The Covid Inquiry just had its first week of witness hearings, meaning high-profile figures like David Cameron and Chris Whitty took to the stand.
This stage of the public inquiry, set to go on for a total of six weeks, is meant to unpick exactly what happened in the run-up to and during Covid, as part of a wider investigation of the UK’s pandemic preparedness.
In the process, anyone who made significant decisions around how the UK responded to the health crisis has been put under the microscope.
Here’s the most surprising comments which have emerged to date.
1. ‘It’s wrong to say we [were] preparing for the wrong pandemic’ – David Cameron
The PM between 2010 and 2016, Cameron was scrutinised over whether his government had laid the groundwork for the UK and its health system to cope with any kind of future pandemic.
Cameron revealed that the emphasis was on a “pandemic flu” – but acknowledged the “regret” is that “more questions weren’t asked about the sort of pandemic that we faced”, one of asymptomatic, highly infectious transmission like Covid.
2. Without austerity, ‘you’d have had a trillion of extra debt’ as well as a pandemic – David Cameron
Cameron oversaw a period of austerity where less government money was available for schools, parts of the NHS and the police, in an attempt to balance the books in the long aftermath of the 2008 fiscal crash.
Amid criticism that austerity meant the NHS was underprepared for the pandemic, Cameron said without those policies to repair public finance, there would have been a “fiscal crisis” at the same time as the pandemic.
3. ‘Ready for flu, ready for anything’ was ‘incorrect’ – Chris Wormald
The permanent secretary of the health and social care department since 2016, Wormald said that the government’s pandemic planning was affected by this misleading idea that the flu was the biggest threat.
4. ‘A whole load’ of pandemic prep paused for no-deal Brexit, –Sir Chris Wormald
Flaws with the UK’s pandemic plans were highlighted, but not worked on, according to Wormald.
He said: “This is one of the areas of work that we paused, while we were very specifically looking at the consequences of a no deal Brexit.
“It was delayed by the work on Brexit and then the pandemic.”
However he said a lot of these no-deal preparations became a “by-product” which helped no-deal Brexit work.
5. Fewer PPE items for black staff were purchased – Sir Chris Wormald
Asked if the respirators provided by the department of health and social care “frequently fitted white face” while those “better for black staff were purchased in much small quantity”, Wormald said that was correct.
“Yes, that is the finding that the department found during the pandemic,” he said.
He also denied there was ever a PPE shortage, but said supplies did get quite low.
6. Lockdowns were ‘not what we had planned for’ – Sir Chris Wormald
He added: “Widespread contact tracing was never part of the influenza pandemic plan.
“And lockdowns, as in legal lockdowns, were not what we had planned for.”
7. High turnover of ministers is ‘disaster for the country’ – Sir Oliver Letwin
Letwin, the minister for government policy between 2010 and 2016 and the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster between 2014 and 2016, suggested the UK was “wildly under-resilient” when it came to critical national infrastructure.
He claimed the constant churn of ministers and officials meant to prepare the UK for emergencies was a “disaster for the country”.
He also said it as an “error” that no government had ever appointed a senior minister with sole responsibility for planning for pandemics.
8. Believing there were enough antibiotics for non-flu pandemics was ‘ludicrous’ – Sir Oliver Letwin
Letwin said there was a consensus in the Department of Health and Health Protection Agency that there were sufficient antibiotics for non-influenza pandemics, and a general belief that “was under control”.
He said this belief was “ludicrous in retrospect”.
9. Austerity ‘had a positive effect on the UK’s ability to respond to Covid’ – George Osborne
Osborne, the chancellor under David Cameron, said he rejected the idea that “the consequences of austerity were a depleted health and social care capacity and rising inequality in the UK”.
He said that the UK “would have been more exposed, not just to future things like the coronavirus pandemic but indeed to the fiscal crisis which very rapidly followed in countries across Europe”.
Osborne claimed that his actions of introducing austerity “had a material and positive effect on the UK’s ability to respond to the Covid pandemic”.
10. ‘Scientists were not elevating the threat of such a virus spreading rapidly’ – George Osborne
Osborne agreed that the Treasury did not plan for an extended lockdown, but – when asked whose fault that was, he suggested it was not the government’s.
“I don’t think it’s particularly fair to apportion blame when scientists were not elevating the threat of such a virus spreading rapidly,” he claimed.
11. ‘It wasn’t just the deaths, it was the way they died’ – Dame Sally Davies
England’s former chief medical officer (between 2010 and 2019), Davies apologised to the relatives of those who died during the pandemic.
Tearfully, she said: “It wasn’t just the deaths, it was the way they died. It was horrible.”
12. ‘We have damaged a generation, and it is awful’ – Dame Sally Davies
Davies said there needs to be a better approach to deal with “groupthink” in order to prepare for future pandemics.
