Professor Sir Chris Whitty was responsible for government guidance that was believed to have triggered the spread of Covid into care homes, the Telegraph has revealed. Here’s an excerpt.
The Chief Medical Officer has told the Covid Inquiry that he was “not closely involved” in decisions behind a scheme to discharge thousands of hospital patients into care homes at the start of the pandemic.
However, government emails obtained by the Telegraph show that Sir Chris’s office signed off guidance for care homes in England, advising them that they could take patients from hospital who had not even been tested.
Emails also reveal that Helen Whately, the former social care minister, warned colleagues that sending people with Covid into care homes “surely materially increases” the risks to residents.
However, she signed the guidance off anyway after officials said that one of Sir Chris’s two deputies was “content with the advice”.
The care homes guidance, published on April 2nd 2020, is considered one of the worst mistakes of the pandemic, and has been branded “irrational” by the High Court.
Sir Chris and Ms Whately will face scrutiny over their part in the guidance during the Covid Inquiry, which opens its examination of care homes on Monday.
The guidance said care homes could accept hospital patients with Covid, as well as take in hospital patients who had not been tested and look after them “as normal” if they did not show symptoms of the virus.
The advice meant that large numbers of untested hospital patients carried Covid directly into some of the most vulnerable communities in England, likely leading to deaths.
According to official figures, nearly 18,500 care home residents in England died between March 14th and June 12th 2020, accounting for around 40% of deaths involving Covid during this period.
Sir Chris appears to have realised the gravity of the mistake less than two weeks after the guidance was published, according to government WhatsApp messages leaked to this newspaper and published as part of the Lockdown Files.
According to the messages, Sir Chris told Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, that there should be testing for “all going into care homes, and segregation whilst awaiting [the] result”.
He offered the advice as Whitehall officials were preparing an update to the care homes guidance, reversing some of the early errors.
Mr Hancock rejected Sir Chris’s advice. He ensured the revised guidance included a commitment to “test and isolate all new residents coming from hospital”, but he rejected a further suggestion to test those coming from the community, saying that “it muddies the waters”.
Mr Hancock has denied that this was a rejection, claiming instead that Sir Chris’s advice could not be “operationalised” owing to a lack of testing capacity.
Now a cache of emails between government officials reveal that, weeks earlier, Sir Chris’s office had allowed the dangerous guidance to be published.
They were obtained by the Telegraph during a years-long battle under freedom of information laws. However, the Government is holding back dozens more – with no guarantee that the Covid Inquiry will make them public.
The revelations have sparked outrage among relatives of residents who died.
Worth reading in full.
Of course, this doesn’t address the question of how many vulnerable care home residents died avoidably as a result of grossly substandard care under the extreme pandemic conditions imposed on care homes and hospitals in this period. Seeding the virus into care homes was appalling, but it wasn’t the only thing killing our elderly during this shameful time.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.