An article in the Sunday Times that claims a meeting with Heneghan, Gupta and Tegners was the reason that BoJo refused to listen to the advice from SAGE for a short circuit breaker in September, leading to the latest round of hospitalisations etc.
Great Barrington was never closer to the PM’s ear…
INSIGHT INVESTIGATION
48 hours in September when ministers and scientists split over Covid lockdown
In its latest investigation into the government’s handling of the pandemic, Insight asks whether the PM’s decision to prioritise the economy over ‘following the science’ led him to repeat the errors of the spring
Insight
Sunday December 13 2020, 12.00pm, The Sunday Times
The medical and scientific experts had been summoned the previous day and warned to keep their Sunday evening rendezvous with the prime minister a secret. When they dialled into the Zoom call at 6pm they found Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, at the end of the long mahogany cabinet room table in Downing Street.
The presence of the chancellor with no sign of other ministers was a little odd, because the experts had been invited to deliver presentations on the coronavirus pandemic rather than the economy. But the government was in a crisis that weekend in September and Sunak had been kicking up a fuss.
Two days earlier, Johnson had been forced to confirm the grim news that a second wave was “coming in”. His chief scientific and medical advisers were pressing him to bring in a short “circuit-breaker” lockdown that would save lives and arguably prevent the need for lengthy, economically damaging restrictions at a later date.
Johnson had reluctantly sided with the scientists and was preparing for a quick lockdown in the week of Monday, September 21, backed by his then chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. Two key members of his cabinet — Matt Hancock, the health secretary, and Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister — were also supporting tougher restrictions.
But Sunak wanted a different strategy. Faced with dire predictions that half a million people could be made redundant in the autumn, he strongly opposed a second lockdown, which some economists were saying would wreak further havoc on Britain’s already limping economy.
Which is why three of the four academics who had been invited to speak by No 10 that Sunday evening advocated a less restrictive approach, which avoided lockdowns.
The strategy of allowing the virus to take its course and build up “herd immunity” in the population had been dropped by the government at the start of the first wave because of evidence that it would lead to an unacceptable death toll and potentially overwhelm the NHS.
The speakers that night included Professor Sunetra Gupta and her Oxford University colleague, Professor Carl Heneghan. Gupta says they were each given 15 minutes in which they argued that a lockdown was unnecessary at that point: the virus could be allowed to spread with lighter controls if those most vulnerable to serious illness were protected. Gupta says herd immunity could be achieved “in the order of three to six months”.
Professor Sunetra Gupta was invited to speak at Downing Street
They were joined by Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s leading epidemiologist, who had masterminded his country’s controversial policy of avoiding a lockdown to build up immunity from the virus in the hope it would reduce the impact of any second wave. Tegnell refuses to disclose what he said at the meeting.
At the end, Professor John Edmunds, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, presented the view of the government’s Sage advisory group, which wanted a two week circuit-breaker lockdown. Edmunds has also declined to reveal what he said to Johnson and Sunak that evening.
But his firm view on the necessity for an immediate lockdown was clear in a paper he co-authored with other Sage members that weekend. “Not acting now to reduce cases will result in a very large epidemic with catastrophic consequences in terms of direct Covid-related deaths and the ability of the health service to meet needs,” they wrote.
It was a huge call for the prime minister, but on that evening — Sunday, September 20 — he decided to side with the opponents of an immediate lockdown.
Just as in the first wave in March, Johnson would delay the lockdown and ignore warnings that the consequences would be disastrous for both the economy and people’s lives. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that … It’s been wishful thinking all the way through.”
The same mistake
Our investigation charts how the government increasingly diverged from the advice of its own scientists in the run-up to the second wave of the outbreak.
This article is the fifth part of Insight’s series, which has drawn evidence from scientists, inside sources, politicians, economists, emergency planners, doctors and bereaved families to build a damning picture of the British government’s response to the pandemic.
Britain’s first 11-week lockdown was one of the longest in Europe because so many people had been infected in the early weeks of March. But the measures had been necessary. A total of 56,100 people died from the virus by the end of the first wave, but a paper commissioned by the government in the summer estimated 470,000 lives were saved by the lockdown despite its late introduction.
