The ‘Lockdown Files’ – the trove of WhatsApp messages between senior Government figures during the pandemic, handed to the Telegraph by Isabel Oakeshott after they were given to her by Matt Hancock to help her ghost-write his biography – continue to bring out scandalous revelations about how pandemic management by WhatsApp was conducted. Here are some of the top stories from Wednesday.
Matt Hancock mounted a “rearguard action” to close schools despite Sir Gavin Williamson battling “tooth and nail” to keep classrooms open.
Exchanges seen by the Telegraph reveal that the then Health Secretary battled the Education Secretary in late December 2020 and suggested it was “mad” that Sir Gavin was attempting to keep schools open.
Mr. Hancock initially lost a Cabinet argument during which he tried to persuade the Prime Minister to close schools ahead of their return in January 2021.
After Boris Johnson sided with Sir Gavin, Mr. Hancock told an aide: “The next U-turn is born” and added: “I want to find a way, Gavin having won the day, of actually preventing a policy car crash when the kids spread the disease in January. And for that we must now fight a rearguard action.”
Messages show that Mr. Hancock immediately contacted Dan Rosenfield, Mr. Johnson’s Chief of Staff, and began an attempt to have schools closed before children returned. He then provided his private email address.
As the planned reopening became increasingly chaotic over the following week, with U-turns on dates and testing requirements for secondary schools, Mr. Hancock and his team said Sir Gavin was having to eat “humble pie”.
Williamson has written an op-ed for the Telegraph saying that “maybe I should have resigned when my plea to put children first was ignored”, and that “what was most upsetting about shutting schools for a second time in January 2021 was that I felt it wasn’t done for the right reasons”.
Teachers were looking for an “excuse” not to work during the pandemic, the then Education Secretary said.
Sir Gavin Williamson criticised both school staff and unions for their response to coronavirus, saying that the latter “really do just hate work”.
Sir Gavin made the comments in a discussion with Matt Hancock as school staff prepared for the re-opening of classes in May 2020.
By this point, schools had been effectively shut for two months with only vulnerable children and those whose parents were key workers allowed to attend in person. Ministers and teachers were planning for lessons to begin returning in June.
The Government’s most senior scientific advisers told the Prime Minister that the implementation of shielding measures was not “very effective” – but ministers still asked 2.2 million people to follow them for months.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, said in a WhatsApp message in Aug 2020 that shielding implementation –which required people who were clinically “extremely vulnerable” to isolate – had not been “easy or very effective”.
Professor Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, added that he would personally “think twice” about following shielding guidelines himself, unless it was to protect the NHS – which was not their principal aim.
Boris Johnson himself raised the prospect of giving over-65s “a choice” between shielding from the virus or taking what he hoped would be an “ever-diminishing risk” of living a more normal life.
The then Prime Minister compared over-65s’ risk of dying from Covid to that of “falling down stairs”, adding: “And we don’t stop older people from using stairs.”
But, despite reservations, the Government still reintroduced shielding nationally during subsequent national lockdowns. In the worst-affected parts of the country that were placed under local lockdowns and stricter restrictions under the tiers system, many effectively shielded for most of the pandemic.
Care homes refused to test staff for Covid at the height of the pandemic in case they discovered they were positive.
Nearly 100 care homes offered tests said they did not want them, according to WhatsApp messages sent between Helen Whately, the Social Care Minister, and Matt Hancock, the then Health Secretary.
They include 10 care homes in the north of England where, according to the messages, the local director of public health was “worried testing will reveal too many asymptomatic staff”.
Ms. Whately shared the information with Mr Hancock at the start of June 2020, by which point there had already been more than 6,400 outbreaks in care homes, according to official Public Health England data.
The Government knew there was no “robust rationale” for including children in the rule of six but backed the controversial policy regardless.
The rule, which limited the number of people who could gather in one place, was severely criticised by the Children’s Commissioner because the way it was drawn up kept large households in effective lockdown.
Scotland and Wales included an exemption for children under 12, so they did not count toward the overall number of people allowed to gather. However, the U.K. Government refused to implement a similar exemption in England until April 2021, keeping thousands of children apart from their friends and grandparents.
