Matt Hancock told Public Health England chief ‘not to patronise him’ in row which saw her told to stay away from the ex-Health Secretary

Government officials wanted Britons not to catch Covid until March 2020 and develop immunity ‘like chickenpox’, as the UK’s Covid research herd is doing today.

Sir Christopher Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department of Health, told former Cabinet Secretary Lord Sedwill that he was “exactly right” to believe that people in Britain would have to get infected to build herd immunity – when enough people are immune for a virus it cannot spread.

In a post on March 12, 2020, shared with the inquiry, Lord Sedwill said: ‘I don’t think PM & Co have yet internalized the distinction between minimizing mortality and not trying to prevent most people from getting it .

‘Presumably, like chickenpox, we want people to get it and develop herd immunity before the next wave.

“We just don’t want them to get it all at once and preferably when it’s warning and dry etc.”

Sir Christopher replied: ‘Exactly right. We make the point clear at every meeting, but they don’t quite get it.’

The exchange took place just days before the government imposed a lockdown amid fears the NHS would be overwhelmed by the virus.

It also came on the same day that former top adviser Dominic Cummings had complained in a WhatsApp message that Lord Sedwill had been ‘chatting about chickenpox’, adding ‘god f***ing help us’.

In evidence to the inquiry earlier this week, Mr Cummings claimed that Lord Sedwill told Boris Johnson: ‘Prime Minister, you need to go on TV and explain that this is just like old times with chickenpox and people are going to have chickenpox parties. And the sooner many people will realize this and be able to get rid of it in the best way possible.’

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Mr Cummings responded to the evidence aired during the inquiry on Thursday.

He said: ‘The reason the Cabinet Secretary suggested to the Prime Minister on 12/3 that he tell the country to have chickenpox parties – and I/Ben Warner said, “You need to stop saying this” – is the Permanent Secretary of the DHSC , *who is in charge. of ‘the plan’*, told him that was the damn plan!!!

‘Holy s**t, this is absolutely horrible and explains so much.’

Sir Christopher, pressed by chief research adviser Hugo Keith KC to explain the exchange, said it was a reference to herd immunity but argued it “reflected the state of scientific advice at the time”.

He said he had been “very loose in my response” and that he had followed the advice of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies at the time.

After Sir Christopher told the inquiry, Matt Hancock is said to have been ‘surprised’ at the widespread view that he was telling ‘untruths’.

Sir Christopher said: ‘I suspect he will be surprised by how widespread it is.

‘He was well aware that Mr (Dominic) Cummings held and expressed these views about him.

“I think he probably knew that the Cabinet Secretary was making the same point from time to time,” he added.

But Sir Christopher said Mr Hancock would likely be surprised that former civil servant Helen MacNamara, who gave evidence to the inquiry on Wednesday, held similar views.

Messages shown to the inquiry this week showed Mr Cummings calling Mr Hancock a “proven liar”, while Ms MacNamara, a former deputy cabinet secretary, told the inquiry this week that Mr Hancock insisted matters were “absolutely ‘okay’, while they were ‘very good’. ‘far from fine’ during the crisis.

Sir Christopher also told the inquiry that Mr Hancock believed it was important to be ‘optimistic and ambitious’, adding that he himself was unaware of the extent of the then Health Secretary’s truth-telling views.

“There were many people who said the Secretary of State was too optimistic about what would happen and overpromised about what could be delivered,” Sir Christopher said.

‘That was said a lot. I think it was a very small number of people who said he was basically telling untruths.”

‘He was always clear that he did it for a positive reason. So setting a very ambitious goal, where you don’t necessarily expect to achieve that goal, but push the system to do more.”

“Whether that’s good or not is a matter of perception.”

Sir Christopher acknowledged that mistrust between Number 10, the Cabinet and the Department of Health would have been damaging.

“The amount of time and energy that seemed to have been spent very early on in the pandemic on assigning blame – that energy clearly could have been better spent on solving the problems that the pandemic posed.”

Sir Christopher also returned to evidence of former government chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, who described the Department of Health in his pandemic diaries as ‘ungovernable’ and an ‘operational shambles’.

Sir Christopher said he did not agree that it was chaotic, dysfunctional or ungovernable.

Discussing the government’s response to the Covid outbreak, Sir Christopher said the government was a ‘week late’ in introducing non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) – restrictions such as masks and social distancing – which were among the first lockdown have led.

He also said that the November lockdown was introduced too late and that was his view at the time.

He said: ‘In retrospect, we were at least a week late on all points of the NPI decisions. I agreed with the decisions at the time and timing.

“But looking back, we should have done everything on the 12th, 16th, 23rd… at least a week earlier.”

He added: ‘In March, our lack of knowledge and understanding about the virus and decision-making was in great uncertainty.

‘That is not the case with the second lockdown. At this point we have a lot of tests. We know a lot about the virus. We’re not modeling, we actually know how it goes up and down.’

However, in Sir Patrick’s pandemic diaries, he said he was given a ‘tick off’ by Sir Christopher in March 2020 after he ‘dropped the bombshell that he needed to act faster’.

Sir Christopher said he had ‘no memory’ of this.