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Covid inquiry: Whitty told ministers to stop discussing herd immunity [1]
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Date: 2023-11
Ministers were urged to stop discussing “ridiculous” and “dangerous” herd immunity policies in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Chris Whitty has said.
According to Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, there was a “large amount of chatter” on the topic – mainly from people who “had, at best, half understood” it.
And such was his concern about the “considerable confusion” being generated in Westminster and among the public at large over the issue, he attempted to limit discussion of controversial interventions such as the so-called ‘Great Barrington Declaration’, an open letter signed by academics urging the government not to impose further lockdowns.
“I think things were muddled up between two completely different uses of the term [herd immunity],” Whitty told today’s hearing of the UK’s Covid-19 inquiry.
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“Frankly, there was a large amount of chatter among people who had, at best, half understood the issue.
“I think it became very confused and my only contribution on this, up to March 20, was to say to people: ‘This is very complicated – please don’t talk about it.’
“Not because I wanted to hide it, but because I thought a very uninformed discussion was forming that was not helping policymaking.”
The inquiry’s second module on government decision-making in the early days of the pandemic has now been sitting for 24 days.
Whitty also gave evidence yesterday in which he claimed there was a “complete absence of plans” to deal with Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic.
And it was revealed that his then deputy, Jonathan Van-Tam, had stated he was “seriously concerned” by the looming threat of the virus as early as January 2020.
Van-Tam is due to give his own evidence to the inquiry later today.
The Great Barrington Declaration was an open letter signed by several academics in October 2020, urging the government to forgo future lockdowns in favour of ‘focused protection’ measures to protect the most vulnerable.
According to its backers, this would have led to herd immunity against Covid-19 in the UK within three months.
But Whitty was stark in his criticism of the proposals, calling herd immunity a “clearly ridiculous goal of policy and a very dangerous one”.
He told the inquiry: “It’s quite rare that I actually say of a group of other academics: ‘I utterly disagree with what you’re saying.’ This is one of those few occasions.
“I think they were just wrong.
“If this had been posited as ‘the vaccine is just around the corner’, you could make the argument ‘why not wait for the vaccine’, because you’ve got a way of achieving herd immunity safely.
“But that wasn’t actually what they were suggesting. They weren’t suggesting ‘wait for a vaccine’.
“I thought it was one of the few areas where I thought it was something to knock it really hard out of the court, rather than saying ‘this is an interesting point – let’s debate it’.”
Whitty also addressed interventions by prominent scientists such as epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, whose modelling is understood to have prompted the decision to begin the UK’s first pandemic lockdown, telling the inquiry: “Quite a lot of scientists felt that their view should be given directly to the prime minister.”
He added he thought it was “sensible” to avoid too many scientific opinions and information being sent “potentially in a confusing way into 10 Downing Street”.
The inquiry has previously heard then prime minister Boris Johnson’s “oscillating” and poor decision-making delayed vital pandemic measures.
Herd immunity
Whitty also shed more light on the methods employed to manage Johnson’s “oscillating” and inability to make decisions.
Responding to questions on the government’s approach to long Covid, which was branded “bollocks” by the then prime minister, England's top medical adviser said he had to find methods of broaching topics that were more creative than “just giving him a document”.
He said: “I wanted to have a conversation with him and do it at a time we could have a serious conversation.
“I would have chosen a moment at which it would have been most useful to have a conversation with him and then followed it up with a short note.”
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/covid-inquiry-chris-whitty-herd-immunity-ridiculous-dangerous-great-barrington-declaration/
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