Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam’s family was threatened with having their throats cut when he worked as deputy chief medical officer, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry heard.
Asked if he ever considered his position over increasingly “hateful messages”, Sir Jonathan said: “The workload was horrendous for all of us.
“It finally got to me when my family was threatened with having their throats cut and when I was asked by police to move out in the middle of the night. My family did not ask for that.”
It comes after former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and ex-chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty told the inquiry on Wenesday morning that the idea of herd immunity “was clearly a ridiculous goal of policy and a very dangerous one”.
Warning that, at the outset of the pandemic, “a very uninformed discussion was forming that was not helping policy-making”, Sir Chris said: “A lot of what was being said could have led to considerable confusion – and indeed did.”
Professor Van-Tam’s family was threatened with having throats cut, inquiry hears
Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam’s family was threatened with having their throats cut when he worked as deputy chief medical officer, an inquiry heard.
Asked if he ever considered his position over increasingly “hateful messages”, Sir Jonathan told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry: “The workload was horrendous for all of us.
“It finally got to me when my family was threatened with having their throats cut and when I was asked by police to move out in the middle of the night. My family did not ask for that.”
Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam
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Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam
Chris Whitty discusses Boris Johnson’s alleged views that long Covid was ‘b******s”
Anthony Metzer KC, who was asking questions on behalf of long Covid groups, asked Professor Sir Chris Whitty if he knew of then-prime minister Boris Johnson’s thoughts on the health condition in October 2020.
He asked: “Were you aware that the prime minister wasn’t convinced that long Covid truly existed in 2020 and for a large part of 2021?”
Sir Chris replied: “I was aware of that.”
Mr Metzer continued: “Why didn’t you, as chief medical officer, disabuse the prime minister of his belief that long Covid was b******s in October 2020, when there were discussions about the need for a second lockdown?”
Sir Chris said: “Well, the particular document with a handwritten note was not one I was privy to until it was published by the inquiry.
“So to be clear, the answer is if I thought that there was an overriding need for the prime minister himself, or herself were it to be a different prime minister, to know about this because it was going to make a big difference to people with long Covid, that would have been a very material point.
“And I did, as you know in 2021, actually address issues of long Covid directly with the prime minister.”
Sir Chris added that Mr Johnson’s views on the condition were “irrelevant” to some degree because he was able to launch the research and analysis into the condition without them.
Chris Whitty reveals his ‘most prominent comms error’
Sir Chris Whitty said comments he made on the risk of “behavioural fatigue” – where people would stop adhering to lockdown restrictions – were his “most prominent communications error”.
England’s former chief medical officer told the Covid inquiry he was “told off” by his behavioural science colleagues for his phrasing.
Full report: Whitty never told about Eat Out to Help Out but ‘should have been’
The country’s top scientists were never informed about the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, despite Boris Johnson saying they were consulted, Sir Chris Whitty has told the pandemic inquiry.
Jane Kirby has the full report:
WhatsApp ‘appalling’ for discussing technical issues, says Chris Whitty
Professor Sir Chris Whitty said the messaging app WhatsApp was “an appalling mechanism” for discussing technical issues.
He told the Covid-19 inquiry: “We didn’t do very much technical stuff on WhatsApp unless it was extremely straightforward, like there have been three new cases or something of that kind.
“[For] something that has greater scientific subtlety … WhatsApp would be would not be an appropriate approach for trying to do that.”
Independent Sage was not a ‘principally scientific’ input, says Chris Whitty
The group of scientists self-styled as Independent Sage was not “principally a scientific input”, Professor Sir Chris Whitty told the inquiry.
The former chief medical officer said: “Independent Sage – despite the rather confusingly similar name – existed for a rather different purpose to Sage, let me put it that way. And I wouldn’t see it as principally a scientific input.
“It was the views of some distinguished scientists – all of whom I know and some of whom are also members of Sage, and gave their views directly through that.
“But the idea that Independent Sag was a scientific input in the way that SPI-M, SPI-O, or SPI-B were … or the Royal Socity, or Academy of Medical Sciences, I think would be to misunderstand their role. And I think they would agree with that statement.
“I don’t think they saw themselves as equivalent to the Royal Sociey or one of the sub-groups of Sage.”
Whitty says he was not consulted about Eat Out to Help Out scheme
Professor Sir Chris Whitty said that he – along with other government scientific advisers – were not consulted on Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme.
Echoing what Sir Patrick Vallance told the inquiry on Monday, Sir Chris said: “My written statement makes clear there was no consultation.”
Hugo Keith, KC, counsel to the inquiry, then asked: “I need to put to you that in his witness statement, Boris Johnson says ‘It was properly discussed, including with Chris and Patrick’, do you agree with that?”
Sir Chris replied: “On this one, neither Patrick nor I can recall it and I think we would have done.”
He continued: “I made fairly firmly to number 10, not to the Prime Minister, the view that it would have been prudent, let’s put it that way, for them to have thought about discussing it (the EOTHO scheme) before it was launched.”
Sir Chris said that it was “perfectly legitimate” for the Treasury and other government departments to come up with different schemes and that “it may well be correct that the prime minister was under the impression we had been consulted” about the scheme even though they had not.
Second lockdown was ‘not necessarily inevitable’, says Chris Whitty
Asked whether he considers that in public health terms, the government had a realistic option not to impose a second lockdown, Sir Chris Whitty said: “By the time it had got to the stage of the second lockdown, given the principle aims of ministers to minimise mortality, I couldn’t see many options.
“Whether other decisions could have been taken earlier to have prevented that, I think is a separate and quite important question. But once we got to that point, the realisation was there wasn’t really much choice.”
Pressed on whether there had been a ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown or earlier tiered restrictions prior to that the second lockdown might not have been either necessary or as long, Sir Chris said: “I think most people would say that is the case.
“I think there are a variety of ways we could potentially have had at least a less onerous lockdown than we did on the second one. The third one, in my view, because it was a new variant, I would say probably we didn’t have many choices.
“But on this one, I thought it was inevitable by the time we got there but wasn’t necessarily inevitable had different decisions been taken.”
Government understood high chance NHS would be overwhelmed without lockdown, says Whitty
Pressed on whether anyone in government said clearly by 23 March 2020 that the NHS would not just buckle, but would break without lockdown, Sir Chris Whitty replied: “I think that ultimately this understanding is what took ministers to the point of realising that – if they wished to minimise mortality – there was no option.
“To understand that, if they did not take this action, it might not be 100 per cent certain that the NHS would get to that point, but that there was a high enough probability that it was simply not something that was an acceptable thing for the government to do if its aim was to minimise mortality.
“So that is very clearly – this risk was very, very heavy in driving – in my view – the decisions that ministers subsequently took.”
UK was already in ‘deep trouble’ on weekend before first lockdow
By the weekend before the first lockdown was implemented, the UK was already in “deep trouble” and could not afford to wait to see if earlier measures would bring the R number for the rate of infection below 1, Sir Chris Whitty has said.
Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, asked whether any consideration had been given to waiting to see the impact of earlier measures before deciding if this “final draconian step was indeed necessary”.
Sir Chris replied: “It wasn’t just a matter of trying to pull it down just below 1.
“It was really trying to shrink this wave as fast as possible. So I think I don’t recall any serious debate that said at this point ‘let’s wait’.
“I think the debate at this point was the numbers here are looking reasonably stark.”
