Key SAGE scientist: 'government had no clear Covid strategy'

One of the key scientists on the government's emergency SAGE committee has argued that ministers had no clear strategy when Covid-19 hit and therefore rolled out confusing and contradictory messages for the public. 

In an interview with ITV News during a major week for the Covid Inquiry, Professor John Edmunds said Boris Johnson's government was "crashing from one extreme to the other" in terms of strategy. 

"We went from a more laissez faire attitude at the beginning then into a lockdown.

"And then after that, we went out of lockdown into Eat Out to Help Out," he said.

"So we just sort of threw the strategy away and then adopted a complete opposite one."

'It's undoubtedly the case that we went into the second lockdown too late,' Professor John Edmunds tells ITV News

Professor Edmunds - who is a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, argued that a similar mistake was repeated a few times.

"I'm sure as a consequence of that, we ended up with poorer health and economic outcomes, unfortunately."

Speaking in a week that has heard testimony from the former PM, David Cameron, former health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and today scientists Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallances, he said the shifting positions also left people confused.

Professor Edmunds highlighted an impression of Mr Johnson by comedian Matt Lucas, who mocked the rules by joking "if you must bake in a tent, then bake in a tent but please don't bake in a tent".

He said the sketch "brilliantly aped" the former PM.

But Professor Edmunds also argued that turning the Covid Inquiry into a blame game would not be helpful. 

"I can understand why you'd want to do that [but] I don’t think it’s the most relevant thing because the people who were in charge are not going to be in charge for the next pandemic.

"So the really important stuff is what lessons can we learn rather than who we point the finger at."

He said a key question to answer was what were the government trying to achieve - to encourage laying down long-term goals and then sticking to a plan to deliver them.

"I mean, you had terrible confusion, people were confused about things like are we supposed to be going to work now or not?"

Professor Edmunds admitted that some politicians would "probably" try to blame scientists but said that was also unhelpful.

He also admitted mistakes were made - arguing that a slightly earlier lockdown the first time round and certainly the second would have saved lives.

He said the government should have planned for a Covid-style virus as well as flu - but said a lockdown still ought to have been considered in flu pandemic planning, and wasn't.

Professor Edmunds also said not enough of government was thinking about the society-wide impacts of a pandemic.

"It didn't feel like the government were doing much... When we went into lockdown in March, it came as a surprise.

"Pandemics affect every area of society and so every area of government."

He asked if businesses were ready to lose all their business or schools to close and suggested they weren't.

It came after the former chancellor, George Osborne, admitted that no planning had been done for a full lockdown.

But he also asked if we would have gone for that policy if China had not done so.

He said with hindsight it was clear we should have considered the implications of a full shut down of the economy, but argued that had we done a "table top" model of a Covid-style pandemic in 2011, we may have claimed a lockdown was not feasible.

Mr Osborne also said the inquiry should scrutinise whether it was right to shut schools, pointing to the balance between the life expectancy of an 80-year-old and educational chances of an eight-year-old.

Both he and Mr Cameron suggested that government experts had failed to warn them about the type of respiratory disease with asymptomatic transmission that Covid turned out to be.

In an emotional moment, the former CMO Dame Sally Davies' voice broke as said she was sorry to families who lost loved ones and for the "horrible" way in which they died.

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