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Chris Whitty tells Covid inquiry UK had ‘complete absence of plans’ [1]
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Date: 2023-11
There was a “complete absence of plans” to deal with Covid in the UK, chief medical officer Chris Whitty has said.
Speaking to the Covid inquiry today, Whitty said the government did not “have a plan that was going to be useful from a prevention or management point of view,” and that his view was that as a country we were “thin on the ground for plans”.
By the end of January 2020, Whitty realised there “was effectively a complete absence of plans to be able to deal with this particular crisis, this particular virus and this particular emerging pandemic”.
The inquiry heard how it wasn’t until a meeting on 25 February that a plan was commissioned by ministers. That document, titled The UK’s Preparedness, was published three days later by the Civil Contingencies Secretariat.
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“There had been no real consideration of what sort of countermeasures might have to be thought about and deployed. Is that a fair summary?” inquiry lead counsel Hugo Keith asked the CMO.
Whitty agreed, but said: “If there had been a plan that laid out: ‘This is how the playbook should run’ it would almost certainly have been the wrong plan and could even have slowed us down, because we would have then spent ages arguing about whether this was the right plan and adapting the plan.
“So sometimes it is easier, actually, to start with a new plan but what we needed was all the building blocks and in my view we had some of the building blocks, intellectually and practically, but we definitely did not have all and they were constructed in many cases in quite a rush really in February and early March.”
Whitty’s comments follow revelations from the inquiry’s first module, which examined the UK’s preparedness, that emergency planning had focused too heavily on a flu pandemic, rather than a coronavirus pandemic. It also emerged the UK failed to consider health inequalities in its pandemic planning, that pandemic planning was paused to prepare for a no-deal Brexit, and that the UK had failed to stockpile nearly enough PPE.
Documents preparing for a flu pandemic that Whitty saw at the time weren’t going to be a “particular help” and would have been “woefully deficient” even in a flu pandemic that had a higher mortality rate than the 2009 swine flu pandemic the plans were based on.
“It was not that it was about flu, and this was Covid,” Whitty said. “It was about the fact this wasn't designed in my view to meet this particular need at all and if I’m honest I think it was clearly written by people that had just been through a pandemic in which the mortality was very low.”
The inquiry has previously heard evidence that even by March it was unclear whether there were any plans. A Coronavirus: Action Plan report setting out the government’s strategy, published on 3 March, was “out of date” by the time it was published because it still included plans to contain the virus.
But Whitty defended the document, saying it was “pretty good” and that “some document is better than no document”.
“There was a clamour for something that people could at least hold onto, even if it was to some extent out of date,” he added.
The action plan has previously been described as an “extraordinary document in retrospect” by former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara’s written evidence, because “so many of the assertions about how well prepared we were would turn out to be wrong only weeks later”.
“At that stage I had no idea that we did not in fact have plans for what was coming and much of what was in the document had not been adequately tested or just was not true for the circumstances we were in,” she said.
The scale of the problem only became apparent when MacNamara began to ask for details of plans – “only to eventually be told that no one had anything that was recognisable as a plan encompassing the sorts of measures that would need to be implemented as the pandemic worsened”.
She said former health secretary Matt Hancock – who has been accused of lying repeatedly during this period – “told us time and time again plans were in place.”
Earlier today, Whitty defended not acting on warnings raised by colleague Jonathan Van-Tam regarding the “serious” potential pandemic.
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/covid-inquiry-chris-whitty-planning-uk-government/
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