Definite niggle in the air as Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance face room of MPs
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Back in March, Prof Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance were introduced – two ingenues blinking under the lights – to the nation at the Downing Street press conferences as the scientists to see the UK through the coronavirus pandemic. And even though Boris Johnson liked to treat the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser respectively as his two pet stooges, they were still the men on whose advice government policy was by and large made.
But somewhere along the line, things soured. Whitty and Vallance became visibly uncomfortable when Boris chose to go rogue by interpreting the data to suit himself, and the relationship appeared to have completely broken down when the government ignored the advice of Sage to introduce a short “circuit breaker” lockdown and opted instead for a series of tiered regional lockdowns.
