Families of care home residents who passed away after using Covid have expressed their “sickness” and “appallment” at the allegations.
In the beginning of the pandemic, Matt Hancock rejected the advise of testing specialists.
Professor Sir Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, requested that testing be done for “everyone moving into care facilities,” according to a cache of more than 100,000 hacked WhatsApp messages.
However, it appears from the released conversations that Mr. Hancock ultimately disregarded the advice, telling an assistant that doing so only “muddies the waters,” and only instituted required testing for patients arriving from hospitals as opposed to the general public.
He was also said to have expressed concerns that expanding care home testing could ‘get in the way’ of the target of 100,000 daily coronavirus tests he was desperate to hit.
The former health secretary was considering legal action over the claims in the Daily Telegraph, which his spokesman dismissed as being ‘flat wrong’ because he was told it was ‘not currently possible’ to carry out the tests.
The aide alleged the messages leaked by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who was handed them by Mr Hancock while she worked on his Pandemic Diaries memoir, have been ‘spun to fit an anti-lockdown agenda’.
Jean Adamson, a founding member of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, lost her father in a care home in April 2020.
She told Good Morning Britain of the reports: ‘I’m appalled quite frankly, sickened, but I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised at all.
‘This just provides further evidence and confirms what we suspected and feared all along, that the then-health secretary Matt Hancock lied his way through.
‘He was more focused on meeting his targets at the time rather than the welfare of our most vulnerable members of society.’
The organisation called for ‘an immediate and serious police investigation’ to run alongside the public inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic.
Spokesperson Lindsay Jackson, whose mother died from Covid-19 during the first lockdown after contracting it at a care home, said: ‘This looks like evidence that Matt Hancock refused to follow the scientific advice and test everyone going into care homes in case it set back his arbitrary target of “100,000” tests a day which he thought would make a good headline.
‘What is certain is that the failure to protect care homes led to thousands of unnecessary deaths, like my mum’s, and meant hospitals became even more overwhelmed and even longer lockdowns were required to prevent further loss of life.
‘The consequences of this could not be more horrific and there needs to be an immediate and serious police investigation in parallel with the inquiry.
‘We have long questioned whether the former health secretary followed scientific advice – it’s one of the many reasons we campaigned so hard for the Covid inquiry.
‘Sadly, the inquiry has so far been incredibly disappointing. These revelations show why it must allow families like mine to be heard in the hearings and for our lawyers to cross-examine key people like Matt Hancock, so we can get full answers to our questions in the right setting instead of having to relive the horrors of our loss through exposés.’
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has defended the official coronavirus inquiry as the ‘right way’ to scrutinise the handling of the pandemic and urged people not to focus on ‘piecemeal bits of information’.
At Prime Minister’s Questions, Sir Keir Starmer called for Mr Sunak to ensure the inquiry had all the support it needed ‘to report by the end of this year’.
The Labour leader added: ‘Families across the country will look at this, and the sight of politicians writing books portraying them as heroes will be an insulting and ghoulish spectacle for them.’
Mr Sunak responded: ‘Rather than comment on piecemeal bits of information, I’m sure the honourable gentleman will agree with me the right way for these things to be looked at is the Covid inquiry.
‘There is a proper process to these things, it is an independent inquiry, it has the resources it needs, it has the powers it needs and what we should do in this House is to let them get on and do their job.’
Health minister Helen Whately went further to criticise the ‘very selective information’ that has been published, adding that ‘selective snippets of WhatsApp conversations give a limited and at times misleading insight’.
Allies of Mr Hancock said that was because a lack of testing capacity meant it was not possible to check everyone entering a care home.
A spokesman said: ‘These stolen messages have been doctored to create a false story that Matt rejected clinical advice on care home testing. This is flat wrong.’
Mr Hancock ‘enthusiastically accepted’ the advice from Sir Chris on April 14.
But ‘later that day he convened an operational meeting on delivering testing for care homes where he was advised it was not currently possible to test everyone entering care homes, which he also accepted’.
‘Matt concluded that the testing of people leaving hospital for care homes should be prioritised because of the higher risks of transmission, as it wasn’t possible to mandate everyone going into care homes got tested,’ the spokesman said.
‘He went as far as was possible, as fast as possible, to expand testing and save lives.
‘This story categorically shows that the right place for this analysis of what happened in the pandemic is in the inquiry.’
The former health secretary was ‘considering all options’ in response to the leak, with a source close to him adding: ‘She’s (Ms Oakeshott) broken a legal NDA (non-disclosure agreement). Her behaviour is outrageous.’
Lord Bethell, a health minister during the pandemic, said the Government had been ‘desperately’ trying to scale up testing at that point of the crisis but that, at the time, it was necessary to prioritise who was swabbed due to the available capacity.
‘The reality was there was a very, very limited number of those tests,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
People who were coming out of hospitals had the highest rates of transmission, therefore ‘it was sensible and right to prioritise those’ first, he said.
He told the Today programme: ‘The formal decision-making is done through official paperwork, and we don’t have that in front of us.
‘That’s why this partial glimpse into the decision-making is so unfortunate, because it gives a misleading impression.’
Ms Oakeshott, who has described lockdowns as an ‘unmitigated disaster’, said she was releasing the messages because it would take ‘many years’ before the end of the official Covid inquiry, which she claimed could be a ‘colossal whitewash’.
‘That’s why I’ve decided to release this sensational cache of private communications – because we absolutely cannot wait any longer for answers,’ she said.
The spokesman for Mr Hancock said: ‘It is outrageous that this distorted account of the pandemic is being pushed with partial leaks, spun to fit an anti-lockdown agenda, which would have cost hundreds of thousands of lives if followed. What the messages do show is a lot of people working hard to save lives.
‘The full documents have already all been made available to the inquiry, which is the proper place for an objective assessment, so true lessons can be learned.’