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Johnson and Sunak were happy to let people die from Covid, inquiry hearsJane Kirby and Nina Massey, PA
Mon, 20 November 2023
Johnson and Sunak were happy to let people die from Covid, inquiry hears
Coronavirus – Thu Oct 22, 2020
Boris Johnson wanted to let Covid “rip” despite the fact people would die, while Rishi Sunak also thought that was “okay”, the public inquiry has heard.
In further revelations from Sir Patrick Vallance’s pandemic diaries, the inquiry heard of the “shambolic” day on October 25 2020, when the country was heading towards a second national lockdown.
The diary entry highlights how the former prime minister wanted to let the virus spread, while his most senior adviser, Dominic Cummings (DC), suggested Mr Sunak, then chancellor, also thought it was “okay” to just let people die.
Former prime minister Boris Johnson during a Covid media briefing (Tolga Akmen/PA)
The extract read: “PM meeting – begins to argue for letting it all rip. Saying yes there will be more casualties but so be it – ‘they have had a good innings’.
“Not persuaded by (Jon) Edmunds, (Neil) Ferguson, (Jeremy) Farrar. PM says ‘the population just has to behave doesn’t it’.
“Heat maps ‘I have the necrotising maps’ so depressing.
“DC says trajectory will leave us in Nov – much as where we were in 1st week of April.
“Chris quite bullish about being able to take the brakes off more in April…
“Goes on about Gulf War Syndrome again… PM getting very frustrated – throwing papers down.
“PM then back on to ‘most people who die have reached their time anyway’.
“DC arguing we need to save lives – it is not democratically possible to follow another route…
The inquiry heard that Rishi Sunak thought it was ‘okay’ to let people die during the pandemic (Henry Nicholls/PA)
“DC argued again (rightly) that a lockdown’s coming and therefore do it sooner rather than later.
“PM concludes, ‘Looks like we are in a really tough spot, a complete shambles.’
“‘I really don’t want to do another national lockdown’.
“PM told that if he wants to go down this route of letting go, ‘you need to tell people – you need to tell them you are going to allow people to die’…
“Conclusion – beef up the tiers – consider a national lockdown – decide by when.
“DC says ‘Rishi thinks just let people die and that’s okay’.
“This all feels like a complete lack of leadership.”
Asked about the diary entry, Sir Patrick told the inquiry he was recording what must have been “quite a shambolic day”.
However, the following day’s entry shows Johnson had taken a different view and described the Covid death toll as “terrible”.
The inquiry also heard that Sir Patrick wrote that “we have a weak indecisive PM” and described the right-wing press as “culpable” in decision-making on Covid measures.
Asked about the diary entries, Downing Street declined to say whether Mr Sunak thought it would be OK to “just let people die” during the pandemic, saying it would be for the Prime Minister to set out his position during evidence before the Covid Inquiry.
“The Prime Minister is due to give evidence before the inquiry at the time of their choosing. That’s when he’ll set out his position,” Mr Sunak’s official spokesman said.
The spokesman said a number of people will be setting out their views of the period, but “rather than respond to each one in piecemeal, it’s right that it is looked at alongside other evidence”.
Science given undue weight over economics in pandemic decisions, says Sir Patrick Vallance
Gordon Rayner
Mon, 20 November 2023
Undue weight was given to scientific advice over arguments for protecting the economy during the Covid pandemic, one of the most high-profile supporters of lockdowns has said.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific adviser, said deficiencies in the economic arguments being put forward caused “a real problem in terms of how decisions could be made”.
Sir Patrick, who was among those pushing for what was described as a “go hard, go early” policy on curbing freedoms, also said it was a “mistake” for the Government to use a worst-case scenario projection of 4,000 deaths per day to help justify the second lockdown in autumn 2020.
Along with Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, Sir Patrick was an almost constant presence on the nation’s television screens during the pandemic, flanking Boris Johnson at daily press conferences to update the nation.
Giving evidence to the Covid Inquiry in London, Sir Patrick said he had referred to Sir Chris in his diary as “a delayer” because his colleague was worried about the long-term health risks associated with shutting down the country, whereas Sir Patrick felt there was a clear need for early lockdowns.
He said: “He was definitely of the view that the treatment and the result of that treatment needed to be considered together and pulling the trigger to do things too early could lead to adverse consequences … I didn’t have exactly the same worry. I was more on the side of ‘we need to move on this’.”
Despite his enthusiasm for locking down the country, Sir Patrick said the Treasury had failed to push back hard enough when the Government insisted it was “following the science”.
He said: “The science advice was there for everybody to see. The economic advice wasn’t and it wasn’t obvious what it was based upon and therefore [it] unduly weighted the science advice in the public mind, I think, and created a real problem in terms of how decisions could be made.”
He said he had suggested that an economic advisory group, similar to the scientific advisory group Sage, should be set up and “it had one meeting but it wasn’t pursued”.
In private diary entries he criticised the Treasury, then under Rishi Sunak as chancellor, saying that its internal predictions for the economy were based on: “No evidence, no transparency, pure dogma and wrong throughout.”
Patrick Vallance's diaries: Eight extracts that lift the lid on No 10's Covid chaos
Blathnaid Corless
Mon, 20 November 2023
Sir Patrick Vallance, right, gave regular public briefings during the pandemic alongside Boris Johnson and Sir Chris Whitty - Paul Grover for The Telegraph
Boris Johnson was “bamboozled” by the science, an unnamed woman sang The Wheels On The Bus to her child during a virtual Cabinet meeting and Matt Hancock told “untruths”.
