UK ‘could have avoided harsh lockdowns’: Short circuit-breakers ‘work better’ than prolonged restrictions, top scientist claims

• Dame Angela McLean succeeded Sir Patrick as chief scientific adviser this year
• She also said a circuit breaker should have been imposed in September 2020
• READ MORE: Whitty and JVT reveal they did not sign off on Eat Out to Help Out 

The UK could have been spared from ‘long, harsh’ Covid lockdowns if officials had imposed short circuit-breakers, the Government’s top scientist claimed today.

Dame Angela McLean, who this year succeeded Sir Patrick Vallance as No10’s chief scientific adviser, said the measure would not have been as ‘damaging’.

Circuit-breakers — a tight set of restrictions imposed for a fixed period of time — would also have avoided creating a ‘panicky situation’, she told the Covid inquiry.

Her comments mirror claims made by other influential scientists, who have  criticised the Government for being too slow to implement measures to help slow the spread of infection in autumn 2020.

Dame Angela also told the inquiry that officials held ‘midway reviews’ in April 2020 — ‘as if we were halfway through the pandemic’, which ‘certainly’ wasn’t the case.

Dame Angela McLean, who this year succeeded Sir Patrick Vallance as No10’s chief scientific adviser, said the measure would not have been as ‘damaging’. Circuit-breakers — a tight set of restrictions imposed for a fixed period of time — would also have avoided creating a ‘panicky situation’, she told the Covid inquiry 

Her comments mirror claims made by other influential scientists, who have criticised the Government for being too slow to implement measures to help slow the spread of infection in autumn 2020. Instead, after cases soared officials were forced to plunge England into a month-long lockdown in November 2020. Circuit breaker restrictions were imposed in October in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland

Dame Angela, who was chief scientist at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), told the inquiry that discussions in September 2020 centred on the expectation that cases would rise due to seasonal factors.

Keeping infections flat would avoid creating a ‘panicky situation when it is all running away from us’, she said.

Responding to questions by Joanne Cecil, counsel to the inquiry, she added ‘this [a circuit-breaker] is when we needed to do it’.  

‘Interventions that keep a epidemic flat are not as bad, not as damaging as the ones that you have to impose if you have got to get cases down really fast.’

She later added: ‘There were plenty of good reasons why intermittent short lockdowns could well have worked better than the long, harsh lockdowns that we had to live with because we put them off to the last possible moment.’

READ MORE: Covid Inquiry: Chris Whitty and Jonathan Van Tam reject claims from Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson that scientists signed off on Eat Out to Help Out

Dame Angela, who sat on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) during the pandemic, said a failure of officials to impose a circuit-breaker in September 2020 was a ‘mistake’ and left her ‘very worried’. 

Instead, after cases soared, officials were forced to plunge England into a month-long lockdown in November 2020. Circuit breaker restrictions were imposed in October in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 

She said: ‘If we had acted decisively then we would have learned from March, but we didn’t.’

She added: ‘That was the time to act. We kept saying so. We kept thinking why weren’t we explaining clearly enough what we needed to do.’

The advice was initially given to Government in a meeting on September 20, she said. But then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson did not ‘say anything’ in response.

At a meeting the following day, scientists again recommended a package of interventions to help slow down the spread of the virus, with a further Sage meeting on September 24 once more recommending a two-week circuit-breaker.

Last month, the inquiry was shown WhatsApp exchanges between epidemiologist Professor John Edmunds and Dame Angela, sent during the September 20, 2020 meeting, branding then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak ‘Dr Death’ and labelling another scientist a ‘f***wit’. 

Email exchanges between Sir Patrick and Dame Angela, shown to the inquiry today, reveal the meeting, which was also attended by Mr Sunak, Mr Johnson and Sir Patrick, was held so Mr Johnson could hear ‘all sides’ from a ‘balanced group’. 

This included Oxford University professors Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan, from the ‘let it rip variety’, Sir Patrick wrote at the time, understood to mean those against imposing lockdowns. 

Professor Edmunds, told the inquiry in October that Dame Angela’s comment ‘Dr Death the Chancellor’ ‘could well be’ about the Eat Out To Help Out scheme, which provided a 50 per cent discount on food and non-alcoholic drinks to customers who ate inside at participating restaurants. 

Dame Angela also referred to a ‘f***wit’ in her messages, which Professor Edmunds inferred was in reference to Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford. 

Email exchanges between Sir Patrick and Dame Angela, shown to the inquiry today, reveal the meeting, which was also attended by Mr Sunak, Mr Johnson and Sir Patrick, was held so Mr Johnson could hear ‘all sides’ from a ‘balanced group’. This included Oxford University professors Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan, from the ‘let it rip variety’, Sir Patrick wrote at the time, understood to mean those against imposing lockdowns

The inquiry was shown WhatsApp exchanges last month between Professor Edmunds and Dame Angela during the September 20 meeting, in which she referred to ‘Dr Death the Chancellor’

In further revelations today, she also admitted that the government held ‘mid-way reviews’ in April 2020, under the belief the nation was halfway through the pandemic.

She said: ‘We certainly weren’t near midway’. 

In her witness statement, read out to the inquiry, she wrote: ‘I do not know what people in Government understand the characteristics of Covid-19 to be, but we were worried that for whatever reasons, decision-makers had not taken on board quite how serious it was.

‘I remember one early meeting in the MoD where I said that this would take at least 18 months, which was met with disbelief.

‘There were “mid-way” reviews in April 2020 as if we were halfway through the pandemic.’

Read more: Jonathan Van-Tam urged to flee home by police after his family received death threats during the pandemic, Covid Inquiry told

Addressing the probe, she said the Treasury also failed to spot ‘egregious errors’ in data during the pandemic.

She described how academics created a simple ‘toy model’ for use in training policymakers ‘about how infectious disease systems work’.

But the Treasury tweaked the model, she claimed.  

In an email exchange, shown today, Dame Angela wrote: ‘Given their inability to spot egregious errors in other things they were sent, I do not have any confidence in their ability to hack a simple, sensible, model.’

There were also times she had to ‘paper over the cracks’ when difficulties arose between academics and civil servants, she told the probe. 

When asked if the differences in approach caused any difficulties during the pandemic, she said: ‘There were several occasions when I had to paper over the cracks, I would say.

‘It was mostly that an academic on SPI-M-O [Scientific Pandemic Infections group on Modelling] had told a civil servant why they were wrong in some way that the civil servant felt was rude.’

But she added that it was her job and she was ‘very happy to do it’.

She said: ‘I was in contact with people saying ‘I’m sorry, that was upsetting for you. They didn’t mean to be rude to you personally. What they were talking about was your work.’

The country’s first lockdown in March 2020 was also brought in too late, she argued. 

Asked whether the lockdown announcement was timely, she said: ‘You’ve already heard from colleagues that it was too late.

‘So if we’re doing a “with benefit of hindsight exercise” here, I would say it should have been two weeks earlier, that that would have made a really huge difference.

‘Now we didn’t have the data, two weeks earlier.

‘By the 16th we had enough data, in my opinion, we should have gone into lockdown on that Monday the 16th.

‘On the 16th — given what we knew about how fast this epidemic was spreading, given what we knew and could surmise about the fact that probably everybody was susceptible to catch it — I think there was enough information on that date to say we need to stop all non-essential contact.’

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