Now messages seen by the Telegraph show that ministers knew there was no good reason to include children in the rule of six, as they were drawing up plans to manage the second wave of the pandemic.
Helen Whately, the Minister for Adult Social Care, told Matt Hancock on October 11th 2020 that she wanted to “loosen on children under 12” in Tier 1, as “it would make such a difference to families and there isn’t a robust rationale for it”.
Mr. Hancock, who was then Health Secretary, did not oppose Ms. Whately’s view but instead informed her that Downing Street “don’t want to go there on this … as in No10. Also on curfew – they don’t want to shift an inch”.
Face masks were introduced in schools for the first time after Boris Johnson was told it was “not worth an argument” with Nicola Sturgeon over the issue.
Mr. Johnson went ahead with the policy despite England’s Chief Medical Officer saying there were “no very strong reasons” to do so. It was one of the most controversial of the pandemic and was not finally ended in England until January 2022 – 16 months later.
Ms. Sturgeon had already announced the compulsory wearing of face masks in corridors and communal areas in Scottish secondary schools when, in August 2020, Mr Johnson asked for advice on whether they were necessary in England.
In WhatsApp messages, Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, appeared ambivalent when asked for his opinion. He said: “No strong reason against in corridors etc., and no very strong reasons for,” adding: “So agree not worth an argument.”
The following day, the Government announced that secondary school children returning to classes in September in areas subject to local lockdown would be required to wear face masks in corridors and communal areas where social distancing was difficult to maintain. The policy was later extended to the classroom.
Children with false positive Covid tests were sent home from school to isolate for 10 days because officials did not want to “unpick” a policy that had already been written.
Matt Hancock, the then-Health Secretary, was warned that “thousands” could miss lessons unnecessarily because of rules the Government put in place around tests when schools returned after the third lockdown in March 2021.
The “incredibly worrying” policy meant that if children tested positive on a lateral flow device at school, they had to isolate and miss lessons for 10 days – even if a more reliable PCR test showed they were negative.
Concerns that children could not afford to miss any more lessons were raised with Mr. Hancock [by a concerned parent who knew him] before schools returned, but the policy was not reversed for almost a month.
Mr. Hancock asked his special advisers to look into it but was told by officials that the policy was “written and distributed and schools prepared, it would be difficult to unpick now”.
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And…nothing will happen. Thats the way of the world now
Wrong. Something will happen.
This is all a giant set up ahead of the WHO pandemic treaty vote.
It paints politicians as clueless, corrupt, bad decision makers who can’t be trusted to follow good scientific advice.
Solution? Give the decision making power to a “qualified” body like, say, the WHO.
It’s a huge set up.
Correct. It’s all part of the decades-long process of building a One World Government.
Every single decision made by the WHO during covid was at best wrong and at worst led to draconian restrictions to public freedom for no benefit.
Yet there’s absolutely no way to bring these people to justice. The Covid pandemic should really result in the WHO being disbanded in its current form.
I will just add a slight correction to your final sentence:
The Covid pandemic should really result in the WHO being disbanded.
It’s one of a number of national and global agencies that do far more harm than good, that we would miss very little or not at all if they didn’t exist – and we’d have the money they cost to spend on things that are actually of benefit to people. Name an agency that, in its current form, does more good than harm.
I can’t disagree with that tof.
There must be hundreds of NGO’s worldwide which actually have severe adverse effects on human happiness, are wasting taxpayers money and simply provide notional employment to people who are at best only notional workers, the real useless eaters we might say.
OFCOM springs to mind.
WHO is mostly privately financed…. Back to those faceless rich patrons buying the implementation of their own nefarious agendas
Not quite so faceless Billy Goats being the main private contributor. 😡😡😡
Sorry to nit-pick Huxley, but surely:-
The Covid pandemic should really result in the WHO being disbanded AND at least 90% of the UK’s Beloved Leaders (including Civil ‘Servants’) being sacked or impeached for their Uniparty incompetence, malice and gross malfeasance in Public Office.
I consider your widening of the net commendable.👍
Absolutely spot on.
https://off-guardian.org/2023/03/01/cattes-corner-lab-leaks-brick-walls/
Here’s a very illuminating take on the whole shyte show and which carries some hope.