Over the course of several hours of testimony at the Covid Inquiry, Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific adviser to the Government, lifted the lid on the chaos and dysfunction inside Downing Street.
A prime minister ‘bamboozled’ by the science
Sir Patrick Vallance said Mr Johnson was “bamboozled” by science in a series of scathing diary entries.
Several extracts from Sir Patrick’s notes, written throughout the pandemic after meetings he and other experts held with the then prime minister to explain the various graphs and statistics, revealed his frustration at Mr Johnson’s incomprehension of the scientific evidence.
He described watching the former prime minister trying to get his head around statistics as “awful” and questioned whether Mr Johnson was “colour blind” because of his apparent inability to read graphs.
In one diary entry from May 4 2020, Sir Patrick wrote:
Another diary entry written by Sir Patrick more than a week later reveals the former prime minister also struggled to retain information for more than one meeting:
Sir Patrick wrote in another entry in June 2020:
In a later entry from September, he recalled how “difficult” it was to explain graphs relating to the virus to Mr Johnson:
Despite his apparent frustration with the former prime minister in his diary entries, Sir Patrick told the inquiry there was not “a unique inability” on the part of Mr Johnson, as many other countries’ scientific advisers were having similar problems explaining concepts to politicians.
Sir Patrick told the inquiry of Mr Johnson: “I think I’m right in saying that the prime minister at the time gave up science when he was 15 and I think he’d be the first to admit it wasn’t his forte and that he did struggle with some of the concepts and that we did need to repeat them often.”
Sunak kept scientists in dark over Eat Out to Help Out
Sir Patrick Vallance directly contradicted Rishi Sunak’s claim to the inquiry that scientists had not expressed concerns over his Eat Out to Help Out scheme.
The measure encouraged people to go to restaurants in August 2020 with the promise of 50 per cent off meals, subsidised by the taxpayer. It was pushed through by Mr Sunak, who was Chancellor at the time.
In a witness statement from Mr Sunak shown to the Covid-19 inquiry , the prime minister said: “I don’t recall any concerns about the scheme being expressed during ministerial discussions, including those attend by the CMO [Whitty] and CSA [Vallance].”
But Sir Patrick said the reason he hadn’t raised concerns was because advisers had been kept in the dark about the scheme.
He told the inquiry: “We didn’t see it before it was announced and I think others in the Cabinet Office also said they didn’t see it before it was formulated as policy. So we weren’t involved in the run up to it.”
Sir Patrick added: “I think it would have been very obvious to anyone that this inevitably would cause an increase in transmission risk, and I think that would have been known by ministers.”
When asked about Mr Sunak’s understanding of the risks, Sir Patrick said: “If he was in the meetings, I can’t recall which meetings he was in. But I’d be very surprised if any minister didn’t understand that these openings carried risk.”
Sir Patrick said Eat Out to Help Out “completely reversed” previous policy of trying to stop people from different households mixing indoors. He said that under Mr Sunak’s scheme the public was effectively saying “we will pay you” to do just that.
Mr Sunak also appeared dismissive of scientific experts, telling a meeting that Covid was about “handling the scientists, not handling the virus”. He was unaware when he said it that Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, was in attendance.
Sir Patrick wrote in a diary entry in early July 2020:
More people died from other illnesses
Sir Chris said it would have been “wrong” for the whole medical profession to focus on Covid-19 in early 2020 and that even at its height more people died of other causes.
Asked about discussions before the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic, he said that by February that year the “great majority” of his work was around the new virus and “we were moving increasingly far away from a probability this could go back to nothing.”
However, he added that that point was still “a long way” from the WHO declaring a pandemic on March 11 2020 or having evidence of transmission within the UK.
Sir Chris argued that it is “important to recognise that it would have been wrong to swing the whole of the medical profession over to this” in February 2020.
“Even at the height of the pandemic, more people died of causes not Covid than died of Covid,” he said. “Every one of those deaths is tragic on both of those sides.”
Sage discussed downsides of lockdown
Sir Chris said Sage had discussed the downsides of lockdown, and that he had personally warned that restricting liberties would hit the poorest and most isolated in society hardest.
He said: “I did have a stronger concern, I would say than some, that the biggest impacts of everything we did – and I was confident we were going to have to do them to be clear – but when we started, the disadvantages of all the actions, not just for lockdown, but other actions before that, for example, what was initially called cocooning and then shielding as an example, and stopping schooling as another.
“The biggest impacts of those would be areas of deprivation and those in difficulties and those living alone and so on.”
Asked if he warned of the danger that if the country “went too soon, too rapidly, there would be other perhaps indirect but other significant consequences”, he said he did not deviate from the advice of Sage.
Cheltenham had no ‘material effect’
One of the biggest controversies at the start of the pandemic was the Government’s decision to allow major sporting events, including the four-day Cheltenham Festival, to go ahead.
Cheltenham began on March 10, 2020 and on March 11 Liverpool hosted a Champions League match against Atletico Madrid. The first lockdown was announced on March 23.
Sir Chris said the decision not to cancel mass gatherings was “technically correct”.
He said he was “taking ownership” of the advice given at the time by the Sage group of expert advisers, who told the Government that the risks of outdoor events was relatively low.
He said: “The problem was not the gatherings themselves, which I don’t think there is good evidence that they had a material effect directly, but the impression it gives of normality at a time when you are trying to signal anything but normality.”
