Covid Inquiry

Poor Jonathan Van Tamm. As if life wasn't hard enough for him during the pandemic without having to deal with death threats to him and his family

They all look out for themselves pieinthesky. To imagine otherwise would be naive.

While having no trust in Boris Johnson at all I am only glad that I didn’t know at the time the chaos that was going on behind the doors of Number 10 or I would have had even more sleepless nights. To hear Chris Whitty say that on reflection we did lockdown too late when many of us had already imposed our own lockdown makes me cringe. Seems Str Jonathan Van Tam was the only person amongst all the scientists and politicians who could sense that we would be threatened by the virus. I think he is due to give evidence next and it will be interesting to hear what he says.. Felt Chris Whitty was being very cautious not to offend anyone in power at the time and that the KC questioning him was getting frustrated with his answers.Is Chris Whitty trying not to tread on toes in order to keep his own job safe?

MaizieD I absolutely agree with you.

Any times are unprecedented times, we have never lived through them before. The problem with the future is always that we do not know what will happened and it behoves every government to have contingency plans for all likely emrgencies - and a pandemic of a disease with a high mortality rate should be high on that list.

As it happens I am currently doing a further education class in the the history of 'The Black Death' where the name of the course belies the fact that we are actually looking and studying pandemic diseases through time. The course makes it abundantly clear how these new diseases or old diseases in new forms sweep the world at regular intervals and are not one off events but re-occur over extended periods of time. Boris Johnson, as a classicist, should be only too aware of this.

There should always be detail plans for handling a pandemic disease with a high mortality. likewise major environmental disasters and infrastructure failures. Perhaps governments should be required to publish these plans, not in minute detail but in clear detail so that the wider public can judge for themselves whether they are sufficient.

M0nica

I still think, in context, the word he used should have been baffled.

Let's face it, everything baffled Boris.

I still think, in context, the word he used should have been baffled.

Greta

I don't think Patrick Vallance
used 'bamboozled' incorrectly when he claimed Boris Johnson was bamboozled by the science. Bamboozle can mean 'cheat' but it can also mean 'mystify'.

I agree.

Bamboozle:
"to confuse, frustrate": it was not a person who bamboozled Boris Johnson, it was the science itself which confused him, as Patrick Vallance correctly stated.

I don't think Patrick Vallance
used 'bamboozled' incorrectly when he claimed Boris Johnson was bamboozled by the science. Bamboozle can mean 'cheat' but it can also mean 'mystify'.

Hmmmm

Looks as though Whitty agrees about the inadequate planning and cuts to the NHS

From twitter:

Chris Whitty, "The system was inadequate due to the erosion of public health facilities, which was continuous over a long period of time, how the NHS has been whittled away by different administrations over a long period of time.. And we didn't have a plan that was going to be useful"

Hugo Keith, "Why wasn't the governments flu plan sufficient?"

Chris Whitty, "Had we had a flu pandemic with a virus with a mortality of 1-2%, the plan would be woefully deficient. The plan wasn't designed to meet this particular need at all"

(I can check this in the transcript later)

Why is 'unprecedented times' always trotted out as an excuse?

It wasn't totally unprecedented. While C19 was a new virus there had been other pandemics and one of the responsibilities of a government is to plan for emergencies of all kinds, including worst case scenarios.

What has emerged so far from the evidence given to the inquiry is that there was no useable 'plan' for the pandemic.

This was exacerbated by the fact that the NHS was running at practically full capacity, which didn't allow for a health emergency which would require vast numbers of extra beds and staff, and that, due to previous cuts and outsourcing to private enterprise, there was an inadequate stock of useable PPE.

Nor, also because of cuts, was there any capacity for increasing test and trace operations. A decade of tory cuts to public spending left the necessary services struggling to cope with a public health emergency.

As for the witnesses trying to evade blame, the barristers questioning each witness are carefully cross checking with other witness statements/evidence and challenging on contradictory aspects of them.

Aa someone has said, it's like a jigsaw. I don't envy the team which has to try and establish the facts.

Yes Whitewave, you’re right, he did include people living in deprivation and the elderly. Unfortunately although I heard what he said, when I came to write it, I could only remember the bit about people living alone. Apologies. My brain doesn’t always remember as well as it used to.

Iam64, I certainly wasn't looking to the government - to lead me anywhere. I was just despairing watching the incompetence, the delays and half measures - like a disaster movie in slow motion.

Why is 'unprecedented times' always trotted out as an excuse? We could all see what was happening around the world - yet, as the busiest international hub after Dubia (I believe) we allowed unrestricted travel for so long.

Of course, the most shocking thing was sending people from hospitals to care homes - unforgiveable.

The scapegoating of Dominic Cummings seems to be coming unstuck to some degree in Whitty’s evidence, which is really interesting. It’s like a jigsaw with a million pieces trying to understand how the dynamics between individuals had such a great bearing on the decision making processes.

maddyone

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

He went further than that - as his position as CMO his concern was for those suffering deprivation, as well as the elderly, those living alone etc.

‘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).

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

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.

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.

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'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

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.

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.

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.”

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!

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