That’s all very well but if the global lock step was all part of the grand plan, how do you explain the outlier that was Sweden?
Good point one can only surmise that Sweden had the balls to tell Gates and co. to go and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
We can only thank them for showing us what a sh1te show the rest of the world made of it by their hysterical but planned nonsense.
Interesting. I hadn’t thought of that.
My bigger concern remains my chess game theory. You keep spinning out ‘viruses’ and keep forcing the public to adhere to measures that are disproportionate, including the coerced administration of ‘vaccines’ that do nothing apart from dent public confidence. You do this until public confidence in ‘vaccines’, along with trust in those making decisions, is shattered. You increase the number of sceptics – importantly, the number of people who refuse the offer of an experimental product – from 15-20% to 70-80-90%. The people have finally seen through all their games and most no longer comply. Then you roll out another virus. But this one is very different. This one is highly infectious and truly deadly. The people don’t see it coming. Game over.
Is it possible that us early sceptics are just pawns in their game? A chilling thought, but one I keep coming back to. What’s that I see? Bird Flu? Yeah, right, you’re not fooling me this time!
Frightening in its simplicity.
Amidst all this enthusiasm for these “revelations”, which are actually IMO not going to have much impact (we sceptics knew all this, most people don’t care and covidians and people who hate Tories will have their beliefs confirmed), let’s just remind ourselves of the fundamentals (as I see them).
Covid was/is a mild illness for most, in the region of bad flu. It didn’t justify special measures, other than perhaps raising awareness of the true risks among those most at risk, and preparing hospitals for being busier than usual (but not by sending everyone else home), and looking at available treatments (HCQ, ivermectin etc).
Lockdowns are always wrong. Saving lives at all costs is wrong.
Until we get those basic points into most people’s heads, we’re lost.
You put far too much faith in the sheeple. Some of these idiots were anally swabbed…
Oh no I have very little faith. I don’t think I will see a general awakening in my lifetime.
Every G20 country shut down its schools. Just a closecidence…nothing was coordinated. Just every policy and activity was the same.
When Doris the Fat Pig Dictator and his wine drinking stab-free, diaper-free minions were caught not following the rules, the entire regime of Rona fascism began to crumble. When that happened, other countries began in various ways to follow suit, albeit slowly and at different speeds. They can’t maintain the fiction that Rona understands borders.
Rona was a planned G20 event, every single activity, words, lies, made up data, propaganda, old age murders, synchronised. When some nations were forced out of the synchronisation, the game was over.
Yet still the MSM report this as ‘government didn’t know what it was doing’ rather than ‘the media were complicit in spreading misinformation to the the public and not doing its job in asking questions of government’.
When exactly is the BBC going to apologise to the public for its aggressive suppression of truth?
And not just the MSM, but Parliament itself. No effective opposition to the Government at all, just one or two sane MPs, like Christopher Chope, and that was it.
So when are we going to walk on parliament? When? Seriously? How much longer are we going to be lied to, beaten, ridiculed and humiliated by these people? There are worse outcomes than death.
…..the worse outcome is WW3, which even sensible political analysts I read, are now really talking about as a possibility…….that‘s one way of covering up the crime scene!
Indeed. Look, there’s a rabbit! Unless… you deliberately place as many incompetent people as possible into positions of authority. You knowingly release a virus, knowing you have a readymade ‘solution’ up your sleeve and guide those incompetent people down the required path. But you know the solution will be useless, worse than useless – will actually cause mass harm, including the death of children. You know there will be massive civil unrest, and you know the incompetent people you’ve placed into positions of authority will do anything to cover their tracks. i.e. you knowingly set off a chain of events that will cause complete social and economic collapse. A very competent display of an appearance of incompetence.
What a disaster…I don’t know how far your head has to be in the sand to think that this was just a cock-up, but even if that is the case, how is any of it defensible?
I’ve never believed the cock-up story because that means rational intelligent people acted against common sense, and why would they..? Except for nefarious reasons….….and if they did act in stupidity why give them reasons for their actions?
