England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty told the government that Covid-19 wasn’t a serious enough infection to fast-track the roll-out of vaccines.
Whitty gave his opinion in February 2020 after Boris Johnson’t chief adviser Dominic Cummings mentioned that Israel was planning to inoculate its own population. According to The Telegraph:
The Chief Medical Officer said a Covid vaccine could not be fast-tracked because the virus had a “low mortality rate” in the early days of the pandemic, messages reveal
Prof Sir Chris Whitty told Matt Hancock and others that diseases with a mortality rate in the range of one per cent would need a “very safe” vaccine and that the necessary clinical trials would be a “rate limiting step”.
He was responding to a WhatsApp message from Dominic Cummings, the then chief adviser to Boris Johnson, in February 2020 about a report saying Israeli scientists were weeks away from developing a vaccine.
How quickly vaccine trials could be completed was one of the most important arguments happening in Government during the first months of the pandemic.
Mr Cummings would later claim the Government could “definitely” have started vaccinating the population in September 2020 – three months before the first jabs were given – if it had adopted a bolder approach to vaccine trials.
To date, 144 million Covid jabs have been administered in England, and a spring booster jab is to be offered to people aged 75 and over, those in care homes and vulnerable people following advice from the joint committee on vaccination and immunisation.
Vaccines will be offered to eligible people around six months after their previous dose, with the booster campaign in England running from April 17 to June 30.
Dr Mary Ramsay, the head of immunisation at the UK Health Security Agency, said Covid was “still circulating widely” and there had been a recent increase in older people being hospitalised.
WhatsApp messages seen by The Telegraph include messages sent within a group of ministers, experts and officials in the early weeks of the pandemic.
The highest mortality rate for Covid in England was recorded in April 2020, when 626 people per 100,000 were dying of Covid – 0.6 per cent.
After subsiding over the summer of that year, it spiked again at 0.55 per cent in January 2021 before declining steadily to 0.04 per cent in January this year.
In May 2021 Mr Cummings told a Covid super-committee of MPs he believed it was “unarguable” that the vaccine trials process should have happened more quickly.
He told the MPs: “Normally, for any kind of vaccine, obviously you have a whole testing process, which takes quite a lot of time to go through, because if you have a disease that is killing, say, one per cent to two per cent of the population, then you have to make sure that you don’t have a vaccine that kills more than that.
“However, for something like this, from the point of view of how human civilisation overall could have done better, I think it is unarguable what should have happened.”
He claimed it had taken “literally hours” for a vaccine to be invented in January 2020 and that the Government should have recruited 5,000-10,000 people to take part in immediate “human challenge” trials, in which volunteers are given the vaccine and then deliberately infected with Covid to see how effective the inoculation is.
He suggested that “everyone takes their chances” if they take part in the trial and “if you die your family will get one million quid or whatever”.
He added: “That obviously would have been the best thing to do. If we had done that, we could have hugely cut the time for doing this. We could definitely have got vaccines into people’s arms by September.”
Between the start of September 2020 and Dec 8, 2020, when the first Covid vaccination in the UK was given, more than 23,000 people died with coronavirus mentioned on their death certificate.
