Confirmation Bias or Something More Scary?

I find my words on the UK government's responses to the Covid-19 pandemic being largely endorsed (perhaps a little more bluntly) by Anthony Costello, Professor of Global Health and Sustainable Development and a former WHO Director (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/22/uk-government-blamed-covid-19-mutation-occur). Costello also dismisses the 'world class' test-and-trace system as simply a waste of billions. He also firmly believes that the first priority the UK should have had, from the start of the pandemic, was to minimise the rate of transmission. The more infections you have, the more opportunities there are for the virus to mutate. The fact that the virus became rampant, is probably why a more infective strain seems to have arisen here. It is predictable, that the rest of the world would attempt to cut the UK off, in an attempt (probably, futile), to protect their populations from this new, faster-spreading strain. I would add that other countries (e.g. notably Brazil, Sweden and the USA) have also followed policies that are likely to facilitate mutations in Covid-19. Costello obviously believes the UK should have gone for faster and more extensive lockdowns, in response to the pandemic. He also thinks that workers in the 'gig economy' should have been aided to quarantine themselves, when necessary ('work or starve' seem to have been the options for many folk). Like me, Costello strongly advocates the rapid scaling up the vaccination programme. That would further reduce opportunities for the virus to mutate (and to become a permanent feature like seasonal influenza). So, why am I concerned by the agreement evident in Costello's opinion piece and some of my earlier posts on these topics? Like everyone else, I might simply be showing confirmation bias (a tendency to believe material, that fits my own established beliefs). In my defense, I think that Costello's background makes it highly likely that he is a believable and well-informed source (that is a feature everyone should check before believing anything). So, why am I not smug that my amatuer 'takes' on Covid-19 infection levels (in humans and animals), viral mutation and the urgent need to vaccinate, are reiterated by an expert? My basic concern is that I spent my academic career as a Psychobiologist, studying the effects of genes, hormones and drugs on behaviour, before briefly looking at some environmental issues. These are both a million miles from studies on novel viral pandemics! Even worse, I have not read an actual scientific paper, since I retired some 10 years ago. So, my information on Covid-19 has come from newspapers, radio, TV and the internet (along with some bits of knowledge I have from teaching Biology and from ancient studies I did on immunology and parasitology). If things were so obvious to me, I cannot believe that UK politicians were not forewarned, by at least some of their specialist scientific advisors, of these possibilities. So how could they have got so many things wrong, so repeatedly? Perhaps they were following the wrong science?