Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will deliver his autumn statement at around 12.30pm, after prime minister’s questions
Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England and chief medical adviser for the UK, is still giving evidence to the Covid inquiry this morning. I’m mostly focused on the autumn statement, but my colleague Peter Walker is following the Whitty evidence, and he has posted these on X.
We’re back with Chris Whitty at the Covid inquiry, and still in mid-March 2020. Even then with 500+ UK cases, Whitty says, many in No 10 still did not realise how fast things would move: “This was a lot of people really not getting what exponential growth was going to mean.”
We’re now onto the idea of herd immunity, which Whitty says was misunderstood by many. It would be “inconceivable” to have it as a policy goal, and would have brought “extraordinarily high loss of life”, while v possibly not even doing what it was meant to.
Whitty on herd immunity: “My view is it was clearly a ridiculous goal of policy, and a dangerous one, and lots of what was said [about it] could have led to considerable confusion, and did.”
Chris Whitty says he sent WhatsApps to a group including Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and officials urging people to not discuss herd immunity: “Frankly there was a lot of chatter by people who at best half understood the issues.”