The cost of the longer lockdown was one of the biggest crashes in the nation’s wealth. Keen to reactivate the economy in the summer, the prime minister began relaxing social-distancing measures when the number of infections was higher than they had been in other European countries when they lifted their lockdowns.
The government’s plan from then on was to keep the reproduction rate — which is known as R and denotes the average number of infections produced by a single infected person — either at or below one, so that infections would not increase again. It was a delicate balancing act because, as restrictions were loosened to allow economic activity, the R number might creep up again, creating a new exponential growth in infections.
In the late summer, relaxing the restrictions required cool heads and wise judgment. But the distance between the scientists’ advice and the government’s action widened and widened.
The second lockdown was strongly opposed by chancellor Rishi Sunak
CHRISTOPHER FURLONG
Our investigation found that the road to the second lockdown was littered with a series of ministerial decisions to help the economy, which were taken without consultation with key scientific advisory committees.
The decisions also flew in the face of advice from the World Bank, cross-party groups of politicians and leading international public health experts that, in the era of Covid, the virus had to be kept under control before the economy could thrive. Failing to do so would leave the country in the worst of all worlds.
After the Sunday evening meeting in Downing Street, Johnson continued with a series of weaker measures to contain the virus for six more weeks until — as the scientists predicted — the number of infections rose so high that his hand was finally forced into bringing in a national lockdown because the NHS was again in danger of being overrun.
As a result, more than 1.3 million extra infections are estimated to have spread across the country. We heard evidence that one intensive care ward in Manchester became so overwhelmed that patients were left to die without the life-saving care they needed.
The longer national lockdown was imposed last month and Britain would see more than 20,000 further deaths from the virus, adding to a tally that was already one of the worst in Europe.
Super Saturday
The journey towards the second lockdown began on July 4, or “Super Saturday”, as it had become known. It was the day when the prime minister lifted a whole raft of restrictions in England, with the reopening of pubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, museums and, finally, for those with pudding-bowl fringes, hairdressers. The move was bold.
NHS bosses had written to hospitals warning them to prepare for New Year’s Eve-level surges in demand for emergency services as people hit the pubs, and the government’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, was anxious about the outcome of relaxing so many restrictions at the same time. “None of us believe … this is a risk-free next step,” he told a press briefing the day before.
On the evening of Super Saturday there was little self-restraint as people — especially the young — were released from more than three months of hibernation. Scenes of crowded city centres terrified those who understood the history of pandemics. Watching events that day, Professor Devi Sridhar, a member of Scotland’s Covid-19 advisory group, who has been critical of the UK government’s approach, was reminded of celebrations in 1918, when people thought the last great pandemic, the Spanish flu, was over after the first wave. “The messaging was wrong,” she said. “The idea that you’re celebrating the end of the pandemic, instead of preparing for a hard winter.”
The scientists were right to be concerned. That week the seven-day average of coronavirus cases fell to just below 600 a day, the lowest figure for the UK since the first wave had begun in earnest in March. From then on, infections began to rise again and would increase through July and August — at first little by little and then faster and faster.
“The second wave started on July 5 … The nadir of the epidemic was that week,” said the senior Sage adviser, who has asked not to be named. He believes that Super Saturday was a big mistake and contradicted all the scientific advice.
Sage had advised the government on June 23 to relax the strictest measures incrementally so that it could gauge the effect each one had on infection rates and prevent infections from “accelerating”. The rush to open everything up, therefore, meant the scientists were unable to read which of the measures caused the spike that began in July.
The Sage adviser said: “If you have to reverse any of those measures, then which ones do you pick to reverse if you haven’t got the data? We’ve been in that situation ever since — having to guess.”
No consultation
Yet neither Johnson nor Sunak were in any mood to take things gradually. This was supposed to be the year of new prosperity with the exit from the EU, and yet Britain had lost close to 20% of its gross domestic product (GDP) in the three months to June.
The lockdown shrinkage of the economy was greater than any other G7 country in the first half of the year. On July 8, the Wednesday after Super Saturday, the chancellor announced a £30bn package to protect jobs because it was feared that unemployment would rise steeply when the furlough scheme supporting 9.3 million workers eventually ended.
