The U.K.'s pandemic missteps: insights from the ongoing inquiry

Since June 2022, the U.K. has been carrying on an inquiry, still ongoing two years later, into the response to and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, hoping to learn lessons that could be useful in the future.

Here are a few of its revelations.

Matt Hancock, health secretary to Boris Johnson, prime minister at the height of the pandemic, blasted his own pandemic response as “completely wrong,” testifying that planning was focused on “the provision of body bags and how to bury the dead, rather than stopping the virus taking hold.”

The inquiry heard from Sir Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific advisor at the time, that Johnson was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life” and that he believed ” COVID is just nature’s way of dealing with old people” and “We should let the old people get it and protect others.”

Lord Lister, an ex-adviser to Boris Johnson, said in a witness statement that Johnson had “wanted to be injected with COVID-19 on television to demonstrate to the public that it did not pose a threat.” But Johnson didn’t need to deliberately expose himself, catching such severe COVID-19 the natural way that he barely survived.

In March 2020, Dame Jenny Harries, then England’s deputy chief medical officer, now promoted to run the U.K. Health Security Agency, wrote in an email that COVID-infected hospital patients should be discharged to nursing homes to protect the NHS from collapse. The backlash from families of COVID-19 patients who died in English nursing homes has been ferocious, including lawsuits against hospitals, nursing homes, and the government itself.

One of Johnson’s top advisors, Dominic Cummings, said that a text in which Cummings used strong expletives to describe government ministers “understated the position as events showed in 2020.” Cummings also told the inquiry there was no plan for shielding the most vulnerable, and the Cabinet Office even tried to block such a plan from being implemented.

Pandemic-related WhatsApp messages to and from Nicola Sturgeon, the former Scottish first minister, and the inquiry’s Scottish counsel, were deleted en masse, in what the lawyer representing COVID-bereaved families in Scotland called “a cynical and pre-meditated decision.”

Shortly before the pandemic hit the U.K., Boris Johnson was said to be “laughing at the Italians” and joking that the U.K. was “going to be great (at COVID-19).” Johnson’s own testimony to the inquiry, interrupted frequently by protesters, was somewhat contrite.

Current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was the U.K.’s chief finance minister during the pandemic, introduced an “Eat Out To Help Out“ scheme in August 2020 that gave restaurant diners up to 50 percent of their bill off – a plan whose pushback included being dubbed “eat out to help out the virus.“

One whistleblower, Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen MacNamara, testified that there had been absolutely no plan for handling a pandemic and that she had graphically warned the prime minister and his senior advisors, “I think we’re going to kill thousands of people.“ As of February 24, 2024, COVID-19 deaths in England officially totaled 232,112, neck-and-neck per capita, with the U.S. higher than Italy and much higher than other major European countries.