Kemi Badenoch 'very concerned' about Covid conspiracy theories
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Kemi Badenoch is “very concerned” about Covid conspiracy theories, she told the Inquiry.
Ms Badenoch said people still approach her in the street and “tell me that I am part of a grand conspiracy to infect them” and that it is “very disturbing”.
The former minister for equalities in No10 during the pandemic added: “I don’t think government’s got a handle on dealing with misinformation.”
She said social media and information “travelling at speed across the world” compounded the issue.
It comes after Prof Dame Angela McLean, who once referred to Rishi Sunak as “Dr Death”, was questioned on Thursday morning.
03:27 PM GMT
The Inqury has ended for the day
The Covid Inquiry has ended for the day. It will resume on November 27 at 10.30am with the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan due to be questioned.
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Check the website for the latest updates.
03:19 PM GMT
Too much focus on health impacts of virus, says Badenoch
Ms Badenoch told the inquiry that there was too much focus on the health impact of the virus and that more should have been done to look at the economic impact of lockdown.
Asked what the greatest lesson we can learn to improve going forward after the pandemic was, she said: “I think another area that we should have done more on was on the economic impact. We were looking very much at the health side and I think that we should have looked at the economic impact of lockdown.
“I think that now you’re seeing many outcomes which are related to, you know, the missing children in schools, for example, what happened to them. No one’s quite got to the bottom of the economic impact of lockdown, how that triggered even more inequality further down, even if people had furlough or safety net.”
She added: “I’m not sure that that work was done because we were very, very focused on the health side. And I think when we have these sort of grand problems we need to have multiple lenses through which we’re looking at them, and this is hindsight analysis, but the fact that we looked at things purely from a health perspective without opportunity costs analysis, what was happening looking at it through another lens, I think we should not have done that.”
02:58 PM GMT
Misinformation following the pandemic 'very concerning'
Kemi Badenoch said she is still “very concerned” about misinformation following the pandemic, and thinks the Government has yet to get a handle on dealing with the issue.
She told the inquiry of how people come up to her in the street and “tell me that I am part of a grand conspiracy to infect them” and that it is “very disturbing”.
“I don’t think government’s got a handle on dealing with misinformation,” she added. “I don’t think that we have adapted to this age of social media where information travels at lightning speed across the world. I don’t know how we solve it.”
02:29 PM GMT
Badenoch: Not possible to prepare for pandemic
It was not possible to prepare for the pandemic or have a government response ready and waiting, according to Kemi Badenoch.
She told the Inquiry: “You can’t skill up quickly for a pandemic and you can’t have a pandemic-sized response sitting there waiting all the time.”
The former minister for equalities added: “A pandemic like that, and the amount that we were doing, I’m not sure there would ever have been enough capacity.”
02:12 PM GMT
Joining forces with disability ministry wouldn't have made difference, says Badenoch
When asked why she didn’t join forces with the minister for disabilities when it became clear disabled people and ethnic minority groups were being impacted disproportionately, Kemi Badenoch said she thought it wouldn’t have made a difference.
She told the Inquiry: “I think just because you’re looking at things separately doesn’t mean there is a hierarchy of needs.
“The evidence showed that disabled people were more impacted, and we were keen to ensure that it was the people who were most impacted that got the most attention.”
02:08 PM GMT
Comforting upset civil servants was my job during pandemic, says top scientific adviser
The Government’s top scientist had to comfort civil servants upset by academics they thought were rude during the pandemic, the Covid Inquiry heard.
Read the full story by Neil Johnston and Blathnaid Corless here.
02:00 PM GMT
The Inquiry has resumed
The Covid Inquiry has resumed following a lunch break. Quesitoning of Kemi Badenoch continues.
01:02 PM GMT
Covid Inquiry is breaking for lunch
The Covid Inquiry has finished its morning session. It is due to restart at 1.50pm.
01:00 PM GMT
Badenoch says term BAME 'masked what happened' within different ethnicities
Kemi Badenoch said she had concerns regarding the terminology used in a report published by Public Health England looking at the disparities in risk and outcome of Covid-19.
