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09-06-2021, 08:19 PM
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Matt Hancock to answer questions on handling of pandemic

Matt Hancock MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, is to answer questions from MPs on the Government's handling of the covid-19 pandemic.

https://committees.parliament.uk/com...-the-pandemic/

The session is as part of the joint inquiry of the Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee into coronavirus: lessons learnt. MPs will focus on the decisions taken around the Spring 2020 and Autumn/ Winter 2020 lockdowns; UK preparedness for pandemics; and the impact of variant B.1.167.2 on the Government's lockdown-easing roadmap.

The joint inquiry considers the lessons that can be drawn from the Government’s handling of the pandemic that could be applied now and in the future.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57284470

Mr Hancock was accused by Dominic Cummings, the prime minister's former top aide, of a string of mistakes - and of lying to the prime minister - at the start of the crisis, in an appearance before the same committee two weeks ago.

Mr Hancock has firmly and repeatedly denied the claims.
Obviously, there will be questions on care homes, PPE, testing, herd immunity, hospital treatment and almost 128,000 (official) deaths .....

No doubt Hancock will give a polished performance and deliver his replies with aplomb .....
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10-06-2021, 12:30 AM
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Re: Matt Hancock to answer questions on handling of pandemic

Matt Hancock ‘was warned of Covid care home risk in March 2020’

https://www.theguardian.com/society/...-in-march-2020

Care England, which represents the largest private chains where thousands of people died in the first months of the virus, told the Guardian it raised “the lack of testing in hospitals and in the care sector” several times in correspondence with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) as well as NHS England in late March 2020.

The Care Provider Alliance also called on the government to prioritise testing for care residents to stop the spread of the virus, warning on 26 March 2020 that without it “there is no way of knowing whether they are going to infect others”.

It also emailed Hancock directly saying: “All people discharged from hospital to social care settings … MUST be tested before discharge.”

Yet despite the pressure from frontline care operators, Hancock didn’t make testing for hospital discharges mandatory until mid-April, after the first wave death toll had peaked weeks later.

Pete Calveley, the chief executive of Barchester, which lost 1,100 residents to Covid over the pandemic, told the Guardian that in March and April “we were saying absolutely no one should be discharged from hospital without a negative test” and that message was conveyed to the DHSC via Care England.

Representatives of smaller care home groups also said they were “consistently” urging testing of discharges earlier on when it was not happening.

“To officials and the minister for care we were saying that people were being discharged out of hospitals into care homes untested,” said Nadra Ahmed, the chair of the National Care Association, which represents independent care providers.

“We were raising the issue with the department on a regular basis. One of our questions was, ‘What are you doing after you test someone [before they are discharged]. Are they in an isolation wing?’”
Hancock, patently, had other concerns .....
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10-06-2021, 09:28 AM
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Re: Matt Hancock to answer questions on handling of pandemic

Hancock coming up shortly

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-57424534

The health secretary is due in front of the joint committee of MPs on Covid at around 09:30 BST.
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10-06-2021, 09:47 AM
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Re: Matt Hancock to answer questions on handling of pandemic

Greg Clark, the Chair of the Science and Technology Committee opened the session.

He asks Hancock if he ever said anything to the prime minister which wasn't true.

"No," Matt Hancock replies.

"Everybody got the Covid treatment that they needed," he states, "there was no point at which I was advised people did not get the treatment they needed. Getting hold of PPE was always a huge challenge," he states "but there was never a point at which NHS providers could not get hold of PPE."
Blatant Lie #1

He says 70% of PPE is now made in the UK.
That's what Hancock promised in September but, AFAIK, no recent figure has been issued and confirmed.

Hancock again denies the most explosive claim by Dominic Cummings - that the health secretary "categorically" told the PM in March last year that people would be tested .

Hancock says he told the PM that people would be tested when the capacity had been created.
So, Hancock's, in effect, saying that people would NOT be tested before being discharged to care homes .....

He says he followed clinical advice that the "most important thing was infection prevention control in care homes", adding that the "strongest route" was through community transmission.
IIRC, care homes had the worst PPE shortages .....

Chair of the health committee Jeremy Hunt asks Hancock about the advice he was given on testing and says it appears it was "either lockdown or let the virus spread".

Hancock says : "Unlike other countries, we did not go into this with a testing capacity - we had to target the testing where it was clinically most needed*.

"The clinical advice I received was that testing people asymptomatically would lead to false positives**."
* Presumably, then, elderly patients were least "needed" ......

