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.
So we have a man-made respiratory virus that they know almost exclusively endangers people with an average age of around 82, and the chief *science officer* of the UK releases thousands of infected patients into care homes full of these very same people?
And shortly after that, antibiotic and antiviral prescription orders for these care homes fall through the floor at exactly the same time as orders for Midazolam rise?
Wow, so many “mistakes”.
There was no virus. There was no spread.
These fascists murdered about 30 K old people and called it ‘Rona’. No one on my street was ill or died. Just old people behind locked doors.
And yet there’ll be no come-back on these morally reprehensible scumbags. If we had acted to effectively kill untold numbers, we would be in the slammer so fast.
Our ‘sainted’ and much ‘clapped’ NHS was responsible for the vast majority of Covid deaths and cases. The much vaunted ‘world beating’ Track & Trace was of course nothing of the sort and was just a huge waste of taxpayers cash. Some areas did try a proper system of visiting people and questioning them face to face. To their surprise – not mine – they found most cases led back to the NHS. The Nightingale Hospitals were a waste of money from the start as NHS directors did not know how to use them – they should have been for Covid cases to keep them from weakened sick people in hospitals. Nosocomial deaths ran riot. And of course deaths and serious injury from their vax is ongoing.
Clearly the man deserves much respect and recognition (sarcasm).
Whitty was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to public health.
Does anyone know what punishment a Knight of the Realm would deserve for manslaughter? No real reason to ask, just curious.
Much as I despise both Whitty and Hancock, I do have a small amount of sympathy in this instance.
Was there capacity to keep the elderly in hospital after they had recovered?
Were they safer in a care home than being kept in hospital?
Given that this was after winter (and 2020 had glorious weather), was the risk of transmission that high really?
Hancock’s objection that there wasn’t capacity to test could be reasonable if true (but sounds implausible).
April 2020 was also just the beginning of this episode, the panic and general grimness was worse later in the year. As we know from the various lockdown parties thrown by the government, they didn’t really take it seriously for themselves and that’s also bound to affect decision making.
I cannot comment on every hospital vis a vis capacity, but I was rushed to my local hospital in the summer of 2020, suffering from a near fatal asthma attack. I was in ITU for a couple of days, then moved to a respiratory floor. When I left ICU there was nobody left in it. It was completely empty. The respiratory floor probably had room for 50 – 60 patients, but there was myself and another chap. Full complement of doctors and nurses though, and even 6 physiotherapists. We both departed the same day, leaving the place with no patients whatsoever.
Totally normal winter flu.
No special action required.
The hospitals were empty for months after they were emptied.
Midazolam.
Isolation and loneliness.
Dangerous jabs.
The whole thing was a crime, from lockdowns onward.
It was an extraordinary year, but I seem to remember that the presentations to us were chaired by someone called Boris something or other, by a well known channel. It looked more like a continuation of a GE at the start of it, albeit without the need to declare one’s interests, what you’re trying to sell etc.
Ah, Chris Whitty the human sized Haemorrhoid, a shifty looking chap. I strongly recommend that for the protection of society at large he is put in a rubber dinghy and set adrift in the Sargasso Sea with only a KFC big bucket and a family sized bottle of Tango to remind him of his crimes, dashed hot today….
The pandemic was an illusion created by disease miscategorisation via the fraudulent use of PCR tests which do not, never had and never will, have the ability to diagnose any illness!
It’s smoke, mirrors and turtles all the way down. The truth will eventually surface, hopefully before they announce the next fake pandemic.
Here we go again, the myth continues to grow, that the Covid catastrophe was the work of a dim minister and a dotty doctor. No it wasn’t. It was WHO transmitting informally diktats to their assets in our “democratic” government. Now that our politicians have signed our surrender paper to WHO, there will be no need for any such farcical “inquiries” during the next scamdemic, “nothing to do with us, we were obeying WHO’s guidelines.”
They killed my poor mother alone and unhappy, and I will never forget and never forgive.
NG163, killed far more than the “virus” and the spike protein.
Those who signed off on these measures and the withholding of antibiotics for pneumonia should have their hides flayed and be attached to lampposts with piano wire.
Every single one.
But remember the lord’s prayer, “Trust the science, we follow the science, in the science we trust” repeat 3 times.
Let Professor Pants Down (Neil Ferguson) also be recognised for his contribution to the mayhem. And his funding provider too cone to that.
I suspect as many elderly died from isolation, loneliness, despair and blatant neglect as those who actually died from the virus.
And then there was the morphine/midazolam euthanasia ….. did Whitty authorise that as well or was that Handcock’s own special policy?
Sir Chris’s office signed off guidance for care homes in England
so his counterparts in the devolved nations are equally guilty?
Did he sign off through political and team pressure. There were so many about turns on how to deal with epidemics contrary to the long rehearsed action plans.
“I was only following orders ” defence m’lud
Residents returning from NHS wards began arriving back in care homes in England when the death-rate there had already peaked. It was midazolam and ‘DNR’ that caused the death surge in Spring-20, and the jabbing that caused the second surge 9 months later.
It is now known that the PCR tests were intentionally calibrated to provide positive results which would increase public fear of a “deadly virus” spreading throughout the country when the opposite was true. Many of the elderly moved to care homes would not have had covid at all – they were then subjected to the NG163 death protocols.
They should also be investigating the massive rise in Midazolam prescriptions issued in care homes during that period.
Everyone with. Brain is aware the Uk had poor advice from its government’s “experts”. As it turns out, VERY POIR ADVICE.
I was hoping never to see that face again