Matt Hancock blocked chief medic Chris Whitty’s calls to ease isolation rules
Matt Hancock rejected Sir Chris Whitty’s advice that self-isolation should be broken over concerns it would ‘imply we are wrong’.
WhatsApp exchanges from November 2020 show England’s Chief Medical Officer thought it would be ‘quite good’ if close contact of positive cases tested for five days instead of staying home for two weeks.
But the former health minister warned the approach was a “massive relaxation” of rules that “would seriously worry people” and “suggested we were wrong.”
The posts, the last to be published by The Telegraphalso reveal that the MP for West Suffolk was determined to run the rollout of Covid jabs as a ‘Hancock triumph’.
WhatsApp exchanges from November 2020 show that England’s Chief Medical Officer (left) thought five days of testing was ‘just as good’ as staying home for two weeks. But the former health minister (right) warned the approach was a “massive relaxation” of the rules that would “seriously worry people” and “implied we were wrong”
The tranche of more than 100,000 WhatsApps was passed on to The Telegraph by journalist Isabel Oakeshott (right), who was given the material by former Health Secretary Matt Hancock (left) when they were working together on his book Pandemic Diaries
On November 17, 2020, Mr Hancock asked Sir Chris about the status of ‘test to release plans’.
At the time, people with confirmed or suspected Covid only had to isolate for 10 days, but close contacts faced a 14-day quarantine.
There was also a legal obligation to quarantine and those who broke the rules could be fined £1,000 – rising to £10,000 for repeat offenders.
Sir Chris said the UK’s Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) and SAGE, a group of scientists who advised No10, supported daily Covid testing for five days rather than isolating between close contacts.
He suggested it should be tested initially to “check it works” and noted that the UK’s drug watchdog had not yet approved Covid tests for its own use.
But Mr. Hancock replied, “So testing every day for five days?” That sounds like a huge relaxation’.
Sir Chris said: ‘The models suggest it’s pretty good [as isolating for two weeks]. And we think adherence will probably be good.”
The former health minister said he was “surprised”. “This sounds very risky and we can’t go backwards – wouldn’t testing every day for 10 days be a safer starting point,” he said.
Sir Chris said: ‘We could go on to 7, but the benefits really drop off after 5. We would expect people with symptoms to get a pcr test as normal’.
Mr Hancock questioned whether the two-week isolation advice had been ‘too long all along’.
The policy reduced cases by about four per cent compared to 10 days of isolation, but “almost certainly at the cost of reduced compliance,” Sir Chris said.
Data from SAGE at the time suggested that only one in five people fully complied with self-isolation rules.
Mr Hancock said: ‘I think it would be HUGE to move to 7-day daily testing for contacts but if we go below that people would be seriously concerned and suggest we got it wrong.
“Presumably we can explain part of the shorter period because the test would pick up the disease before symptoms.”
Sir Chris said he would pass this along to the other CMOs he thought would be ‘sympathetic to this’.
The government reduced self-isolation to 10 days on December 14, four weeks after the exchanges between the two men.
A statement from the UK’s CMOs confirming the rule change read: ‘After reviewing the evidence, we are now confident that we can reduce the number of days contacts self-isolate from 14 days to 10.’
By the summer of 2021, the policy evolved into using the NHS Test and Trace app, which alerted people if they had been in close contact with a positive case and told them to self-isolate for up to 10 days.
But the resulting ‘pingdemic’ saw up to around 600,000 people a week isolating, with the app being so sensitive that people were unnecessarily ‘pinged’ through their walls if their neighbor was infected.
Sir Chris said the UK’s Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) and SAGE, a group of scientists who advised No10, supported daily Covid testing for five days rather than isolating between close contacts. He suggested it should be tested initially to “check it works” and noted that the UK’s drug watchdog had not yet approved Covid tests for its own use. But Mr. Hancock replied, “So testing every day for five days?” That sounds like a huge relaxation’
Parts of the country came to a standstill and ministers were forced to release key workers from quarantine to keep the NHS, transport and food services running.
A daily test pilot had started in May 2021, allowing participants to take a daily test for seven days instead of isolating themselves. However, this did not apply to people contacted through the NHS app.
In August 2021, children and double-dipped Britons would no longer have to isolate if they were in close contact. However, they were advised to have a PCR test and quarantined for 10 days if they tested positive.
Self-isolation was finally abolished in February 2022, when more than 20 million Britons had been told to stay at home, according to The Telegraph.
MailOnline has not seen or independently verified the WhatsApp messages leaked to The Telegraph by Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who helped Mr Hancock write his book Pandemic Diaries.
Other recently released reports show Mr Hancock was told by advisers the public would ‘forgive’ him for supporting the lockdowns if he could claim vaccines as his success, leading the MP to try and be the face of the campaign.
Mr Hancock’s special media adviser, Damon Poole, sent Mr Hancock a link in January 2021 to a Daily Mail article saying the jab rollout was being accelerated.
The MP replied, ‘I RIGHT THIS TWO MONTHS AGO. This is a Hancock triumph!’