** Really .....
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10-06-2021, 10:26 AM
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Re: Matt Hancock to answer questions on handling of pandemic

Greg Clark asks about the target of doing 100,000 tests a day by the end of April 2020*. Clark asks why Hancock's own advisers were not wishing to associate themselves with this target.

Hancock says: "In this case, I knew that we needed a radical increase in testing... over 100,000 is a good number for a big target," he states.

The 100,000 target mattered because "it galvanised the whole system," he says.
* From which the elderly in hospital and care were excluded .....

In fact, the "100,000 a day" wasn't reached until the end of May and failed to increase until the beginning of July .....

Jeremy Hunt asks about how much the government used the line that they were "following the science".

"There are examples where ministers make decisions that are different to the scientific advice," replies Hancock.

He says those returning from Wuhan in China in January 2020 were quarantined *, while the scientific advisers said those people could self-isolate at home.

"We did accept and implement the scientific advice" on lockdown, he states. "I take full responsibility for the decisions that I take but also made in my name as Secretary of State".
* 24th January 2020

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51232163

Officials are attempting to trace as many as 2,000 visitors who have flown in to the UK from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the new strain of coronavirus first broke out.
Tests on 14 people in the UK have come back negative, Chief Medical Officer for England Chris Whitty said.

Prof Whitty said there is a "fair chance" Britain will see cases of the new virus, which has killed 26 people.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the risk to the public "remains low".
Blatant Lie #2 .....

Turning to the issue of borders, he says the clinical advice the government received was that unilaterally taking action on borders would only delay the spread by about a week.

"The only way the world could have stopped this virus getting out of China was for China to stop people leaving its borders," he says.
That's a perverse logic and utterly disproved, not only by "imports" last year but also by the government allowing the "Indian variant" in this year .....

Back to care homes, and Labour's Rebecca Long-Bailey says a whistleblower claimed that PHE's initial advice was to test residents on discharge from hospital.

Hancock says he had "no recollection" of such initial advice.

Long-Bailey then asks about an allegation that PHE's advice was "softened" in March "at the request" of the Department of Health and Social Care

"Not that I'm aware of," Hancock says.

He says again that the clinical advice at the time had three parts:
  • That testing turnaround was about four days, so if a care home resident were tested, that test could come back negative four days later - but they could have caught Covid in hospital during that time
  • That asymptomatic testing was "likely to give you a false negative"
  • Again, that "infection prevention and control" in care homes was the "most important thing"
Asked whether he will provide copies of internal advice and his written responses, Hancock says "yes"*.
* I won't hold my breath ......
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10-06-2021, 10:57 AM
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Re: Matt Hancock to answer questions on handling of pandemic

Greg Clark says "we clearly didn't lock down early enough". He asks if it was not seen that "the mathematics of this was pretty stark" and the virus could cause 400,000 deaths if left unchecked. He asks how this was "missed for so long, for six to eight weeks".

"We knew about this problem from the start," replies Hancock, "the challenge from the early weeks of March" was to make a "massive judgement... based on incomplete information".
So, he procrastinated .....

"How was it that you and everyone else didn't see the enormity of what was going on?" Clark asks. "Why did we miss the big picture?"

Clark asks if it was the case that Hancock "simply accepted" the advice that was being given on how long people would tolerate restrictions for.

"Ultimately, you didn't know how long people would put up with it, it now seems obvious that people would put up with lockdowns," Hancock replies.

"These are huge decisions, to take those decisions against the scientific advice is an even bigger decision to make," he states."
So, Hancock waits for "scientific advice" then claims that he (finally) went against it .....

Clark asks about Cummings' claim that former Cabinet Office official Helen McNamara said: "I think we're going to kill thousands, there's no plan, I think we're in huge trouble".

The health secretary says: "I have no idea if she said that."

He added: "I don't recall having any conversations with her at that time."
He would say that, wouldn't he .....

Hunt asks why the NHS Test and Trace system didn't prevent the second and third lockdowns.

Asked about a Sage analysis in October 2020 that said Test and Trace only had a marginal impact on transmission, he says: "I think that it had had an impact but it clearly hadn't had an impact big enough to bring the R down... to below one," he says. "There is evidence now, as of today, that the surge testing and tracing and isolation system that we've got in place is working."*
At what cost, though .....

£37,000,000,000 .....

