The government’s chief scientific adviser sent a secret message calling Rishi Sunak “Dr Death the chancellor” during a meeting attended by both in the Covid crisis, the official inquiry into the pandemic has been told.
Prof Dame Angela McLean, who at the time was the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, made the comment in a WhatsApp message to another leading scientist in apparent reference to Sunak’s “eat out to help out” scheme that ran during the summer of 2020.
John Edmunds, a professor of infectious disease modelling who was the recipient of McLean’s messages, told the inquiry that he remained angry at Sunak’s scheme, which incentivised people to eat at restaurants and cafes, saying it sent the wrong message to the public.
After Covid cases began to rise sharply in September 2020, Sir Patrick Vallance, whom McLean succeeded as the government’s chief scientific adviser earlier this year, tasked Edmunds with devising possible ways to curb this, such as a “circuit breaker” lockdown or asking people to work from home again.
On 20 September, Vallance asked Edmunds to join a meeting at which Boris Johnson and Sunak were to hear views from scientists – “mainly from the ‘let it rip’ brigade”, Vallance told Edmunds in the email.
McLean and Edmunds exchanged messages as the meeting heard from anti-lockdown voices, with McLean making reference to “Dr Death the chancellor”. Asked if this was a reference to “eat out to help out”, Edmunds replied: “It’s so long ago I don’t know. But it could well be.”
At another point, McLean asked: “Who is this fuckwit?” to which Edmunds replied: “Every statistic is wrong.”
Asked who this referred to, Edmunds told the inquiry: “I’m pretty sure it’s the next witness.” Due to give evidence after him was Carl Heneghan, a professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University who was a critic of several lockdown-related measures.
In earlier evidence, Edmunds was highly critical of Sunak’s scheme, saying that while it did not necessarily worsen infection rates, it played a role in prompting the public to take more risks.
“To be honest it made me angry, and I’m still angry about it,” he said. “It was one thing taking your foot off the brake, which is what we’d been doing by easing the restrictions, but to put the foot on the accelerator seemed to me perverse.
“And to spend public money to do that – 45,000 people had just died. I don’t want to blame eat out to help out for the second wave, because that’s not the case. But just the optics of it were terrible.”
He added: “My feeling was, yes, the pub and restaurant sector really needed support, I wasn’t against that at all. But this was not really just supporting them. They could have just given them money. This was a scheme to encourage people to take an epidemiological risk.”
Naomi Fulop, a spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said: “It’s unbearable to think that if it wasn’t for Rishi Sunak’s reckless, unscientific and callous approach, my mum might still be with me. When our current chief scientific adviser has referred to our prime minister as ‘Dr Death’, how can any of us have faith in our government if another pandemic strikes?”
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