She said the use of the term BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) “masked what was actually happening within different ethnicities by lumping people who are black with people who are Asian”.
She said this “umbrella term” could make it harder to look at the “underlying factors” causing.
Ms Badenoch said the term “completely obscures different bits of information”, and from an analysis perspective she said it was “not particularly helpful”.
12:47 PM GMT
Badenoch sworn in to give evidence
Kemi Badenoch has now been sworn in and is giving evidence to the Inquiry.
Ms Badenoch served as minister for equalities in No10 during the pandemic, until July 2022. She is currently serving as Secretary of State for the Department for Business and Trade.
12:33 PM GMT
Second lockdown a 'terrible moment', Inquiry hears
Dame Angela described the decision to implement the second lockdown as a “terrible moment” in her written evidence.
She told the Inquiry this was because “the thing that we had been trying to avoid by having smaller interventions at lower [Covid] prevalence had had to be done”.
“It felt like March all over again. We wait until the last possible moment - we delay and delay a decision, and then we have to slam the brakes on as hard as possible with the attendant social costs and economic costs.”
12:04 PM GMT
Scientists 'not consulted' about Eat Out to Help Out
Scientists were not consulted about the government’s Eat Out to Help Out initiative, Prof Dame Angela McLean has said.
The scheme gave diners a 50 per cent discount at restaurants in August 2020.
Asked what advice she would have given about it, she told the Covid-19 Inquiry: “It would have been longer lines of advice that we were giving routinely, which is that there wasn’t much room for increasing mixing and the kind of mixing that should be avoided is between households indoors.
“So, we would have said ‘could you not find some other way to stimulate the economy?”‘
11:53 AM GMT
Repeat circuit breakers may have been better than long lockdowns
Short “circuit-breaker” lockdowns would have been more effective than prolonged restrictions during the pandemic, Prof Dame Angela McLean has told the Covid Inquiry.
“There were plenty of good reasons why intermittent short lockdowns could well have worked better than the long, harsh lockdowns that we had to live with because we put them off to the last possible moment,” she said.
The government’s chief scientific adviser said repeat circuit breakers should have been adopted from September 2020 onwards.
“This is when we needed to do it,” she said.
“Interventions that keep a epidemic flat are not as bad, not as damaging as the ones that you have to impose if you have got to get cases down really fast.
“That was the time to act and we kept saying so... we couldn’t understand why we weren’t explaining clearly enough that this is what we needed to do.”
11:38 AM GMT
UK 'could not have eliminated Covid' like New Zealand
Prof Dame Angela McLean has told the Covid Inquiry that the UK could not have eliminated all Covid cases in the same way as New Zealand and Australia did.
Inquiry counsel Joanne Cecil asked: “Looking back now, would elimination have ever been possible based on what is known?”
Dame Angela responded: “Certainly not after we had seeded the epidemic the way we did after half-term in February.”
11:24 AM GMT
Government thought UK was 'halfway through pandemic' in April 2020
The government held “mid-way reviews” in April 2020 as if the UK was halfway through the pandemic, Prof Dame Angela McLean has told the Covid Inquiry.
The chief scientific adviser said there were concerns at the beginning of the crisis that decision-makers did not understand the seriousness of the virus.
In her witness statement to the inquiry Prof Dame Angela wrote: “I do not know what people in Government understand the characteristics of Covid-19 to be, but we were worried that for whatever reasons, decision-makers had not taken on board quite how serious it was.
“I remember one early meeting in the MoD where I said that this would take at least 18 months, which was met with disbelief.
“There were ‘mid-way’ reviews in April 2020 as if we were halfway through the pandemic.”
11:10 AM GMT
Britain should have gone into lockdown 'two weeks earlier'
Prof Dame Angela McLean has said the government should have introduced lockdown two weeks before it actually did so on 23 March 2020.
“You’ve already heard from colleagues that it was too late,” the government’s chief scientific adviser said. “So, if we did a ‘with benefit of hindsight’ exercise here, I would say it should have been two weeks earlier.