He said it risked sending a message that “the Government couldn’t be that worried” about the threat of Covid-19 if it was allowing big sporting events to go ahead, so the decision was “in a sense technically correct and logically incoherent to the general public”.
No war with Sir Patrick
Sir Chris was asked about a description by his Sage colleague Sir Jeremy Farrar of “palpable tension” between him and Sir Patrick over lockdown policy.
He said: “Well Sir Jeremy, who is a good friend and colleague, had a book to sell and that made it more exciting, I’m told.”
Sir Patrick said Sir Chris had been more cautious about imposing restrictions on the public than he was, but Sir Chris said: “My own view is that actually the differences were very small. And the main one … was that I saw as part of my role within Sage … to reflect some of the very significant problems for, particularly areas of deprivation.”
Sir Chris dismissed Sir Patrick’s description of him in his private diary as “a delayer”, saying he had only reflected the overall opinion of Sage at the time in trying to balance the risk of going too early with restrictions and going too late.
We relied on foreign experts
Sir Chris was asked if England had consulted overseas experts about the response and experience of the pandemic, but said that the country was “absolutely dependent” on information from abroad at the start of the pandemic.
He explained that he spoke with officials from the WHO, including the director general, and his counterparts in other countries as the pandemic progressed.
“We did and we were absolutely dependent on that,” he said.
Pandemic plan was out of date
Sir Chris has admitted that a government strategy document published on March 3, 2020, was “out of date” when it was published.
“Once you are in an exponential curve you get out of date remarkably quickly,” he said.
Asked by Mr Keith about the plan and whether it was outdated at the time of publication Sir Chris agreed but claimed much of the advice was still useful. He denied hopes of containment were “lost weeks before” and that around the time the strategy was published was “close to the point where you had to abandon it”.
“The problem with this document is essentially there is nothing wrong with the document, it’s just too late,” he said. “If it had been published when it was first conceived it would be much more in date. This is one of the problems of trying to develop these kind of documents on the hoof during an exponential rise. That’s just a reality”.
Sir Chris added that he would “stand behind the publication” and “some document is better than no document”.
Ministers ‘not electrified’ by warnings
Sir Chris said there was an “opportunity where we could probably have moved up a gear or two across Government” in early February 2020 if the system had been “electrified” by the information it already had on Covid-19.
He said if MI5 had warned that 100,000 people could die in a terrorist attack, the chance the system would have carried on as it did would have been “quite small”.
He told the inquiry “the system is surprisingly bad, in my view, at responding to threats of this kind which are not in the national security system”.
Asked why no one “appears to have been electrified by the information that there was a massive threat”, Sir Chris added: “I mean, I think, in a sense that is my point, is the system is surprisingly bad at, in my view, responding to threats of this kind which are not in the traditional national security system ... I think it is largely to do with the way that the national security apparatus interprets its role.”
Sir Chris also claimed that those in government did not understand the concept of exponential growth prior to the pandemic.
“I think that one of the things that, however, we really did not find easy to get across, and I found this surprisingly, surprising, given that so many people in both politics and in the official system are trained in economics, is the extraordinary power of exponential growth to get you from small numbers to large numbers very quickly, people just don’t get that intrinsically.”
Under questioning from Mr Keith about claims of “oscillation and chaos” in government decision-making during the pandemic, Sir Chris said: “That’s correct but I think it’s a matter of record that many other nations had similar problems.”
He described Mr Johnson as having a “quite distinct style”, adding: “I think the way Mr Johnson took decisions was unique to him.”
Mr Keith replied: “If I may – that’s a euphemism if ever I’ve heard one.”
Gordon Rayner
Mon, 20 November 2023
Undue weight was given to scientific advice over arguments for protecting the economy during the Covid pandemic, one of the most high-profile supporters of lockdowns has said.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific adviser, said deficiencies in the economic arguments being put forward caused “a real problem in terms of how decisions could be made”.
Sir Patrick, who was among those pushing for what was described as a “go hard, go early” policy on curbing freedoms, also said it was a “mistake” for the Government to use a worst-case scenario projection of 4,000 deaths per day to help justify the second lockdown in autumn 2020.
Along with Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, Sir Patrick was an almost constant presence on the nation’s television screens during the pandemic, flanking Boris Johnson at daily press conferences to update the nation.
Giving evidence to the Covid Inquiry in London, Sir Patrick said he had referred to Sir Chris in his diary as “a delayer” because his colleague was worried about the long-term health risks associated with shutting down the country, whereas Sir Patrick felt there was a clear need for early lockdowns.
He said: “He was definitely of the view that the treatment and the result of that treatment needed to be considered together and pulling the trigger to do things too early could lead to adverse consequences … I didn’t have exactly the same worry. I was more on the side of ‘we need to move on this’.”
Despite his enthusiasm for locking down the country, Sir Patrick said the Treasury had failed to push back hard enough when the Government insisted it was “following the science”.
He said: “The science advice was there for everybody to see. The economic advice wasn’t and it wasn’t obvious what it was based upon and therefore [it] unduly weighted the science advice in the public mind, I think, and created a real problem in terms of how decisions could be made.”
He said he had suggested that an economic advisory group, similar to the scientific advisory group Sage, should be set up and “it had one meeting but it wasn’t pursued”.
