The Chaos inside Government !!!

The shambles of the Government's 'herd Immunity' !!!




Coronavirus: Internal emails reveal ‘herd immunity’ messaging chaos in government
No 10’s chief scientific adviser asked for help to ‘calm our academic friends down’ over controversial idea

Adam Forrest@adamtomforrest
3 hours ago
Newly released emails have revealed the anger and alarm among the UK’s top scientists over the government’s exploration of “herd immunity” when dealing with initial outbreak of coronavirus earlier this year.

Boris Johnson’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance even had to ask for help in trying to “calm down” leading academics after he expressed his apparent support for the controversial idea in public.

The government has insisted herd immunity – the moment a high enough proportion of a population achieves immunity from a disease – was never official government policy or strategy.

Yet emails obtained by the BBC following a Freedom of Information request show Sir Patrick and chief medical officer Chris Whitty had discussed the concept.

In an email to Sir Mark Walport – his predecessor as chief scientific advisor – Sir Patrick suggested his remarks to the media on the subject had been taken out of context, and the message in response to criticisms should be that “herd immunity is not the strategy”.


In a separate email in March, Sir Patrick asked a government colleague: “Anything you can do to calm our academic friends down over herd immunity would be greatly appreciated.”

However, on 13 March, Sir Patrick had talked about herd immunity as an “aim” during an interview with BBC.

“Our aim is to try and reduce the peak … also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission.”

On the same day he spoke on Sky News about his hope the virus could be controlled long enough to “allow enough of us who are going to get mild illness to become immune to this”.

When asked what proportion of the British population would need to get the virus for herd immunity to work, Sir Patrick said “probably around 60 per cent”.

In one internal email from April, Prof Whitty revealed his frustration when discussing a media report which suggested No 10 and their advisors “were absolutely focused on herd immunity”.

The chief medical officer complained he did not think immunity was “a sensible aim of policy” and he had only talked about the concept because he had been answering “questions put to me by ministers”.

In a separate email to the president of the Faculty of Public Health, Prof Whitty insisted: “The government had never pursued a ‘herd immunity strategy’.”


Speaking on Sky News on Wednesday, Professor Devi Sridhar, scientific advisor to Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon, said herd immunity was simply not a useful concept in dealing with a pandemic like the coronavirus.

“I would say the majority of scientists are aligned that maximum suppression of this virus is the optimal strategy,” said the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh.

“There’s a small group of very vocal scientists who are advocating what you could call herd immunity,” Prof Sridhar added.

“But I would just push back and say that we don’t have herd immunity against many infectious diseases that have been a problem for mankind for centuries like plague, cholera, malaria, measles, TB, and I could go on.”


Back at the beginning of March when there was discussion about herd immunity, Vallance was saying 60%-70% of the population would need to get ill and become immune for it to work. Since then of course we’ve learned that to be incorrect as not everyone is equally as likely to contract the virus and the real figure is more likely to be 20%-30%.


Austin-Healey2 hours ago
... At the same time of Vallance making the first of many mistakes, Dr David Halpern, a psychologist who heads the Behavioural Insights Team, spoke of the need to “protect those at-risk groups so that they basically don’t catch the disease and by the time they come out of their [bubble], herd immunity’s been achieved in the rest of the population.” But even with that clear warning neither Vallance nor the government did anything about those “at-risk groups”.