Senior government adviser 'astonished' at Ministers' failure to act swiftly

A senior advisor to the Scottish Government has said he was ‘astonished’ at Ministers’ failure to act swiftly on clear warnings that the Covid virus was ‘vastly more dangerous’ to the elderly and the vulnerable.

Professor Mark Woolhouse, who was a member of the Scottish Covid-19 Advisory Group (C19AG) from March 2020, gave evidence to Baroness Hallett’s inquiry that ‘the single most important intervention was always to protect those most vulnerable to severe disease’.

Despite this, he said, he and his C19AG colleagues struggled to get Ministers to listen and act on this crucial point despite delivering ‘at least half a dozen direct briefings to the First Minister’ on aspects of the pandemic.

The professor, a leading expert on tracking infectious diseases, said: ‘I was astonished throughout those early stages, March through April 2020, how difficult it was to get people to accept that this virus was vastly more dangerous to the elderly, the infirm and the frail than it was to young, healthy members of the population. 

It was a significant risk to a largeish but defined subset of the population and policy simply didn’t reflect that simple fact, which we had known since February.

‘And I still don’t know, and the inquiry report doesn’t shed any light on this for me, why that crucial aspect of the biology of this virus didn’t get traction among policymakers for so, so long. In fact, I’m not sure it really did. We may all have been at risk in a technical sense, but there’s no way we were all at equal risk. Far from it, and yet that simple fact just did not get traction among policymakers.’

Prof Woolhouse, who is professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, also said he had been very concerned that little or no work appeared to have been done on setting up appropriate surveillance systems to cope with the threat of a major viral threat, even though that had been a central recommendation of the official report into the H1/N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009. 

The professor said: ‘After swine flu, the Royal Society of Edinburgh wrote a report saying what needed to be done and it wasn’t done. And then Covid came along roughly ten years later and, obviously the people [in charge] have changed and the lessons haven’t been learned.