In private diary entries he criticised the Treasury, then under Rishi Sunak as chancellor, saying that its internal predictions for the economy were based on: “No evidence, no transparency, pure dogma and wrong throughout.”
‘Mistake’ to show slide detailing worst-case scenario for deaths
Sir Patrick said that when Mr Johnson announced a second national lockdown on Oct 31 2020, he was told to show the public an information slide with a worst-case scenario for deaths, which he insisted was a bad idea.
He said: “The message came back several times that the PM thought that as he had seen the slide it was only right that the public should see it.
“It was agreed that I should show that slide but try to move on to the medium-term projection which was the real thing. I think I made a mistake by agreeing to show it.”
Less than a week later, the Office for Statistics Regulation criticised Sir Patrick for failing to release the data and assumptions behind the worst-case scenario projection of 4,000 deaths per day by December 2020 if no action was taken.
Mr Johnson had been forced into a hasty announcement of the lockdown after plans for it were leaked to the media, and Sir Patrick said the then prime minister spent three to four hours on the phone before that day’s press conference trying to explain his reasoning to Tory MPs and other critics.
He said there was nothing wrong with the 4,000 deaths projection in terms of its scientific validity, but: “I just thought it was not a sensible science slide to show.”
The inquiry was shown another entry from Sir Patrick’s diaries in October 2020 in which he noted that Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s senior adviser, had claimed: “Rishi thinks just let people die and that’s okay.”
Sir Patrick said that when Mr Johnson announced a second national lockdown on Oct 31 2020, he was told to show the public an information slide with a worst-case scenario for deaths, which he insisted was a bad idea.
He said: “The message came back several times that the PM thought that as he had seen the slide it was only right that the public should see it.
“It was agreed that I should show that slide but try to move on to the medium-term projection which was the real thing. I think I made a mistake by agreeing to show it.”
Less than a week later, the Office for Statistics Regulation criticised Sir Patrick for failing to release the data and assumptions behind the worst-case scenario projection of 4,000 deaths per day by December 2020 if no action was taken.
Mr Johnson had been forced into a hasty announcement of the lockdown after plans for it were leaked to the media, and Sir Patrick said the then prime minister spent three to four hours on the phone before that day’s press conference trying to explain his reasoning to Tory MPs and other critics.
He said there was nothing wrong with the 4,000 deaths projection in terms of its scientific validity, but: “I just thought it was not a sensible science slide to show.”
The inquiry was shown another entry from Sir Patrick’s diaries in October 2020 in which he noted that Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s senior adviser, had claimed: “Rishi thinks just let people die and that’s okay.”
Blathnaid Corless
Mon, 20 November 2023
Sir Patrick Vallance, right, gave regular public briefings during the pandemic alongside Boris Johnson and Sir Chris Whitty - Paul Grover for The Telegraph
Boris Johnson was “bamboozled” by the science, an unnamed woman sang The Wheels On The Bus to her child during a virtual Cabinet meeting and Matt Hancock told “untruths”.
Over the course of several hours of testimony at the Covid Inquiry, Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific adviser to the Government, lifted the lid on the chaos and dysfunction inside Downing Street.
A prime minister ‘bamboozled’ by the science
Sir Patrick Vallance said Mr Johnson was “bamboozled” by science in a series of scathing diary entries.
Several extracts from Sir Patrick’s notes, written throughout the pandemic after meetings he and other experts held with the then prime minister to explain the various graphs and statistics, revealed his frustration at Mr Johnson’s incomprehension of the scientific evidence.
He described watching the former prime minister trying to get his head around statistics as “awful” and questioned whether Mr Johnson was “colour blind” because of his apparent inability to read graphs.
In one diary entry from May 4 2020, Sir Patrick wrote:
Another diary entry written by Sir Patrick more than a week later reveals the former prime minister also struggled to retain information for more than one meeting:
Sir Patrick wrote in another entry in June 2020:
In a later entry from September, he recalled how “difficult” it was to explain graphs relating to the virus to Mr Johnson:
Despite his apparent frustration with the former prime minister in his diary entries, Sir Patrick told the inquiry there was not “a unique inability” on the part of Mr Johnson, as many other countries’ scientific advisers were having similar problems explaining concepts to politicians.
Sir Patrick told the inquiry of Mr Johnson: “I think I’m right in saying that the prime minister at the time gave up science when he was 15 and I think he’d be the first to admit it wasn’t his forte and that he did struggle with some of the concepts and that we did need to repeat them often.”
Sunak kept scientists in dark over Eat Out to Help Out
Sir Patrick Vallance directly contradicted Rishi Sunak’s claim to the inquiry that scientists had not expressed concerns over his Eat Out to Help Out scheme.
The measure encouraged people to go to restaurants in August 2020 with the promise of 50 per cent off meals, subsidised by the taxpayer. It was pushed through by Mr Sunak, who was Chancellor at the time.
In a witness statement from Mr Sunak shown to the Covid-19 inquiry , the prime minister said: “I don’t recall any concerns about the scheme being expressed during ministerial discussions, including those attend by the CMO [Whitty] and CSA [Vallance].”
But Sir Patrick said the reason he hadn’t raised concerns was because advisers had been kept in the dark about the scheme.
He told the inquiry: “We didn’t see it before it was announced and I think others in the Cabinet Office also said they didn’t see it before it was formulated as policy. So we weren’t involved in the run up to it.”
Sir Patrick added: “I think it would have been very obvious to anyone that this inevitably would cause an increase in transmission risk, and I think that would have been known by ministers.”
