‘WE ARE F***ED!’ Director of No10’s ‘nudge unit’ reveals Downing Street colleague leaned over and scribbled over his note saying country was ‘not ready’ for ‘unstoppable’ Covid wave during gloomy March 2020 meeting

During a crucial meeting at the start of the pandemic, an explicit note was issued between two government scientific advisers saying ‘we are f***ed’.

Dr. David Halpern, chairman of No10’s ‘nudge unit’, which has encouraged people to stick to the rules during the pandemic, said during a sit-down discussion on March 13, 2020 that the penny dropped among officials about the severity of the upcoming Covid wave.

He wrote that ‘we are not ready’, which was seen by a Downing Street colleague, who scribbled over the note to read ‘we are f***ed’, the UK Covid-19 inquiry heard today .

During the inquiry, he said the note was made after hearing evidence that the NHS would be overwhelmed by the ‘unstoppable’ wave, that there was insufficient testing capacity and that modeling of the impact of the virus had been ‘overconfident’ .

The research is in the second module, which examines the core of British decision-making and political governance. At a hearing today, defense counsel Dermot Keating asked whether Dr Halpern had made the note.

Dr. Halpern said, “I actually did, I wrote it in all caps, it was so striking.”

Mr Keating said: ‘A colleague number 10 leaned over and deleted your entry, which we see at the bottom of the page, and what did it say instead of ‘we’re not ready’?’

Dr. Halpern said, “We’re fucked.”

He confirmed the comment was written by Ben Warner, a data scientist at No10, who worked with Dominic Cummings on the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and attended Sage meetings.

When asked if this represented his concern and readiness for the “unstoppable wave that was about to come,” Dr. Halpern said, “Yes. Remember, the only game you had in a strategy, as we were told, was that you can shape the wave.

‘As mentioned endlessly, you could flatten it etc and you tried to do it to avoid the NHS being overwhelmed.

“But at this meeting you’ll hear evidence that it’s going to be overwhelmed as it stands, that we don’t have the testing ready, that the models seem overconfident, and that there’s a lot of cause for concern.

“And so I felt really quite shocked and depressed. I felt it wasn’t our role to do all those things. We are working on the behavioral aspects.

“The general feeling was that, just like in my notebook, we, the country, the policies, are not ready for what is unfolding.

‘I felt from the faces of the people in the room that there was some awareness of this. A kind of crack in confidence.’

Others in the meeting, like him, felt that the government should pursue repressive strategies, he said.

It was 10 days before the first national lockdown was announced on March 23 and three days before then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson told people to stop non-essential contact and travel.

Dr. Halpern chairs the Behavioral Insights Team, which was established under David Cameron’s government. The group was responsible for positively influencing behavior with small changes without introducing legislation.

Previous successes include increasing diversity in the police force, helping the Employment Agency get more people on benefits and increasing the number of organ donors.

The nudge unit has been involved in much of the government’s messaging during the pandemic, including the slogans ‘Hands, Face, Space’ and ‘Stay at Home – Protect the NHS’.

However, earlier this year the co-founder accused the government of using scare tactics to get people to follow Covid rules during the pandemic.

Behavioral scientist Simon Ruda suggested too much emphasis had been placed on modeling and data, which he warned was “propagandistic”.

Dr. Halpern told the inquiry today that “overconfidence” and “overconfidence” that Britain would not be hit as hard by the pandemic was hindering other countries’ learning.

He said pride in British science had led to a delay in considering the approach of other countries hit at the start of the crisis.

In a July 2020 letter to senior officials criticizing the initial response, he wrote: ‘Ironically, pride in our science and our capabilities slowed our ability to learn lessons from other countries under the cover of variations of “there it is very different,” there was an arrogance that we knew better and would do better.”

He said entrenchment – ​​a difficulty in moving away from previous assumptions – within the medical community led to the assumption that Covid would be a flu-like wave.

Dr. Halpern said this was “the most fundamental misstep” in the early response to the virus prevented its expansion by suppressing its spread.

There was “a hint of hubris that we knew better and that we would do better, alongside criticism of how poorly other countries were doing,” he wrote.

He said that overconfidence “characterized much of what happened from the beginning to those very early comparisons with other countries – Japan, Germany – and it slowed us down to look very carefully at what they did and the lessons from them to learn.

‘It also had many more manifestations. Masks would be an example. We felt that the evidence for masks was becoming very compelling, certainly in late March, early April, and there was a strong entrenchment in skepticism among many members of the medical community.”

Dr. Halpern also criticized the ‘stay alert’ messages from Boris Johnson’s government. “It tells you to worry, but not what to do – the worst combination,” he said.

During a speech in January, Dr. Halpern that he unknowingly shamed Mr. Johnson into wearing a mask by showing him similar world leaders who did so.

Speaking to the Reckitt Global Hygiene Institute, he said: ‘We shared a pack of microscope slides with him at one point. There were a series of images of virtually every world leader wearing a mask, and then a photo of him not.”

He added that this means that “it is normal for a world leader to wear a mask at this time.”

Mr Johnson’s mask-wearing habits made headlines in November 2021 when he apologized for not covering up during a hospital visit.

He insisted he had broken the rules for ‘barely 30 seconds’ after being photographed without a face covering during a trip to Hexham General Hospital.