Are we saying we believe these people really thought there was a devastating pandemic..they didn’t….that they had no idea how the PCR worked or how it could be manipulated….they did…in one of the messages Hancock actually asks George Osborne to ramp up a news story to get people to test more…that’s not a cock-up….….
That they didn’t know how useless track and trace was…they did…that they didn’t know masks were useless and use them in their Covid Theatre? That they pushed MSM stories while suppressing alternatives?
Are we ignoring the SPI-B ‘people aren’t scared enough’….Fauci, ‘you use lock down to vaccinate more people’, and “we didn’t think we could do it, then we saw what they had done in Italy and knew we could’? That people were sacked for not having a jab, when their own data by that time was showing, for months, that the vaccinated were testing positive at a higher rate than the vaccinated?
Are we memory-holing Whitty actually saying kids should have the jab, just because it will make them feel safer at school? Not a lick of actual medical advice from the Chief Medical Officer……. And all the time, like us, they could just have looked at Sweden and other Scandi countries….…….?
are we actually supposed to forgive the MHRA for not doing their job? similarly the JVCI? Jabs for babies, children and pregnant women.?
No investigation, and actual dismissal of vaccine injured people..in our Government?
And the ‘dameing’’ and ‘knighting’ of dozens of these collaborators??
No..I will never forgive them or forget….and no they don’t get to say, it was just a cock-up….It was and still is, much more than that….
Terrific post ebg and with you 100%.
Seconded.
Yup.
“We realised we could get away with it.”
Right there. In a nutshell.
Gove’s absence from these WattsApp messages (so far) is interesting.
He was one of the Quad who decided Covid Regulation Policy: Johnson, Handcock, Sunak …… and Gove. It has been reported many times that Gove was a Lockdown enthusiast, always on the “more restrictions, longer restrictions” side of the argument.
Notable also, that in a highly competitive field, Gove was the MOST revolting fawner on Greta Thunderpants when she was bleating about her childhood having been stolen.
Do you know I am sickened by all this back pedalling and back side covering, Hancock is clearly being made the Scape goat, he deserves everything he gets, but all of these people, every single one of them who are now saying, oh I disagreed, Oh I should have resigned, they all let it happen, they didn’t resign, they supported and promoted the cruelty, they are as guilty of genocide as Hancock and should be equally held to account in a criminal court. They all kept taking the money, protecting their careers, they are disgusting they of course will not suffer, they will continue to collect our money to pay their handsome wages and lifestyles. The next thing to break will be the Vaccines and the knowledge that the products were dangerous, you watch they will all say, we were following what the advisors told us, we didn’t know.
Is there no retribution for these creatures?
Well said.
What is currently happening is TPTB are muddying the waters, Hancock front and centre as the sacrificial goat he willingly is?
Remember and ask:-
This has nothing to do with Hancock doing things on a whim. He may of eyed a few quid, but this was and is a world-wide conspiracy.
Eyes on the ball, not the squirrel!
HMMLO – ???
SOP – ???
Otherwise an excellent post.
HMMLO – Her (His) Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. Official name of UKs Opposition to the Govt. i.e. Starmer et al.
SOP – Already stated in the post – Safe Operating Procedure (any Industry standard, especially in things like Emergency Action Plan for large organisations)
Thank you.
No testing is required of a military bioweapon – DARPA own & developed the pathogen, Pfizer, Biontech & Moderna are merely the hired cover.
All of the measures implemented around the globe are under military control as decades of legislative changes have handed this control over to the military of each jurisdiction.
Health is nowhere near this bioweapon product.
IMO they’re going to have to invent a ‘new Conservatives’ party after this.
Oh, and a ‘Newer Labour’, as they were even more insistent on keeping up the draconian measures — and even if they claim ‘we didn’t know’, they certainly weren’t acting as an opposition party during the Covid times.
There’s also the international element to this — just what exactly are other countries going to say about the UK government keeping the public in the dark about emerging science and even making policy to ‘stop policy problems’ (ie, remaining in charge was more important than actually following the science).
Or, ‘The $cience.’
“just what exactly are other countries going to say about the UK government keeping the public in the dark about emerging science and even making policy to ‘stop policy problems’ “
F#ck All is my guess. 😀😀
Short rope, long drop. For. Every. Single. One.