That day the chancellor cheerfully served tables in a branch of Wagamama to advertise one of his new big initiatives: Eat Out to Help Out. The discount scheme was intended to prop up the hospitality industry by encouraging diners to return to pubs and restaurants, with the offer of up to £10 off sit-down meals per person from Monday to Wednesday throughout August.
The initiative was never put before the scientific advisers on Sage. Nor were members of Sage consulted on a sudden reversal of a key policy to control the virus announced by the prime minister in an online forum with the public two days later. He said it was time to replace the “stay at home if you can” with “go back to work if you can”’
As part of the drive to return life to normal, international travel was opened up on the same day as Johnson’s online forum. A new “traffic light” system of “travel corridors” was introduced that allowed people to travel to 59 countries with no requirement to quarantine for 14 days on return to England.
The policy was questionable, given that British tourists were travelling to countries such as Spain with higher rates of infection. In the penultimate week of July, when the air travel corridor was still open, Britain had 6.8 cases per 100,000 people, whereas Spain had 25.9 cases per 100,000. Many people brought the virus back into Britain from their travels.
This would later show up in research on the second wave of the virus. A study from Basel University in Switzerland shows a new variant of the virus appears to have emerged in Spain in early summer and then spread to the UK by the middle of July. Remarkably, by September the variant was estimated to be responsible for 50% of virus cases in England and 80% of those in Wales and Scotland.
By the middle of July, most areas of the economy had been opened for business again. There were still protections in place with screens, distancing measures and mandatory mask-wearing on public transport. But this just slowed, rather than stopped, the infections and the return to a more active world was still a big gamble.
As if to emphasise the scale of the risk being taken, a report commissioned by Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, was published on July 14 setting out what could happen if there was a second wave of the virus in winter.
The report — produced by the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences with the help of several Sage members — drew attention to how Australia and New Zealand had acted swiftly to stem the spread of the virus in winter and had managed to keep the virus transmission at very low levels. “Assuming that they maintain control, their winter season will be very different from that which is likely in the UK,” said the report. The two countries’ death figures have remained small: New Zealand has had just 25 fatalities while Australia has recorded 908.
The report went on to outline a “reasonable worst-case scenario” with almost 120,000 deaths by the middle of 2021 if the R number was to reach 1.7 in September. However, it warned that hospital capacity was “likely” to be stretched even if R went between 1.1 and 1.5.
It meant that the government would have to take great care with any policies that might increase the infection rate. But the R number was already on the rise.
Sage committee minutes show that it was recognised at the end of July that infections may no longer be below the crucial “one” threshold for R and by early August the scientists were advising that “strong measures introduced early for short periods are likely to be more effective in reducing transmission than less stringent measures which would need to be implemented for longer”.
This was also the view of the 58 MPs on the Commons all-party coronavirus group, which had been taking evidence about how to deal with the pandemic from scientists, public health experts and frontline medical workers. By mid-August, with infections having risen to more than 1,000 a day, they wrote directly to the prime minister. “It is already clear that to minimise the risk of a second wave occurring and therefore to save lives, an urgent change in government approach is required,” the letter said.
The group wanted the government to introduce a “zero-Covid” strategy, which would mean bringing in measures to restrict the virus to less than 70 cases a day. This would not only save lives — it would benefit the economy, the group argued. “The truth was then as it is now, that minimising community transmission allows a faster and stronger economic recovery,” said Dan Poulter, the Conservative MP who is a vice-chairman of the parliamentary group, as well as being a doctor who works part-time in the NHS. The group received no response from ministers to its letter.
Many scientists also favoured a strategy that was aimed at cutting infection to near zero. Professor Steven Riley, a member of the government’s scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling (SPI-M), which reports to Sage, said the UK must adopt such an approach if the country faced the same situation again. “From the experience of this pandemic, some countries have had much, much better outcomes by pursuing that [approach]. Even if we didn’t achieve it, we should have it as an objective,” he said. “I don’t think that will be controversial. In fact, it’s almost silly to suggest otherwise.”
Indeed, in May, economists at the World Bank had published a report entitled “The Sooner, the Better”, which concluded that countries in Europe and central Asia that had acted earlier to stem the virus’s spread had suffered less damage to their economies and fewer deaths. Locking down early was a win-win strategy. It was advice that many scientists believed should be applied to avoid further economic damage from a second wave.
part 2 follows below