Expressing concern over how Covid was handled, she said, “educational impact tells me that education has a terrific amount of work to do” when it comes to the pandemic’s impacts on children, adding: “We have damaged a generation, and it is awful... watching these people struggle.”
13. Britain not ‘operationally prepared’ for Covid – Sir Mark Walport
The government’s chief scientific adviser between 2013 and 2017 and current chief executive of UK Research and Innovation, Walport said the country was ready scientifically for Covid when it struck – but acknowledged that being ready operationally was “another matter”.
He claimed: “I think that focus in richer countries has moved away from infectious diseases after the Second World War.
’With the rise of chronic inflammatory diseases, cardiac disease, hypertension, diabetes, there was much more of a focus on those and away from infection.”
14. No deal planning made UK ‘match fit’ for pandemic – Oliver Dowden
Current deputy PM and cabinet office minister from July 2019 and February 2020, Dowden, said that preparing to leave the EU without a deal put the UK in a “strong position” to approach other challenges.
He said it “made us match fit for when... we did have to deal with the actual materialisation of the Covid pandemic – that is to say it forced government departments to work together closely, so there’s a lot more cross-government co-ordination”.
He also claimed extra staff hired for no-deal Brexit were “redeployed” to tackle Covid.
15. UK had ‘deeply entrenched’ assumption pandemic would be impossible to stop – Jeremy Hunt
Current chancellor and the health secretary between 2012 and 2018, Hunt said he took some responsibility for the “deeply entrenched” planning assumption that it would be impossible to stop the spread of a pandemic.
Hunt said: “There were no questions asked at any stage as to how do we stop it getting to the stage of 200,000 to 400,000 fatalities. It was an assumption that if there was pandemic flu it would spread, using layperson’s terms, like wildfire. And you pretty much couldn’t stop it.”
He added that there was a “groupthink” that the UK knew this stuff best and there wasn’t much they could learn from other countries.
16. Lockdown could have been ‘avoided’ – Jeremy Hunt
Hunt said by the time testing and isolation was considered for Covid, transmission rates were too high, so you would have to use a lockdown.
“Had we got on the case much earlier with that approach, we might have avoided that,” Hunt claimed.
17. Government wasn’t using experts ‘enough’ – Roger Hargreaves
Roger Hargreaves, head of the COBRA emergency response committee, said: “Generally there was a question of whether we were tapping enough into that expertise [of emergency planning].
“I was quite keen to embrace quite quickly some quite big shifts in how we used experts.”
18. Crisis response ‘pulled out of shape by terrorist incidents, Brexit’ – Roger Hargreaves
He also claimed that the crisis response system has been “pulled out of shape by terrorist incidents in 2017, by planning around Brexit, by Covid, by Afghanistan, by Russia, Ukraine”, and called for the government to take “civil protection seriously enough”.
19. ‘Big weakness’ in government advice committees – Sir Chris Whitty
England’s chief medial officer since 2019 said the current committee system is “excellent” but not “designed to inject radicalism of that size into the situation” when the government is responding to threats.
“That is potentially the big weakness in the system. How do you inject radicalism into the system, rather than how do you respond to expertise,” Whitty said.
20. Lockdowns were ‘radical’ – Sir Chris Whitty
He also said: “I’m talking here very, very specifically about the state saying people have to go home and stay at home, except under very limited circumstances, a very radical thing to do.”
21. Abuse and threats against medical advisers was ‘extremely concerning’ – Sir Chris Whitty
“One [thing] we should be very firm in saying that the society very much appreciated the work of these people,” and he added that it was “extremely concerning” level of threats and abuse.
22. Moving government officials around is a ‘very big problem’ – Sir Patrick Vallance
Pandemic chief scientific adviser between 2018 and March of this year, Vallance suggested that moving people around in government leads to the loss of experience and knowledge.
If papers and documents aren’t reviewed in the right timeframes they risk becoming invalid, he explained.
23. Not publishing SAGE advice quickly is a ‘regret’ – Sir Patrick Vallance
He said scientific advice should be published by default unless there’s a risk to national security, noting it took “longer than it should have done” to publish SAGE advice during the pandemic.
He said having advice “challenged is part of the scientific practice but said “I see no reason why this can’t be the norm going forward”.
24. Vaccine taskforce was ‘likely to fail’ – Sir Patrick Vallance
He said when Covid hit, the industrial vaccine base in the UK “had pretty much gone” due to “benign neglect with a very significant consequence”.
He continued: “When we set up the vaccine taskforce, it was very, very possible, even likely, that it would fail.”
25. ‘Terrible truth’ is pandemics ‘feed off inequality’ – Sir Patrick Vallance
Vallance said: “There is a terrible, terrible truth, and it’s something that we all need to reflect off, is that all pandemics feed inequality and drive inequality. That’s the way they behave.”
That needs to be built into the strategy around pandemics, so people need to be aware of that “right from day one”.