When asked about Mr Sunak’s understanding of the risks, Sir Patrick said: “If he was in the meetings, I can’t recall which meetings he was in. But I’d be very surprised if any minister didn’t understand that these openings carried risk.”
Sir Patrick said Eat Out to Help Out “completely reversed” previous policy of trying to stop people from different households mixing indoors. He said that under Mr Sunak’s scheme the public was effectively saying “we will pay you” to do just that.
Mr Sunak also appeared dismissive of scientific experts, telling a meeting that Covid was about “handling the scientists, not handling the virus”. He was unaware when he said it that Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, was in attendance.
Sir Patrick wrote in a diary entry in early July 2020:
The Wheels On The Bus sung in Cabinet
Sir Patrick referred to Cabinet ministers as “meek as mice” and said a woman singing The Wheels On The Bus to her baby during one Cabinet meeting over Zoom was “symbolic of the shambles” in Government.
In a diary entry on Oct 11 2020, the former chief scientific adviser wrote:
“Cabinet call. Whilst waiting someone clearly not on mute - baby crying and then she starts singing ‘the wheels on the bus’ - somehow symbolic of the shambles.”
At the meeting, Mr Johnson tussled over whether to plunge the country into a new lockdown or stick with tiers. Sir Patrick was clearly agitated at the vacillation.
Sir Patrick noted in his diary:
“PM said on call, ‘The package we have as a baseline is unlikely to get R < 1 [reproduction rate] unless local leaders go further ... Hancock says this is our last shot at avoiding national lockdown...meek as mice from Cabinet ministers.”
Worries that Britain was ‘licked as a species’
Boris Johnson wondered out loud if Britain was “licked as a species” weeks before introducing a second national lockdown.
Sir Patrick Vallance disclosed details of five hours of meetings with the prime minister in late September 2020 at which Mr Johnson also said “We [the UK] are too s***” to avoid a fresh lockdown. The entry also highlights Mr Johnson’s seeming inability to make a decision and stick to it.
In his diary entry of Sept 20, Sir Patrick wrote:
Sir Patrick referred to Cabinet ministers as “meek as mice” and said a woman singing The Wheels On The Bus to her baby during one Cabinet meeting over Zoom was “symbolic of the shambles” in Government.
In a diary entry on Oct 11 2020, the former chief scientific adviser wrote:
“Cabinet call. Whilst waiting someone clearly not on mute - baby crying and then she starts singing ‘the wheels on the bus’ - somehow symbolic of the shambles.”
At the meeting, Mr Johnson tussled over whether to plunge the country into a new lockdown or stick with tiers. Sir Patrick was clearly agitated at the vacillation.
Sir Patrick noted in his diary:
“PM said on call, ‘The package we have as a baseline is unlikely to get R < 1 [reproduction rate] unless local leaders go further ... Hancock says this is our last shot at avoiding national lockdown...meek as mice from Cabinet ministers.”
Worries that Britain was ‘licked as a species’
Boris Johnson wondered out loud if Britain was “licked as a species” weeks before introducing a second national lockdown.
Sir Patrick Vallance disclosed details of five hours of meetings with the prime minister in late September 2020 at which Mr Johnson also said “We [the UK] are too s***” to avoid a fresh lockdown. The entry also highlights Mr Johnson’s seeming inability to make a decision and stick to it.
In his diary entry of Sept 20, Sir Patrick wrote:
Tension between Vallance and Whitty revealed
A “palpable tension” emerged between the Government’s chief scientific adviser and chief medical officer over lockdown policy during the pandemic.
Sir Patrick Vallance privately referred to Sir Chris Whitty as “a delayer” of a national lockdown, as he wanted to impose tough restrictions more quickly than the then chief medical officer, who was worried about the knock-on effects of shutting down the country.
The inquiry was shown an extract from the memoir of Sir Jeremy Farrar, a member of the Sage group of scientific advisers chaired by Sir Patrick, in which he spoke of a “friction” between the two experts and described a “a palpable tension between Patrick and Chris in the early weeks of 2020, particularly given the apparent absence of political leadership in that period”.
Sir Patrick wrote in his own nightly diary, following a meeting in Feb 2021 attended by Sir Chris:
Asked by Andrew O’Connor KC, counsel for the inquiry, if there was tension between him and the chief medical officer in the early days of the pandemic, Sir Patrick told the inquiry Sir Chris was concerned about “indirect harms” for mental health, loneliness, economic impacts and non-virus deaths, meaning he felt “pulling the trigger to do things too early could lead to adverse consequences”.
Sir Patrick added: “He would bring in views that were broad public health views looking at the consequences of interventions, as well as the direct consequences of the virus, and I think sometimes I would want to push and he might not and sometimes he was right, and sometimes I think we should have gone earlier.”
Hancock tells ‘untruths’
Sir Patrick said Matt Hancock had a habit of saying things “too enthusiastically” and without the evidence to back them up.
He also admitted that the former health secretary said things that were not true while working in No 10 during the pandemic.
Sir Patrick told the inquiry: “I think he had a habit of saying things which he didn’t have a basis for. And he would say them too enthusiastically, too early, without the evidence to back them up, and then have to backtrack from them, days later.
“I don’t know to what extent that was over-enthusiasm versus deliberate. I think a lot of it was over-enthusiasm, but he definitely said things which surprised me because I knew the evidence base wasn’t there.”
