces death. In the early months of the pandemic, hospitals needed beds. The NHS discharged elderly patients, some infected with COVID, into care homes. This decision was made because hospitals were understood as biological spaces, sites of disease management and viral spread, while care homes were categorized as social care facilities. The conceptual boundary between healthcare and social care, between the biological and the social, allowed infected patients to be transferred into settings full of the most vulnerable people. A framework that understood care homes as what they actually are, densely populated environments where elderly bodies in close proximity are cared for by low-paid workers moving between facilities, would have recognized them as epidemiologically critical spaces. But that recognition requires seeing biology and society as inseparable, and the government's entire conceptual apparatus prevented this. The split between health care and social care was not just administrative. It was ontological, and it was deadly.
The same pattern repeated across every domain. Behavioral science was sidelined as mere "science communications" rather than recognized as central to understanding how viruses actually spread through human populations. Economic advisors were consulted separately from epidemiologists, as if the economy were something happening in a different dimension from viral transmission rather than the very structure through which the virus moved. Ventilation, a fundamentally material and physical determinant of airborne transmission, was treated as an operational detail rather than a core epidemiological variable. Supply chains for PPE were seen as logistical problems rather than as part of the biological infrastructure of pandemic response. In each case, the biological was imagined as a domain of objective scientific fact while the social was imagined as a realm of values, trade-offs, and political judgment. But the virus did not respect this distinction. It exploited the government's conceptual confusion, finding every gap in the split worldview.
The delays that defined the UK's response, the late lockdown, the slow border measures, the hesitant school closures, were not simply failures of courage or political will. They were the direct consequence of waiting for biological data while treating social reality as separate. Ministers and advisors waited for infection curves and hospital admission numbers, treating these as objective biological signals that would tell them when to act. But those numbers were already shaped by the social world the government imagined as separate: by work patterns, housing density, transport infrastructure, and economic precarity. The biological signal they were waiting for was always already social, but the conceptual split meant they could not see this. They were looking at a virus moving through a society while believing they were observing two distinct phenomena.
What makes the current inquiry so disappointing is not that it fails to criticize the government's response, it offers plenty of criticism, but that it reproduces the exact same conceptual framework that exacerbated the disaster in the first place. The inquiry is led by a judge, and law is perhaps the most refined institutional expression of categorical thinking. Law operates through clear distinctions: cause and effect, responsibility and context, scientific advice and political decision, health and economy. A judge-led inquiry must break reality into legally cognizable categories before it can say anything at all. This is not a deficiency of the individuals involved. It is a structural feature of legal reasoning itself. Law cannot perceive fused causality. It cannot understand processes that refuse to stay within neat boundaries. It requires distinct domains, clear lines of responsibility, and threshold-based determinations of fault.
The inquiry's own structure makes this explicit. Its modules are organized into separate categories: resilience and preparedness, core decision-making, the impact on healthcare systems, vaccines and therapeutics, procurement, care homes, economic impacts. Each domain gets its own chapter, its own set of experts, its own analysis. The inquiry acknowledges, repeatedly, that scientific advisory groups were too heavily weighted toward biomedical expertise and lacked sufficient input from economists, social scientists, and ethicists. But this is treated as a problem of balance, of getting the right mix of experts across domains, not as a sign that the domains themselves are the problem. The inquiry sees gaps in expertise. It does not see that the very idea of distinct biological and social domains is what produced the catastrophe.
Throughout the inquiry's reports, one finds the language of "trade-offs" and "balance" and "considerations." Scientific advice on one side, economic and social impacts on the other, with government somehow mediating between them. But this framing accepts as given the very distinction that needs to be interrogated. The virus was not a biological entity whose spread had social consequences. It was a multimediated process from the beginning, impossible to understand except as a phenomenon moving through specific housing types, specific labor relations, specific patterns of inequality, specific infrastructures of care and transport. The fact that the inquiry cannot see this is not an accident. A legal inquiry is institutionally incapable of perceiving what it would need to perceive, because law itself is built on the purification of categories, the separation of domains, and the attribution of responsibility to clearly delineated actors.
