Covid-19 Inquiry

Lord Winston Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, in 1917, at the height of the terrors of the First World War, Hilaire Belloc wrote to GK Chesterton and said, “Sometimes it’s necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation”. And 103 years later we had another, much smaller catastrophe: the pandemic that we are talking about now. It was not quite global but it came close—and it was certainly very serious. Something that we have not discussed very much about this report is the question of the believability of what we were hearing about the pandemic, and that is a more serious question to be answered.

I must say that it was a pleasure to work behind my noble friend Lady Thornton, who again and again, absolutely selflessly, led the way in the debates. What was encouraging to both of us—certainly to me; I must say that I have not discussed this with her—were the repeated answers of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, for the Government, who, I think, tried to speak honestly and directly every time. He even answered emails almost immediately. He was sometimes somewhat indiscreet; I am not going to say exactly what his emails said—that is between him and me—but he certainly was one of the really good people in this. But, on the whole, not all the Government, in many people’s minds, come out quite so well.

It is also reassuring to consider that it was wonderful to see both Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance—now the noble Lord, Lord Vallance—supporting the Government, but how difficult it was for them to be, with the Prime Minister in the centre, in a kind of showcase. This is very difficult for scientists who have to do their best to tell complete truth wherever they can and to be as objective as they can when, in fact, there are political considerations through no fault of any of them. Anyhow, one of the issues is that, since the pandemic, the reputation of politics has not yet got back to where it should be—that is rather important.

I want to discuss two issues. One has just been touched on by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins: the question of track and trace. That is a very good example. At one stage, I remember, at a committee meeting, inquiring rather rudely of the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, who was then invited to lead track and trace, “Why is it that people don’t trust you?” She looked a bit amazed that anybody could ask her that question and her advisers and officials did not help. About 10 days later, I got a message asking whether I would respond to a phone call. It had to be done by the hour, so, at a certain time, she phoned me and said, “Is it really true that people don’t trust me?” I said, “Well, do you think that people are trusting track and trace? They’re not”. “Why not?” I said, “Well, being tracked and traced is an invasion of your privacy, for one thing; it gives you the risk that you might find out something that you don’t want to hear; it gives you the risk that you might not have wanted to be in the place that you were tracked from, and so on”. She said, “Well, what should we have done?” I said, “Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? One way of changing public opinion is by demonstrating that it would be good for the person concerned. So you say, ‘If you’re traced and diagnosed, you’ll get much quicker treatment before any serious consequences of the disease are present’”. “Oh”, she said, “I must run and tell the Prime Minister”.

That was not a brilliant example, but it is interesting because, thinking about it, the other issue I am tangling with is the reverse: the mistrust of vaccines. It was very clear that a lot of people were scared of the vaccine. That fear was increasingly caused because the politicians and people promoting the vaccine were not, or did not appear to be, trustworthy. To be fair, the vaccine had been produced almost like a rabbit out a hat—completely unexpectedly, like magic, very quickly, without thorough testing or going through the usual regulatory formulae. Of course, people started to get a few symptoms or side-effects, some of which were later quite serious.

There is an interesting connection between those two issues. A person who is ill might benefit from test and trace but, with a vaccine, it is best for everybody else but not you to be vaccinated. Herd immunity will suit you just as well and you would not run the risk of having the vaccine. We could have learned that from the outbreak of measles in London, just 15 years ago, when government officials were telling people that they must have the vaccine. We saw mothers holding their babies on television. The ethical responsibility of the mother concerned is to make certain that her baby is not harmed, but the great harm might well be the vaccine that she is about to receive for the baby. It is a failure of understanding and of dialogue between people.

We must recognise that we need to do much better with public engagement. The public engagement between the Government and the populace was woeful in the pandemic. The press and rumour-mongers often did not help, neither did the various media, but this is something important that we should consider.

I ask the noble Baroness to address this in her reply to the debate. The Blair Government made a considerable attempt to increase our understanding of how we might better engage the public by giving them better information and having dialogue with them. That worked very well. We were trying to tackle some big issues at that time. One was nuclear waste, another was genetic modification and another was the new nanotechnology coming into medicine, which was puzzling because of different effects at different cell levels.

We have to recognise that a Government cannot succeed unless they are trusted. I hope that this side of the House recognises that over the next few years. I do not pretend for a moment that it is simple to do. While I cannot comment on the Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson, I do not think that Asquith was trusted by the populace during the pandemic of 1918-19 and the Great War beforehand. But it is important that we try to find ways to trust.

