Covid survivors accuse former Welsh health secretary of incompetence
Relatives who lost loved ones to Covid have accused the former Welsh Health Secretary of incompetence and arrogance after revealing that all his WhatsApp messages from that time had been lost.
Vaughan Gething, who is set to become the next First Minister of Wales, said the messages were a way to “blow off steam” rather than be used to make government decisions, but said he was ashamed that they had disappeared.
Appearing at the Welsh leg of the UK Covid inquiry in Cardiff, Gething denied that the fact the Labor government’s cabinet only formally discussed Covid a month after the government was warned of the risk showed it had moved too slowly.
He also defended his government for taking almost two weeks longer than the Westminster government to start testing Covid-19 patients sent from hospital to care homes, claiming Wales did not have the capacity to do this.
Anna-Louise Marsh-Rees, who leads Covid-19 Bereaved Families Cymru, said outside the hearing: “He makes (former UK Health Secretary) Matt Hancock look like a pandemic strategic planning genius. He wasn’t prepared. He didn’t respond. It was all so informal. Thousands of people died in Wales as a result of these decisions. There was no sense of urgency. He was supposed to be in charge of protecting our loved ones, but he wasn’t. His arrogance is astonishing.”
Marsh-Rees said the revelation that all of Gething’s WhatsApp messages had disappeared was “stunning”. “If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be something out of The Thick Of It,” she said.
Another member of the group, Sam Smith-Higgins, was so angry that she left the hearing, describing the Welsh government’s response to Covid as “chaotic”.
She said: “This is a socialist government, but it is behaving like a dictatorship. They don’t want to learn from this. The complacency we have heard today from a man who could be Prime Minister next week. We cannot allow the Welsh Government to point the finger at Westminster and say they were terrible. They were terrible, but we made big mistakes in Wales.”
Gething blamed a “security rebuild” on his Senedd mobile phone for the deletion of his WhatsApp messages.
He said: “It’s a matter of real shame because if I could have recovered those messages we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” Gething said the messages were used in place of “conversations you have in the hallway” and not for decision-making. He characterized discussions as “largely letting off steam and being supportive.”
The Welsh Cabinet held its first formal discussion on Covid on February 25, 2020, a month after Wales’ Chief Medical Officer Frank Atherton told the First Minister, Mark Drakeford, that there was a significant risk of the disease arriving in Wales . Even then it was only on the agenda in “other matters”.
Gething said fellow ministers were aware that he was making weekly statements on Covid and attending UK government Cobra meetings.
When asked why the Welsh Government only ordered England to test patients for Covid before moving them from hospitals to care homes 13 days after England, he appeared to criticize the British Government, saying: “There was no sharing of information that you would have expected between the Department of Health and others… I certainly wish we could have taken action more quickly.” He also said he did not think Wales had the testing capacity to do this.
Gething was asked why the government was prepared to allow 70,000 people to gather in Cardiff for a Wales v Scotland rugby match on March 14, 2020. The match was eventually canceled by the Welsh Rugby Union, but not until 20,000 Scottish rugby fans had attended arrived in the Welsh capital. He said: “In retrospect, I think we would have done that differently… of the tough choices we made, that’s definitely one that messed up.”