“That would have made a really huge difference.”
Without hindsight, Dame Angela said there was enough information available at the time to justify bringing in lockdown on 16 March.
“I think on the 16th, given what we knew about how fast this epidemic was spreading, given what we knew and could surmise about the fact that probably everybody was susceptible to catch it, I think there was enough information on that date to say we need to stop all non-essential contact,” she said.
10:57 AM GMT
Hancock, Raab and Gove to appear at Inquiry next week
Matt Hancock, Dominic Raab and Michael Gove will be among those giving evidence to the Covid Inquiry next week.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham will also appear, alongside former health secretary Sajid Javid.
10:55 AM GMT
Inquiry resumes after break
Proceedings at the Covid Inquiry have resumed after a 15 minute break.
10:55 AM GMT
Treasury could not spot 'egregious errors' in data
The Treasury failed to spot “egregious errors” in data during the pandemic, Prof Dame Angela McLean has said.
The government’s senior scientist said academics created a simple “toy model” for use in training policymakers “about how infectious disease systems work”.
However, the Inquiry heard that the Treasury had played around with and changed that model.
In an email exchange in relation to this, Dame Angela said: “Given their inability to spot egregious errors in other things they were sent, I do not have any confidence in their ability to hack a simple, sensible, model.”
10:29 AM GMT
Care homes outbreak was 'foreseeable'
Asked if the issue of outbreak in care homes during the pandemic was foreseeable, Prof Dame Angela McLean replied: “Yes”.
She added that Sage had said early on that attention would need to be paid to care homes.
“It was clearly going to be an issue,” she said.
“Of course, at that very early stage we did not have many tools in our pockets for helping and testing would have been one of the few things we could do.”
10:24 AM GMT
McLean had to 'paper over the cracks' between academics and civil servants
Prof Dame Angela McLean said there were times she had to “paper over the cracks” when difficulties arose between academics and civil servants.
Asked if differences in approach caused any difficulties during the pandemic, the Government’s chief scientific adviser said: “There were several occasions when I had to paper over the cracks, I would say.
“It was mostly that an academic on SPI-M-O (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational) had told a civil servant why they were wrong in some way that the civil servant felt was rude.”
She added that it was her job and she was “very happy to do it”.
“I was in contact with people saying ‘I’m sorry, that was upsetting for you. They didn’t mean to be rude to you personally. What they were talking about was your work’,” Dame Angela said.
10:10 AM GMT
Speed of decisions UK's 'most significant pandemic shortcoming'
Prof Dame Angela McLean said there was a “lack of appreciation that very quick decisions were needed” when it came to dealing with the exponential growth of the virus.
This was the “most significant shortcoming” in decision-making during the pandemic, she said.
Prof Dame Angela wrote in her witness statement to the inquiry that the “approach of ‘watch and wait’ was, in itself, a decision capable of producing damaging consequences.”
She added: “From my perspective, this is an important lesson for the future as it represented what appears from my perspective to be the most significant shortcoming in decision-making during the pandemic.”
10:03 AM GMT
Rishi Sunak was described as “Dr Death” by the country’s most senior scientist
Rishi Sunak was described as “Dr Death” by the country’s most senior scientist during a pandemic crisis meeting that discussed the Eat Out To Help Out scheme, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry heard.
Dame Angela McLean, who became the first female Chief Scientific Adviser earlier this year and sat on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) during the Covid-19 pandemic, made the comments in private messages to a colleague during a Zoom meeting chaired by Boris Johnson.
During the meeting, titled “Should the Government intervene now and if so how?”, in September 2020, she also sent a WhatsApp to fellow Sage member Prof John Edmunds where she described Prof Carl Heneghan, a prominent lockdown critic, as a “f---wit”.
Read the full story by Senior Reporter Neil Johnston.
09:46 AM GMT
Welcome to The Telegraph's live coverage of the Covid Inquiry
Welcome to The Telegraph’s live coverage of the Covid Inquiry.
Professor Dame Angela McLean has arrived and is being questioned with Kemi Badenoch expected to appear this afternoon.