A defence of Mr Toby Young.
I find it inconceivable that Toby still believes in the cock-up theory and it is safe to say we have won that argument and convincingly. So, why is Toby clinging on?
The only explanation would appear to be to protect DS. By continuing with his implausible position Toby is setting out the Editorial position of DS and if some regulatory body comes knocking he can always point to his Editorial stance. As DS is a free speech platform Toby can hardly be held responsible for the rantings of his conspiracy minded commentors. 😀
That’s put that to bed.
You’re probably right. I’m happy with this site, good articles, no apparent censorship, good debate. If we think an article is talking rubbish, we can say so, and why. The world is a much better place for it!
Without question.
Would the official Covid inquiry have had access to these messages? They seem to be part of government decision making, etc — really they should have visibility of all such messages already — not just from Hancock, but all government ministers (and civil servants, etc).
Isabel Oakeshott does come across as a real journalist as she responds to this attack from a fake journalist: –
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-64822872
She did speak out against injecting children, so I wonder where these leaks might end. They might not be a smokescreen after all.
https://twitter.com/isabeloakeshott/status/1430792705437835265
Hancock is a scape goat now. He is being deliberately sacrificed to hang as much of the disasterous policies of lockdown on to his crass ineptitude and aggressive politicking.
This way, once again, we get distracted from the abomination of the poison jabs policies and outcomes.
We get distracted, like Toby Young, into believing it was low IQ politicians that were to blame for these policies rather than the takeover of public health systems throughout the Western world and beyond via the WHO and other international treaties/agreements.
Just like all our cities and local authorities adopting 15 minute neighbourhoods, low traffic zones, reduced lanes, car emission standards to eliminate older cars, electric charge points on smart poles with sensors, 5G tower installations….it’s not bungling politicians, it’s from Globalist bureaucracies deriving agreements and standards flowing from bodies like the UN and the WEF.
The low IQ politicians are the ones who made such a sorry mess out of implementing the policies the WHO et al considered sensible and they’re also responsible for implementing them at all. The WHO has no political power, all it can do is give advice. People like Anders Tegnell in Sweden or Ron DeSantis in Florida had the courage to risk straying from the beaten track of the WHO (and were and probably still are endlessly vilified by left-leaning news outlets for that). Boris & gang didn’t, not the least because they didn’t care so much. After all, they weren’t regulating their own lives away, only those of others and – also a very attractive proposition – they knew they could use the money of said others to pay for it all, regardless of the eventual outcome.
These people don’t deserve a public execution. They deserve to be turned into a national clown show which must keep touring the UK and explaining pandemic policies until their deaths. In front of Bring your own eggs and tomatoes audiences.
Actually I think the WEF, WHO and various globalists must be getting worried, that Hancock is even more foolish than they thought and that his texts reveal the path back to their door.
We sort-of knew this already. But it’s still a bit depressing to have it spelled out in all its everyday banality — Yo, minister, this be The Right Thing to do, we know this ourselves. But the orders for The Wrong Thing were already written and distributed and changing them now would be such a hassle [for us]. It’s only other people’s children, after all. F**k them!
Government by unaccountable majority at its finest.
Wancock’s total lack of emotional intelligence on display yet again. Was it this quality that made him an ideal Health Minister? He was so concerned to burnish his own image with his book that he didn’t think it would be a problem by using an anti lockdown journalist as his ghost writer 🤣🤣
Obvious question: Why isn’t Matt Hancock in prison?
In the 1st lockdown our 90+ year old neighbour had been told to shelter. After a fortnight I saw her out in her garden when she told me “I’ve had enough of this, I’m on borrowed time” and promptly walked the 15 minutes to Lidls. Atta girl!
“they had to isolate and miss lessons for 10 days – even if a more reliable PCR test showed they were negative.”
“reliable PCR test” is that not an oxymoron?
As I keep on saying time and time and time again, this is a procedure that its inventor Kary
Mullis specifically said should NOT be used as a diagnostic tool. And especially at the CT levels it was being used. They jumped on this to use it for their own ends to frighten people and thus keep them under control.
Bliar always refers to the PCR test as “the gold standard.” That’s all we need to know.