One of the most interesting lessons was in the Reith lecture given by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, who touched on this. We should go back and look at some of the things she said, as well as at our Select Committee report on science and society. We need to understand how we can do this better, because otherwise we will always have these problems in science. We need to be much clearer about how we will deal with them in the future, and I hope that this new Government try to renew interest in some of those issues.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, as the last speaker from the Back Benches, I do not intend to comment on everybody’s speeches, but I do hope that the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, makes his own submission to the inquiry, because it is a vital point. I would like to see how the inquiry and its advisers deal with his point. I say no more.

It is probably just as well that I do not comment widely because my own expertise in the health field is limited to virtually nil and my experience with pandemics relates to my period as a Minister dealing with the foot and mouth epidemic; in other words, in the livestock area. While there are vast differences, and the authorities in livestock epidemics have means of controlling them that would not be acceptable to the human population in any civilised society, there are also some features that are the same. Principally, those are that the authorities in the agriculture and related sectors did not have a very clear plan; there was no mutual understanding between the industry and Defra; we changed our policy several times during the period; and probably more cattle—or beasts in general—lost their lives than needed to.

There have been inquiries into that epidemic and inquiries into this pandemic. On my count, there have been—I think the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, referred to this—six key inquiries into what to do in an epidemic, beginning with the one after SARS in 2003 and going right through to the recent one in 2018. The one common feature that is clear—the noble Lord referred to this—is that there were a lot of recommendations, some of them were taken up, many of them were not, and many of those that were taken up were dropped or severely modified. I hope that this inquiry produces recommendations that can be sustained and that health practitioners, scientists and everybody is convinced at least by the main thrust of the inquiry’s recommendations. The module that we have already received will be supplemented by much more detailed ones, but it already raises a number of very serious concerns.

The fact that those inquiries have not been followed through by successive Governments is a worry, and I hope that we can have a very serious follow-through by something like a resilience structure in government, which my noble friend Lord Harris referred to, and that that will have clear backing from Parliament and the new Government.

I want to end with one final, crucial area that has not been touched on. The theme of the report is referred to in terms such as “putting into place”, “failing to put into place” and “needing to put into place” contingency plans for a surge in resources, particularly during the immediate response. My namesake Professor Chris Whitty —no relation—expresses it as a way of stopping a pandemic in its tracks. Three things have to be in place to do that during any form of pandemic or virus-based epidemic: testing; tracing; and making sure that all the equipment required, from PPE to syringes and everything else, is already in place and can be stepped up according to the severity of the epidemic.

I asked Ministers in the previous Government about the recommendation in some of these reports that we get agreements in place well in advance to sort out not only the incredibly complex governmental structure—it is reproduced in the report and involves an incredibly complicated network of bodies—but the resources in private, university and research areas. For example, there needs to be an agreement so that, as soon as a pandemic becomes evident, a system makes available laboratories in the public sector and in the rest of society, together with testing arrangements, and makes the availability, specification and distribution of PPE clear well in advance. In order to do that, public sector bodies need to have in place as soon as possible protocols on those facilities becoming available as soon as a pandemic is declared. In the private, educational and research sectors, we need to have protocols—contracts, in effect—with money paid up front so that those private facilities will be transferred into producing as soon as possible the equipment needed to test and trace, and the materials and equipment needed for combating the pandemic. They would therefore drop research work and commercial ventures, because those stand-down contracts were already available.

I asked the previous Minister—it was not the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe—some months ago whether such contracts were already in place, but I have to say that I got a rather equivocal answer. I ask the Minister, and the previous Minister if she cares to comment, whether, if a pandemic started or was clearly threatening us tomorrow, we would have available those facilities.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way. This is a time-limited debate, so I shall make just one point. There was a public service laboratory that was closed down. It was a wonderful institution that many noble Lords will remember. It is something we should have not just for a pandemic, but as a continuous resource for unexpected and unusual things that affect the nation, particularly bacteriology.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that. That shows that we are going backwards with public facilities, but private and other facilities also need to be mobilised immediately and a judgment made on how long we need to do that, according to the success or otherwise of our control of a pandemic. I put it to the Minister in the new Government that if that has not yet been put in place on a wide scale, it should be one of the priorities. I hope she can reply positively on that. I also hope that industry research labs of all sorts would respond. In the previous case, we were panicking to get them in place, and it led to some corner-cutting that in turn led to accusations of some dubious behaviour. I do not want to go into that, but if we had systems in place already, none of that would be a problem. Since nobody else has mentioned it, I hope the Minister and the ex-Minister can reply and give me some assurance on that basis.