The government is hoping to use the success of the vaccination roll-out against Covid to rewrite the history of the pandemic and exonerate itself from all blame. Labour’s strategy of forgetting the past and looking to the future may well let them get away with it. So let us keep the memory alive. And in doing so let us never forget those who died because of this government’s failure.
Today on the Andrew Marr Show Priti Patel categorically denied that the government had ever pursued a policy to allow Covid to spread through the community in order to create herd immunity. Her denial was repeated on every BBC news bulletin I listened to. I did not hear it challenged.
The BBC News website quotes the UK Health Security Agency chief as saying that allowing people to become infected “has never been on the agenda”. Dr Jenny Harries said she had “never been in a government meeting where herd immunity was put forward as a mechanism of control” for the pandemic.
In March 2020 Dr Harries was not chief of anything and she qualified her statement by saying, “But bear in mind I would not have been in most of the high-level [meetings] as deputy chief medical officer.”
At the very end of the article the BBC mention that, On 13 March 2020, Sir Patrick Vallance told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the government’s aim was to “try and reduce the peak – not suppress it completely, also because most people get a mild illness, to build up some degree of herd immunity whilst protecting the most vulnerable.”
And they give Sir Patrick the last word to insist that herd immunity was “not the plan” and the Department of Health said his comments had been misinterpreted adding: “Herd immunity is not part of our action plan but is a natural by-product of an epidemic.”
Clearly the government are keen to bury the idea of herd immunity as a malign fantasy of Dominic Cummings, whose credibility has dived since his trip to Durham. But he was very much in favour at the time. As Johnson’s senior advisor Cummings attended SAGE meetings and it may be that without him pushing the prime minister to act the government’s response to the pandemic would have been even more of a disaster than it was.
Others were in no doubt about the government’s strategy. It may not have received much scrutiny from the Tory fan club in the British media but the Irish were paying very close attention. They saw the UK as an outlier pursuing a strategy in contradiction to the policy in Ireland and the rest of the EU and were acutely aware that UK policy would impact directly upon them as the virus was no respecter of borders.
The Italian government, whose country was in the forefront of the crisis at that time were in no doubt about the UK’s policy of herd immunity. As Will Thorpe reminded us on Twitter today:
https://twitter.com/withorpe/status/1396463143904219140?s=21
And Richard Horton, Editor in Chief of the Lancet, was clear in his book, The Covid-19 Catastrophe that, “In the UK, for example, ministers have claimed they did not pursue a policy of herd immunity early in the pandemic. The statements from ministers and science advisors clearly prove the opposite.”
That will not prevent the government from trying to edit the narrative and embed its defence of its actions in the public consciousness ahead of next year’s public inquiry. Horton is equally clear that, “it is a defence that can and must be refuted.”
But the last word must belong to Michael Rosen.
Dear Priti Patel
— Michael Rosen ???? (@MichaelRosenYes) May 23, 2021
I see that you say that your government did not pursue a 'herd immunity' policy. What policy did it pursue in Jan, Feb and the beginning of March 2020? As I remember it, there was no policy, which is..er…a herd immunity policy.
Yours
Michael Rosen.