Hancock questioned on contact tracing and isolating

Jeremy Hunt says some people are of the view that "you'd need some national contact tracing for surge capacity" but local tracing should be standard.

Matt Hancock says "speed matters here" and a "national call centre system can be much faster".

"If you can't reach somebody after a number of calls, you can pass it on to the local system and they can send somebody round to the front door."

"It's about optimising a joint system,*" Hancock says.

Hunt asks if the real target in a pandemic should be making sure that people do isolate.

Hancock says "we absolutely" had targets for making sure enough people isolated.**
* Local authorities persistently argued that they were best placed for tracing but were ignored by Hancock.

** What targets and what methods for meeting those targets .....
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10-06-2021, 11:32 AM
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Re: Matt Hancock to answer questions on handling of pandemic

Everyone agrees if we'd known more or acted earlier, that would have been better, Greg Clark tells Matt Hancock, adding: "We've also established that we had inadequate testing capacity."

Hancock agrees it would have been better to have greater testing capacity at the beginning of the pandemic.

Clark suggests another lesson should be learned, saying the discharging of infected patients into care homes was "one of the major faults in the first attempts to handle the pandemic".

He asks Hancock what he meant when he said previously "we tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes".

The health secretary responds: "I think the most important words in that sentence are that 'we tried to'.
Hancock then attempts to bluff his wayround the question by blaming lack of funding, lack of data and lack of power .....

He follows that with a typical Hancock deflection - in this case, what he wants to do in the future - he thinks the care sector needs to be more integrated with the NHS - more people should be discharged from hospital to their home with a care package and not to care homes .....

Greg Clark asks Hancock whether a letter from NHS England to NHS trusts in 17 March 2020 ordering them to urgently discharge all inpatients who were medically fit was a joint decision with ministers.

Hancock says the decision was discussed with him and the PM before it was executed.

"There were some things that this country got right and the provision of care at all times to Covid patients was one of them," he says.

He adds that more people were discharged to their own homes with care packages, so the result of the letter "was a reduction in the proportion of people who were discharged into care homes"
.
Blatant Lie #3

Greg Clark says the PM's former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, gave evidence that when the PM returned from his own Covid illness in April, he was "alarmed" at what was going on in care homes.

He asks Hancock if Boris Johnson had a conversation with him that indicated he was surprised to find out what happening.

"Not that I can remember," says the health secretary.
Ah, the old fallback ..... selective memory .....
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10-06-2021, 12:05 PM
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Re: Matt Hancock to answer questions on handling of pandemic

Hi

Hancock is being set up.

Cummings has not provided evidence, he wants Hancock to lie to Committee first.

As for scientific evidence, read this.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/...outbreak-in-uk

Hancock is not even the real target.

Cummings, Hunt and Gove are after Boris.
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10-06-2021, 12:22 PM
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Re: Matt Hancock to answer questions on handling of pandemic

Hancock defends delay on use of face coverings

James Davies asks the health secretary why there was a delay in implementing Sage advice on masks and face coverings.

"There was rigorous international debate on use of masks," says Hancock. It comes down to disagreements about the most likely route of personal transmission."

There were also practical considerations at the time, he says, due to concerns over PPE shortages* in hospitals.
"We now have huge stockpiles of PPE - but it was a problem** at the time."
* Previously "there was never a point at which NHS providers could not get hold of PPE"

** Previously a "challenge"

Matt Hancock says public trust in the government has "increased significantly" when quizzed by Anum Qaisar-Javed.

He says there is "better communication" and more "teamwork" inside government "and the public have undoubtedly noticed this improvement in the past six months or so".

Asked whether he thinks the public trusts him, he laughs and says: "You can judge that for yourself.*

"All I can say is that the approach I've taken throughout this is to answer questions as directly and straight as possible. I'm a big team player, I'm willing to say difficult things if necessary."
* Soapy is as slippery as a bar of Dove .....

On that note, I'll break for lunch .....
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10-06-2021, 02:00 PM
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Re: Matt Hancock to answer questions on handling of pandemic

The "evidence" is getting protracted and convoluted -the "headlines" are

Hancock says 'no evidence' lack of PPE led to any Covid deaths

Hancock denies involvement in procurement contracts.

Hancock claims he decided to buy 100m doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Hancock can't remember Johnson opposing second lockdown

Hancock denies serious NHS staff shortages and ICU beds

'No doubt' people picked up Covid in hospitals, says Hancock - Hunt points out that that regular testing for NHS staff wasn't rolled out across the system until November
 
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