Asked if that meant Mr Hancock had said things that were untrue, Sir Patrick replied: “Yes.”
In another diary entry after a meeting which included talk about Long Covid in Sept 2020, Sir Patrick wrote that Matt Hancock had “explained things well for once”.
Rule of Six and schools rows
Sage, the Government’s Covid science advisory body, wanted to exempt children from the “Rule of Six” - but the idea was pushed back by ministers.
In a diary entry from Oct 15 2020, Sir Patrick wrote:
“Sage pushing for ‘Can’t we exempt children from rule of 6’. We said no, not unless CO (Cabinet Office) want to revisit.”
The rule, which limited the number of people who could gather in one place, was criticised at the time by the Children’s Commissioner who said it effectively kept large households in lockdown.
Scotland and Wales included an exemption for children under 12, but the Government in Westminster refused to implement a similar exemption in England until April 2021.
The Telegraph previously revealed in messages from its Lockdown Files that the Government knew there was no “robust rationale” for including children in the rule, but backed the policy regardless.
In a separate diary entry from Sir Patrick, he said Boris Johnson insisted all pupils needed to “get back to school” in August 2020, saying he would “no longer take this Covid excuse stuff”.
Sir Patrick wrote on Aug 6 2020:
A “palpable tension” emerged between the Government’s chief scientific adviser and chief medical officer over lockdown policy during the pandemic.
Sir Patrick Vallance privately referred to Sir Chris Whitty as “a delayer” of a national lockdown, as he wanted to impose tough restrictions more quickly than the then chief medical officer, who was worried about the knock-on effects of shutting down the country.
The inquiry was shown an extract from the memoir of Sir Jeremy Farrar, a member of the Sage group of scientific advisers chaired by Sir Patrick, in which he spoke of a “friction” between the two experts and described a “a palpable tension between Patrick and Chris in the early weeks of 2020, particularly given the apparent absence of political leadership in that period”.
Sir Patrick wrote in his own nightly diary, following a meeting in Feb 2021 attended by Sir Chris:
Asked by Andrew O’Connor KC, counsel for the inquiry, if there was tension between him and the chief medical officer in the early days of the pandemic, Sir Patrick told the inquiry Sir Chris was concerned about “indirect harms” for mental health, loneliness, economic impacts and non-virus deaths, meaning he felt “pulling the trigger to do things too early could lead to adverse consequences”.
Sir Patrick added: “He would bring in views that were broad public health views looking at the consequences of interventions, as well as the direct consequences of the virus, and I think sometimes I would want to push and he might not and sometimes he was right, and sometimes I think we should have gone earlier.”
Hancock tells ‘untruths’
Sir Patrick said Matt Hancock had a habit of saying things “too enthusiastically” and without the evidence to back them up.
He also admitted that the former health secretary said things that were not true while working in No 10 during the pandemic.
Sir Patrick told the inquiry: “I think he had a habit of saying things which he didn’t have a basis for. And he would say them too enthusiastically, too early, without the evidence to back them up, and then have to backtrack from them, days later.
“I don’t know to what extent that was over-enthusiasm versus deliberate. I think a lot of it was over-enthusiasm, but he definitely said things which surprised me because I knew the evidence base wasn’t there.”
Asked if that meant Mr Hancock had said things that were untrue, Sir Patrick replied: “Yes.”
In another diary entry after a meeting which included talk about Long Covid in Sept 2020, Sir Patrick wrote that Matt Hancock had “explained things well for once”.
Rule of Six and schools rows
Sage, the Government’s Covid science advisory body, wanted to exempt children from the “Rule of Six” - but the idea was pushed back by ministers.
In a diary entry from Oct 15 2020, Sir Patrick wrote:
“Sage pushing for ‘Can’t we exempt children from rule of 6’. We said no, not unless CO (Cabinet Office) want to revisit.”
The rule, which limited the number of people who could gather in one place, was criticised at the time by the Children’s Commissioner who said it effectively kept large households in lockdown.
Scotland and Wales included an exemption for children under 12, but the Government in Westminster refused to implement a similar exemption in England until April 2021.
The Telegraph previously revealed in messages from its Lockdown Files that the Government knew there was no “robust rationale” for including children in the rule, but backed the policy regardless.
In a separate diary entry from Sir Patrick, he said Boris Johnson insisted all pupils needed to “get back to school” in August 2020, saying he would “no longer take this Covid excuse stuff”.
Sir Patrick wrote on Aug 6 2020:
Second lockdown graph ‘a mistake’
Sir Patrick Vallance told the Covid inquiry it was “a mistake” to present a graph to the public showing that up to 4,000 people a day could die in the second Covid wave.
Modelling from a range of universities leaked to the press on Friday Oct 30 2020 which included a “reasonable worst case scenario” from Public Health England of several thousand daily deaths.
This document was taken directly into No 10 and shown to the Prime Minister, Sir Patrick told the inquiry, who admitted he was “rather blindsided” by the emergence of the graph, which had been meant only for the SPI-M sub-committee of Sage.
Sir Patrick said at the time to Mr Johnson that he should not take much notice of this particular projection and should instead focus on the six-week medium term projections, which are far more likely and “pretty grim”.
A decision was made overnight to go back into lockdown which necessitated an emergency press conference on Saturday Oct 31 2020.
Sir Patrick thought the graph should not be shown to the public via a press conference and instead wanted to focus the messaging around lockdown on Sir Simon Stevens, then CEO of the NHS, warning of collapse of the health service.
