Covid Inquiry

We were another couple who acted much sooner than the government and locked ourselves down much sooner.

It was obvious what was likely to happen.

But not everyone was in that fortunate position though. Those at work did not have any choice.

Sunak and Johnston seem to have ignored the scientific advice given at the time. The worst people in charge of a country at the worst possible time

Casdon

I am left feeling sorry for Patrick Vallance, it must have been immensely frustrating being given no direction. He comes across in his evidence as very professional.

Thanks Casdon. I’ve found the evidence compelling. I’m surprised by the occasional comment suggesting they’re ‘all as bad as each other’, trying to distance themselves. The scientists seem straight forward in telling it as it was.

Eat out to Help out shocked me at the time. To learn the scientific advisor wasn’t involved in its planning and would have advised it would increase transmission will stay with me

My now 7 year old grandson, along with most of his group in year 3, is still ‘catching up’ with what’s expected in year 3. He’s a happy, well motivated boy, at his recent parents evening his very experienced teacher reassured his parents he’s doing well - catching up with the legacy of being out of reception for a year etc etc

So we opened the pubs, not the schools………

MayBee70

Just imagine how much worse it would have been if many of us hadn’t’ve taken our health into our own hands and locked down before we were told to.

I was ill before it was supposedly identified, as were other people I know. The person i caught the unknown virus from died.

It isn't called covid 19 for nothing.
Quite right - was the WHO asleep?
People in Wuhan knew something was very wrong in autumn 2019 with the new virus.

Casdon
I am left feeling sorry for Patrick Vallance, it must have been immensely frustrating being given no direction. He comes across in his evidence as very professional.

I do too, he must have felt as if no-one in government was listening.

But he still stood next to Johnson at the daily briefings giving Johnson credence.

MayBee70, what do you believe Patrick Vallance could have done differently?

We were in terrifying, unprecedented times. People, even those with no faith in Johnson, rightly looked to the government to lead

The thread of it so far has been everyone blaming others especially the government for doing the wrong things, maybe that’s the verdict at the end.

But how is that going to help the right decisions to be made in the futur, it’s just a blame game.

Iam64

MayBee70, what do you believe Patrick Vallance could have done differently?

We were in terrifying, unprecedented times. People, even those with no faith in Johnson, rightly looked to the government to lead

He said he wouldn’t have endorsed eat out to help out if he’d been consulted on it so why didn’t he speak out about it when it happened. And Van Tam was the only one that called out Cummings for what he did,

If he’d spoken out, it would have made a dreadful uncertain situation for the country even worse

A Chief Scientific Advisor is just that though Maybee, an advisor. We could project onto him a more influential role, but that’s not the reality of the situation he and his colleagues were in, they had no governmental authority. Their part in the briefings was tightly controlled if you remember, and they would not be able to brief against what the PM said. If they did, they wouldn’t be there the next day - look at what happened to Yvonne Doyle.

Yes, and they should have had the courage to challenge BJ openly- lose their jobs and go public. THAT would have been the honest and useful thing to do.

Boris may have struggled with scientific concepts but our scientist, Sir Patrick Vallance equally struggles with the English language, when he confuses bamboozle and baffle.

Boris wasn't bamboozled, a word meaning to cheated or fooled, by the science, but he was assuredly baffled by it as in the fact that he couldn't understand it.

Fleurpepper

Yes, and they should have had the courage to challenge BJ openly- lose their jobs and go public. THAT would have been the honest and useful thing to do.

Seriously? Where do you think that would have left us, with no scientific and medical experts tempering the governments actions?

Katie59

The thread of it so far has been everyone blaming others especially the government for doing the wrong things, maybe that’s the verdict at the end.

But how is that going to help the right decisions to be made in the futur, it’s just a blame game.

That's what I have been thinking for the whole of this Inquiry.

The suggestion that public servants should resign when they disagree with plans or managers is naive

Iam64

The suggestion that public servants should resign when they disagree with plans or managers is naive

It's quite ridiculous to think that our Chief Medical Officer, Chief Scientific Officer and others would even think of resigning because of the incompetence of the politicians, at a time when the country was in the middle of a pandemic.

