Covid-19 inquiry: Flu-based pandemic prep meant herd immunity was seen as ‘inevitable’, says Hunt
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has said the focus on any future pandemic being flu-based meant there was a “shared assumption herd immunity was inevitably” going to be the strategy used to contain a new virus.
He admitted being part of “groupthink” when he was health secretary, leading to a “narrowness of thinking” that failed to expand UK pandemic preparedness beyond planning for a flu outbreak, to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.
Hunt also revealed that he was not briefed about UK government modelling of a non-flu based epidemic despite it being carried out while he was the cabinet minister responsible for health.
He said it was a “wholly mistaken assumption” for past administrations not to prepare for “other types of pandemic that might emerge”.
The Treasury chief was giving evidence to the first stage of the inquiry, which is looking into UK preparedness for the coronavirus pandemic, a virus that caused the country to be placed under restrictions several times from March 2020.
The senior Conservative politician, who was health secretary between 2012 and 2018, said exercises to prepare for a future pandemic were full of “groupthink”, which he wished he had “challenged at the time”.
He said studies by the likes of Johns Hopkins University in the US had viewed the UK as being “very good at dealing with pandemics” but said that assumption proved to be “completely wrong”.
“We hadn’t given nearly enough thought to other types of pandemic that might emerge and that was, with the benefit of hindsight, a wholly mistaken assumption,” Hunt told the inquiry’s lead counsel Hugo Keith KC.
He suggested the government had “too narrow a focus” during Exercise Cygnus, a cross-government exercise in 2016 to test the UK’s response to a serious influenza pandemic.
The findings of Exercise Alice, modelling which also took place that same year to assess the impact of the Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), were not shared with him, he also revealed.
Hunt said the Alice report was the “only place” where the “importance of quarantining” was clearly laid out.
Hunt added: “The fundamental issue was that we were — and by the way not just us, across western Europe and North America — there was a shared assumption that herd immunity was inevitably going to be the only way you could contain a virus because it spread like wildfire.”
UK “groupthink” had also led ministers and officials to think “we knew this stuff best”, he said, adding that there was a “narrowness of thinking” when it came to learning from Taiwan and South Korea, which had dealt with Mers.
“They learned those lessons and there was clearly a narrowness of thinking, of which I was part, which didn’t think hard enough about that kind of potential pandemic,” Hunt added.
Hunt’s evidence comes after deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden told the inquiry he was reassured during his time in the Cabinet Office, from July 2019 to February 2020, that the UK was in a “pretty strong state of preparedness” for any future pandemic.
Dowden also told the investigation that preparations for a no-deal Brexit put the country in a “strong position” to respond to other challenges.
Press Association – By Patrick Daly, Sophie Wingate and Cameron Henderson