“The message came back several times that as he had seen this slide, it was only right that the public saw it and that we had to show it,” the inquiry heard.
“In the end we agreed that we would show the slide.”
He added that Mr Johnson’s thought process “carries some legitimacy” and said the data was valid and correct.
“I just didn’t think this was a sensible thing to show at a press conference,” Sir Patrick said. “These are complicated things to explain and it wasn’t really the issue. The issue is what is going to happen in the next six weeks, not what the theoretical unmitigated scenario looks like over the next several months.
“So, I think I made a mistake to agree to show it and I think, in retrospect, I should have phoned Simon Case and said I’m being put under a lot of pressure to do something I don’t want to do.
“But I didn’t have any worries about the scientific legitimacy, I just thought it was not a sensible slide to show.”
Sir Patrick Vallance told the Covid inquiry it was “a mistake” to present a graph to the public showing that up to 4,000 people a day could die in the second Covid wave.
Modelling from a range of universities leaked to the press on Friday Oct 30 2020 which included a “reasonable worst case scenario” from Public Health England of several thousand daily deaths.
This document was taken directly into No 10 and shown to the Prime Minister, Sir Patrick told the inquiry, who admitted he was “rather blindsided” by the emergence of the graph, which had been meant only for the SPI-M sub-committee of Sage.
Sir Patrick said at the time to Mr Johnson that he should not take much notice of this particular projection and should instead focus on the six-week medium term projections, which are far more likely and “pretty grim”.
A decision was made overnight to go back into lockdown which necessitated an emergency press conference on Saturday Oct 31 2020.
Sir Patrick thought the graph should not be shown to the public via a press conference and instead wanted to focus the messaging around lockdown on Sir Simon Stevens, then CEO of the NHS, warning of collapse of the health service.
“The message came back several times that as he had seen this slide, it was only right that the public saw it and that we had to show it,” the inquiry heard.
“In the end we agreed that we would show the slide.”
He added that Mr Johnson’s thought process “carries some legitimacy” and said the data was valid and correct.
“I just didn’t think this was a sensible thing to show at a press conference,” Sir Patrick said. “These are complicated things to explain and it wasn’t really the issue. The issue is what is going to happen in the next six weeks, not what the theoretical unmitigated scenario looks like over the next several months.
“So, I think I made a mistake to agree to show it and I think, in retrospect, I should have phoned Simon Case and said I’m being put under a lot of pressure to do something I don’t want to do.
“But I didn’t have any worries about the scientific legitimacy, I just thought it was not a sensible slide to show.”
‘Following the science’ became millstone around our neck, says Whitty
Gordon Rayner
Tue, 21 November 2023
Sir Chris Whitty said the Government's reliance on taking expert advice was a hinderance - PA
Boris Johnson’s insistence that the Government was “following the science” during the pandemic became a millstone around the necks of his advisers, the Chief Medical Officer has said.
Prof Sir Chris Whitty told the Covid Inquiry he was initially glad that the then prime minister was committed to taking expert advice on board, but later came to see it as a burden.
During an entire day in the witness box, Sir Chris also said more people died from other illnesses than Covid-19 throughout the pandemic and denied claims of tensions between him and Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific adviser.
Sir Chris and Sir Patrick were Mr Johnson’s two most senior scientific advisers during the global crisis, and became household names as they flanked the prime minister at daily press conferences.
Sir Chris, who will continue giving evidence for a second day on Wednesday, said that when ministers first told the public they were following the science, both he and Sir Patrick “thought, ‘well, this was a good thing, the Government is recognising that science is important.’
“Very soon we realised it was a millstone round our necks and it didn’t help the Government either.”
On Monday, Sir Patrick had said that the phrase was unhelpful as there was no such thing as “the science” and it suggested that there was a single agreed position from scientists, rather than a range of opinions that were constantly evolving as more information became available.
Gordon Rayner
Tue, 21 November 2023
Sir Chris Whitty said the Government's reliance on taking expert advice was a hinderance - PA
Boris Johnson’s insistence that the Government was “following the science” during the pandemic became a millstone around the necks of his advisers, the Chief Medical Officer has said.
Prof Sir Chris Whitty told the Covid Inquiry he was initially glad that the then prime minister was committed to taking expert advice on board, but later came to see it as a burden.
During an entire day in the witness box, Sir Chris also said more people died from other illnesses than Covid-19 throughout the pandemic and denied claims of tensions between him and Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific adviser.
Sir Chris and Sir Patrick were Mr Johnson’s two most senior scientific advisers during the global crisis, and became household names as they flanked the prime minister at daily press conferences.
Sir Chris, who will continue giving evidence for a second day on Wednesday, said that when ministers first told the public they were following the science, both he and Sir Patrick “thought, ‘well, this was a good thing, the Government is recognising that science is important.’
“Very soon we realised it was a millstone round our necks and it didn’t help the Government either.”
On Monday, Sir Patrick had said that the phrase was unhelpful as there was no such thing as “the science” and it suggested that there was a single agreed position from scientists, rather than a range of opinions that were constantly evolving as more information became available.
More people died from other illnesses
Sir Chris said it would have been “wrong” for the whole medical profession to focus on Covid-19 in early 2020 and that even at its height more people died of other causes.
Asked about discussions before the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic, he said that by February that year the “great majority” of his work was around the new virus and “we were moving increasingly far away from a probability this could go back to nothing.”