The biological/social split is not unique to the UK or to this pandemic. It is a deep feature of modern thought, coined during the Enlightenment. Nature/culture, science/society, fact/value, these distinctions have been productive in many ways, enabling specialized knowledge and institutional differentiation. But they become catastrophic when applied to phenomena that do not respect them. Pandemics are one such phenomenon. Climate change is another. Any event that fundamentally involves the entanglement of biological processes with social structures will be misunderstood and mismanaged by institutions committed to keeping these domains separate.
The inquiry's treatment of inequality offers another revealing example. Throughout its reports, inequality appears as a complicating factor, an unfortunate context that made certain populations more vulnerable. But inequality is not context. It is structure. It is the very architecture through which the virus spread. People in precarious employment could not afford to isolate. People in overcrowded housing could not physically distance. People in frontline jobs had no choice but to maintain exposure. These are not social factors that complicated a biological event. They are the material conditions that determined transmission patterns. A virus does not exist in abstract biological space and then encounter social inequality. The virus is always already moving through structured inequality. To treat inequality as a separate consideration to be weighed against biological imperatives is to have already misunderstood everything.
What the inquiry needed, but could not provide, was conceiving pandemic response as a mesocosmic intervention (Ecks 2025). This would require abandoning the assumption that biology and society are distinct domains that interact, and instead recognizing that life is simultaneously embodied, relational, environmentally embedded, technologically shaped, and symbolically mediated. When a care worker moves between facilities because they have multiple part-time jobs, this is not a social fact that has biological consequences. It is a pattern of bodily movement through space shaped by labor markets and employment law that directly produces viral transmission. When families live in multigenerational households because of housing costs and cultural practices, this is not a social arrangement that affects biology. It is a multimediated configuration that is what it is all at once.
The failure to think and plan entirely without a biological/social split is not just academic. It has immediate practical consequences for pandemic preparedness. If future pandemic planning continues to imagine biology and society as separate domains requiring balance, the next response will fail for the same reasons this one did. Preparedness will focus on stockpiling medical equipment and updating pandemic models while neglecting the actual material and social conditions through which viruses spread. Advisory structures will continue to separate epidemiological expertise from social science, ensuring that neither can perceive the full reality. Policy responses will continue to treat lockdowns, economic support, and public health measures as separate levers requiring coordination, rather than as aspects of a single integrated response to a unified phenomenon.
Overcoming the biological/social split does not mean simply adding social scientists to advisory groups or considering economic impacts alongside epidemiological projections. It means fundamentally reconceptualizing what a pandemic is. It means understanding that viral transmission rates are not biological facts upon which social policies must act, but are themselves produced by social structures. It means recognizing that epidemiological models that ignore housing density, labour precarity, and care work arrangements are not describing biological reality, they are describing a fiction. It means building institutions and expertise capable of perceiving and responding to phenomena that are irreducibly multimediated from the start.
The deepest irony of the inquiry is that it is itself a demonstration of the problem it should be diagnosing. A catastrophic failure rooted in categorical splitting is now being analyzed by an institutional form, legal inquiry, that is structurally committed to categorical splitting. The same conceptual machinery that produced the disaster is now attempting to explain it. This guarantees a particular kind of blindness. The inquiry can identify procedural failures, communication breakdowns, insufficient preparedness, and poor decision-making. These are all real. But it cannot perceive the ontological error underneath them all because it shares that error. It cannot see that the disaster was not primarily a failure of process but a failure of reality-perception, because its own tools of perception operate within the same flawed ontology.
The biological/social split is not just a British problem or even just a pandemic problem. It runs through all of contemporary governance, shaping how we respond to climate change, environmental degradation, emerging diseases, and social inequality. It determines what counts as expert knowledge, how institutions are structured, and what kinds of solutions are imaginable. But pandemics make the costs of this split visible in ways that few other phenomena do, because viruses move too quickly and kill too many people for the split's failures to remain hidden. The UK's COVID catastrophe is thus not merely a story of particular failures by particular people at a particular time. It is a revelation of a conceptual architecture that shapes modern governance itself, an architecture that will continue to produce disasters until it is recognized and rebuilt from the ground up. The inquiry, for all its detail and effort, cannot provide this recognition because it is itself built from the same broken materials.
Ecks, Stefan. 2025. A Mesocosmology of the Next Pandemic. American Ethnologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.70028