Chris Whitty admits Cheltenham Festival and Champions League match were mistake

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Allowing Cheltenham and Champions League match to go ahead 'was a mistake'

Professor Sir Chris Whitty has admitted that allowing large sporting events to go ahead in March 2020 was a mistake.

In the weeks before lockdown, thousands of spectators enjoyed the races at the Cheltenham Festival and football fans attended a Champions League match between Liverpool and Atlético Madrid at Anfield.

The country's top medic said that choosing not to cancel the mass gatherings meant that the public got the wrong idea about the danger posed by coronavirus.

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Sir Chris said: "The risks of outdoor events, even if quite crowded, is small relative to many of the other things... I think what we really were not paying enough attention to, and it's sort of obvious with hindsight, is the message this was sending to the general public - that the government couldn't be that worried because it was not closing the mass gatherings.

"So I think that the problem was not the gatherings themselves, which I don't think there's good evidence had a major material effect directly. But the impression it gives of normality at a time that what you're trying to signal is anything but normality. So I think, again, were we to rerun, I think that's one of the things we would I would certainly do differently."

(Getty Images)

Whitty says plans for a pandemic were 'woefully deficient'

Professor Sir Chris Whitty said pans for a pandemic were “woefully deficient” and had “clearly” been written by people who had been through the Swine flu pandemic, which had a much lower mortality rate.

From early on, he said it was “pretty clear" any pandemic plans weren't "going to give us any particular help, frankly. My view was we didn’t have a plan from a prevention or management point of view.”

He said they “didn’t meet the needs of a 1918-style flu pandemic”, which, by the end of January 2020, he said he believed “was the kind of model we needed to be thinking about”. The Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 killed tens of millions of people

Sir Chris added that many of the building blocks of plans for the Covid pandemic were "constructed in many cases in quite a rush really in February and early March" of 2022.

Boris Johnson 'focused more when in a smaller group of people'

England's chief medical officer has said Boris Johnson tended to be more focused when in a small group.

Professor Sir Chris Whitty said: "A lot of the way by which senior ministers, including the prime minister, came to their position was done informally in conversation.

"And, for example, one of the times where we had the most conversation with the prime minister in a small group - where he tended to be at his most focused - was in the briefing just before we did press conferences.

"That was not not a formal meeting, that was really just working things out.

"But actually it allowed him to test out ideas, not in public, which I think he valued, and I think helped the decision-making process."

Whitty says Boris Johnson had a 'unique' way of taking decisions

Asked about the way Boris Johnson behaved as PM, Professor Sir Chris Whitty said: "I think that the way that Mr Johnson took decisions was unique to him."

When Hugo Keith QC suggested this was a "euphemism", the top medic said: "He has quite a distinct style, but I think lots of other people have got quite distinct styles."

Sir Chris said he felt his role was not to "make commentaries on individual politicians".

He added that it was a "matter of record" that "many other nations" had issues with their governments making consistent decisions and sticking to them.

Dominic Cummings caused 'quite a row' by attending SAGE meetings

Whitty reveals that Dominic Cummings caused "quite a row" when he insisted on sitting in on SAGE meetings.

But Whitty thought it was "perfectly sensible that one of the most senior advisers to the prime minister... could listen in on SAGE".

It would have been inacceptable for Mr Cummings to try to influence discussions - but this never happened, he said.

(AFP via Getty Images)

SAGE should have "cottoned on to" idea of lockdown at an earlier stage

Whitty says that idea of a full lockdown was not considered in February and was probably "something we should have cottoned on to at an earlier stage".

He said other measures such as quarantine and self isolation had been looked at for previous flu pandemics but not a full shutdown - and it is reasonable to suggest it should have been looked at earlier.

However Whitty makes the point that ministers could have asked SAGE to look at lockdown measures which had been imposed in China at that point.

Scientists were already telling the Government of the need to significantly reduce household interractions in March - but it was a political decision whether they changed the law.

'Wrong' to focus NHS entirely on Covid-19 at the start

Chris Whitty said it would have been "wrong" to narrow the focus of the whole medical profession to Covid-19 in early 2020.

He told the Inquiry that a "great majority" of his work was around the new virus in February 2020.

"We were putting a large amount of time into communicating it, putting resources into it, trying to get the medical profession ready for it," he said.