We needed their expertise even more.

Such was the politicians' indifference to the advice of these experts that they even appeared not to notice when the CMO was present in a meeting!

A note by Sir Patrick on July 2 (2020) read: “In the economics meeting earlier today they didn’t realise CMO (chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty) was there and CX (then-chancellor Rishi Sunak) said, ‘It is all about handling the scientists, not handling the virus’.

“They then got flustered when the CMO chipped in later and they realised he had been there all along. PM (then-prime minister Boris Johnson) blustered and waffled for five mins to cover his embarrassment.”

It is now on record that Sunak rather thought that people should die in preference to the economy receiving a hit.

What a charming little pip squeak he is.

To put it brutally, the decisions of life and death are ones governments and individuals in governments sometimes have to make, both in war and peace.

Taking, at one extreme, completely crashing the economy and thrusting the country into decades of poverty, but having no one die of COVID and at the other extreme let COVID rip regardless of deaths but keeping the economy growing.

Any decision along that line requires decisions about people dying. It cannot be avoided. That decision would have to be made, whoever was in government.

Vallance's diary entries seem to be endearingly honest reflections of his day's work. I think they encapsulate the whole situation very well - the scientists vs economists and Boris's non scientific training causing him problems in understanding graphs and charts. A very human picture is conjured up by these diary extracts. Open and direct. No redactions or hiding of emails/texts etc

Much of the working population could have been classified as vulnerable, such as pregnant women, people with conditions such as asthma and diabetes, people of colour, people nearing retirement age, and the obese. If they had all sheltered so as to allow the rest of the country to continue working as usual the nation's economy and vital services might have been severely affected anyway. Even with our badly-managed lockdown over 200,000 died, and not all came into the 'vulnerable' groups. Restrictions were literally vital. I'm surprised that Boris found the graphs, etc., hard to understand. I gave up physics and chemistry at 14 and didn't take an O-Level in maths, but I had no trouble grasping what was meant.

Vallance and Whitty are said to have disagreed with one another about lockdown. We will see today when Whitty gives his evidence. All will seek to minimise their own decisions and try to ensure that blame is laid anywhere but at themselves.
We have to accept that with a novel virus, which was extremely infectious, any government would struggle to make decisions. I agreed with lockdown, others even on here didn’t agree. I think my opinions have changed slightly though, I would no longer have abandoned my daughter and I would have carried on doing childcare for her, whilst restricting my activities elsewhere. Maybe she would still be living in the UK if I had made that decision, and it didn’t make any difference in the end because I still got Covid and I was still hospitalised. I don’t blame either politicians, shambolic though it appears they were, nor the experts, who disagreed about how to proceed, because at the end of the day, no one actually knew how to proceed or the best way to handle things.
I hope something can come out if this yet further expensive investigation into what happened and if such a thing happens again in the future, maybe it could be handled better.
I won’t hold my breath though.

Aveline

Vallance's diary entries seem to be endearingly honest reflections of his day's work. I think they encapsulate the whole situation very well - the scientists vs economists and Boris's non scientific training causing him problems in understanding graphs and charts. A very human picture is conjured up by these diary extracts. Open and direct. No redactions or hiding of emails/texts etc

I do agree, and with M0nica.

For politicians, it was finding the balance which was important, brutal though it may sound.
However, listening to the science was important, perhaps the CSO and CMO could have simplified it so that even Johnson could have understood it all better.

He seemed to have a butterfly mind. Was this before or after he had Covid? Perhaps he was suffering with Covid brain fog, which I know can be a real problem regarding concentration.

Whitty has apparently testified that he was concerned about lockdown because of the effect on people living alone.

‘New Zealand's economy is in the midst of a necessary, policy-induced slowdown following the strong post-pandemic recovery. With exemplary management of the pandemic, New Zealand recovered faster than most other advanced economies’
I just googled New Zealand Economy: this is what popped up but I don’t know the source. I’m trying to remember what Arden said at the time ‘ come down hard, come down fast’ or something like that. I do realise that NZ is a different country with different needs but she showed true leadership at a time of crisis (imo).