However, he added that that point was still “a long way” from the WHO declaring a pandemic on March 11 2020 or having evidence of transmission within the UK.
Sir Chris argued that it is “important to recognise that it would have been wrong to swing the whole of the medical profession over to this” in February 2020.
“Even at the height of the pandemic, more people died of causes not Covid than died of Covid,” he said. “Every one of those deaths is tragic on both of those sides.”
Sage discussed downsides of lockdown
Sir Chris said Sage had discussed the downsides of lockdown, and that he had personally warned that restricting liberties would hit the poorest and most isolated in society hardest.
He said: “I did have a stronger concern, I would say than some, that the biggest impacts of everything we did – and I was confident we were going to have to do them to be clear – but when we started, the disadvantages of all the actions, not just for lockdown, but other actions before that, for example, what was initially called cocooning and then shielding as an example, and stopping schooling as another.
“The biggest impacts of those would be areas of deprivation and those in difficulties and those living alone and so on.”
Asked if he warned of the danger that if the country “went too soon, too rapidly, there would be other perhaps indirect but other significant consequences”, he said he did not deviate from the advice of Sage.
Cheltenham had no ‘material effect’
One of the biggest controversies at the start of the pandemic was the Government’s decision to allow major sporting events, including the four-day Cheltenham Festival, to go ahead.
Cheltenham began on March 10, 2020 and on March 11 Liverpool hosted a Champions League match against Atletico Madrid. The first lockdown was announced on March 23.
Sir Chris said the decision not to cancel mass gatherings was “technically correct”.
He said he was “taking ownership” of the advice given at the time by the Sage group of expert advisers, who told the Government that the risks of outdoor events was relatively low.
He said: “The problem was not the gatherings themselves, which I don’t think there is good evidence that they had a material effect directly, but the impression it gives of normality at a time when you are trying to signal anything but normality.”
He said it risked sending a message that “the Government couldn’t be that worried” about the threat of Covid-19 if it was allowing big sporting events to go ahead, so the decision was “in a sense technically correct and logically incoherent to the general public”.
No war with Sir Patrick
Sir Chris was asked about a description by his Sage colleague Sir Jeremy Farrar of “palpable tension” between him and Sir Patrick over lockdown policy.
He said: “Well Sir Jeremy, who is a good friend and colleague, had a book to sell and that made it more exciting, I’m told.”
Sir Patrick said Sir Chris had been more cautious about imposing restrictions on the public than he was, but Sir Chris said: “My own view is that actually the differences were very small. And the main one … was that I saw as part of my role within Sage … to reflect some of the very significant problems for, particularly areas of deprivation.”
Sir Chris dismissed Sir Patrick’s description of him in his private diary as “a delayer”, saying he had only reflected the overall opinion of Sage at the time in trying to balance the risk of going too early with restrictions and going too late.
We relied on foreign experts
Sir Chris was asked if England had consulted overseas experts about the response and experience of the pandemic, but said that the country was “absolutely dependent” on information from abroad at the start of the pandemic.
He explained that he spoke with officials from the WHO, including the director general, and his counterparts in other countries as the pandemic progressed.
“We did and we were absolutely dependent on that,” he said.
Pandemic plan was out of date
Sir Chris has admitted that a government strategy document published on March 3, 2020, was “out of date” when it was published.
“Once you are in an exponential curve you get out of date remarkably quickly,” he said.
Asked by Mr Keith about the plan and whether it was outdated at the time of publication Sir Chris agreed but claimed much of the advice was still useful. He denied hopes of containment were “lost weeks before” and that around the time the strategy was published was “close to the point where you had to abandon it”.
“The problem with this document is essentially there is nothing wrong with the document, it’s just too late,” he said. “If it had been published when it was first conceived it would be much more in date. This is one of the problems of trying to develop these kind of documents on the hoof during an exponential rise. That’s just a reality”.
Sir Chris added that he would “stand behind the publication” and “some document is better than no document”.
Ministers ‘not electrified’ by warnings
Sir Chris said there was an “opportunity where we could probably have moved up a gear or two across Government” in early February 2020 if the system had been “electrified” by the information it already had on Covid-19.
He said if MI5 had warned that 100,000 people could die in a terrorist attack, the chance the system would have carried on as it did would have been “quite small”.
He told the inquiry “the system is surprisingly bad, in my view, at responding to threats of this kind which are not in the national security system”.
Asked why no one “appears to have been electrified by the information that there was a massive threat”, Sir Chris added: “I mean, I think, in a sense that is my point, is the system is surprisingly bad at, in my view, responding to threats of this kind which are not in the traditional national security system ... I think it is largely to do with the way that the national security apparatus interprets its role.”
Sir Chris also claimed that those in government did not understand the concept of exponential growth prior to the pandemic.
“I think that one of the things that, however, we really did not find easy to get across, and I found this surprisingly, surprising, given that so many people in both politics and in the official system are trained in economics, is the extraordinary power of exponential growth to get you from small numbers to large numbers very quickly, people just don’t get that intrinsically.”
Under questioning from Mr Keith about claims of “oscillation and chaos” in government decision-making during the pandemic, Sir Chris said: “That’s correct but I think it’s a matter of record that many other nations had similar problems.”
He described Mr Johnson as having a “quite distinct style”, adding: “I think the way Mr Johnson took decisions was unique to him.”
Mr Keith replied: “If I may – that’s a euphemism if ever I’ve heard one.”
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