"At a point where, in my view, we were moving increasingly far away from a probability this could go back to nothing.

"But we weren't yet at a point where we could say that definitively - we were still a long way away from, for example, the WHO declaring a pandemic. And as I say, we did not at this stage, and did not for some time in fact, have internal transmission."

Sir Chris added that it is "important to recognise that it would have been wrong to swing the whole of the medical profession over to this".

"Even at the height of the pandemic more people died of causes not Covid than died of Covid," he said. "Every one of those deaths is tragic on both of those sides."

Top medic rejects claims he warned of overreacting to virus

Chief medical officer for England Professor Sir Chris Whitty was asked about reports he warned the Government about overreacting to the spread of the virus.

When questioned by Hugo Keith KC on his position at the time, Sir Chris said: "My advice was... the advice of Sage and advice of Sage at this point was extremely clear: that without action we were going to be in very deep trouble and they'd said that from the 16th onwards really."

He added: "That was a position of Sage, we'd agreed it and that was clear that the view of Sage was if he wished to avoid loss of life, you are going to have to act."

He told Inquiry counsel Hugo Keith KC: "I’ve rejected and I will continue to reject your characterisation of 'overreacting'."

Whitty predicted he'd be hauled before Inquiry in February 2020

Professor Sir Chris Whitty said he was prepared for consequences over the Government's handling of Covid back in February 2020.

In a speech to the Royal College of Physicians, he predicted he would either be criticised for failing to prepare for "armageddon" or chastised for spending public money on an epidemic that never happened.

See a transcript of his remarks below

First lockdown 'too late' but differences between experts over lockdown timings were 'small'

Professor Sir Chris Whitty played down claims from top expert Sir Jeremy Farrar of tensions between himself and Sir Patrick Vallance over the timing of restrictions.

Sir Chris said he “had a book to sell and that made it more exciting”.

He insisted the differences in position were "extremely small" but said he had a "stronger concern than some" about the impact of restrictions such as lockdown and shielding on poorer people.

Pushing people into deprivation was a public health issue but the economy was not and his job was to inform ministers of the impacts of lockdown restrictions on public health, he said.

But Sir Chris admitted the Government was too slow to act during the first wave of Covid.

"With the benefit of hindsight, we went a bit too late on the first wave and I've been clear about that for some time," he said.

Professor Sir Chris Whitty begins giving evidence

England's Chief Medical Officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty has started giving evidence to the Inquiry.

Over the next few hours he will be grilled by Hugo Keith KC about his role in the Government's handling of the pandemic.

Sir Chris starts out by explaining his role and how he started leading on the Covid response in late January when it became clear it was a major threat.

Top Tory fails to deny Rishi Sunak thought 'let people die'

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Laura Trott did not deny that Rishi Sunak, the-then chancellor, thought it was "okay" to "just let people die" in October 2020, as suggested by Sir Patrick Vallance's diary.

It "will be for him to talk about these individual things" when he appears before the inquiry, she said. Pointing to the furlough scheme, she said Mr Sunak "provided a great amount of leadership" during the pandemic.

She also declined to comment on whether Mr Sunak's Eat Out To Help Out scheme was a good idea.

"That's exactly what we've got the independent inquiry to look at," the Cabinet minister said.

What we learned at yesterday's Covid Inquiry

Chilling evidence to the Covid Inquiry has claimed Rishi Sunak believed ministers should “just let people die and that’s okay” during the pandemic.

Sir Patrick Vallance, who was the Chief Scientific Adviser until this year, shared private diaries with the probe detailing his daily notes about the battle with the virus. The bombshell extracts reveal the callous and chaotic atmosphere in Government as top ministers dithered over imposing restrictions to curb the spread of Covid.

In a day of revelations, Sir Patrick described how Boris Johnson was "bamboozled" by graphs and data and the ex-PM appeared "broken" as he warned "we are too s*** to get our act together. Sir Patrick also said it was "highly likely" that Mr Sunak's Eat Out to Help Out scheme drove up Covid deaths and scientists weren't told about the plan to get people back into restaurants before it was announced in August 2020.

Extracts from his diary also claim ministers were reluctant to impose a second national lockdown, with Mr Johnson arguing for "letting it all rip". He also noted that Dominic Cummings said Mr Sunak said the Government should "just let people die".

Click here for a round-up of the most dramatic things we learned