Flattening the curve – i.e. allowing the virus to circulate while suppressing it enough to stop the health service being overwhelmed – was as much Whitty’s plan as it was anyone’s, but when he pivoted to supporting full lockdown in March 2020 he essentially never looked back. By May, the curve was flat but the country would remain in lockdown for another two months. The belief that everything is more important than the economy and nothing is more important than “public health” had taken hold.
Whitty seemed to become obsessed with the idea that epidemics are always halving or doubling. Since the only time the infection rate (the infamous R number) went down in the first 18 months of the pandemic was during lockdowns, this meant that he could always foresee the Tiber foaming with blood. The only solution was more lockdowns. Longer lockdowns. Lockdowns to prevent lockdowns. For the rest of the pandemic, every piece of advice from Sage, which was co-chaired by Whitty, was nudging the government towards that end.
Politicians decide, but their decisions are based on the advice and evidence given to them by experts. During Covid, the evidence presented appeared partial and excessively pessimistic and the advice seemed relentlessly illiberal. A few examples should suffice.
In October 2020, the NHS was nowhere near being overwhelmed. There were more empty hospital beds than there had been a year earlier. Things were worse in parts of northern England but local restrictions seemed to be working in the northwest and infection rates were falling in the northeast. Nevertheless, Chris Whitty appeared on television at Halloween with some graphs and Boris Johnson capitulated with a four-week lockdown. When that ended, Sage used out-of-date infection data to justify putting nearly every English county into the top two tiers, thereby extending lockdown in all but name and crushing the hospitality sector.
In December 2021, the Omicron variant was causing renewed panic around the world despite all the evidence showing that it was significantly milder than its predecessors and that hospitalisation rates in South Africa, where it had originated, were a small fraction of what they had been before. On 15 December, more than a fortnight after the chair of the South African Medical Association told us that we were “panicking unnecessarily” about an “extremely mild” variant, Whitty appeared on television to warn about the “misinterpretation” of the South African data and saying: “I want to be clear, this is going to be a problem.” He argued that South Africans benefited from high levels of immunity, seemingly forgetting that the British had been repeatedly vaccinated for the last year. “There are several things we don’t know [about Omicron]” he said, before adding inaccurately, “but what we do know is bad”. It seemed like every effort was made to bounce Boris Johnson into a fourth lockdown that Christmas. It is to his credit that he resisted. It was not until 23 December that Sage finally admitted that Omicron was indeed much milder. In February, Whitty conceded that Omicron’s impact on mortality had been “much more muted” and was “essentially not visible”. The government spent £9.3bn on lateral flow tests that winter.Whitty was not alone in pushing lockdowns at the drop of a hat. It took a team effort to lay waste to Britain’s economy and inflict an injury to the nation’s psyche from which it has yet to recover. Weak politicians, flawed modellers and hysterical journalists should all be held accountable. But if the finger has to be pointed at a single individual, it is the man who has never apologised and who was knighted when in my view he should have been sacked. Chris Whitty, the softly spoken boffin, the unassuming technocrat, broke Britain with Powerpoint.
We used to think that Whitty never smiled because he is a serious man. It turned out that he is just a misery-guts who hates the idea of people enjoying themselves, as he has proved by whispering terrible, illiberal ideas into the ears of politicians ever since. A pox on him.
