Scientists have rejected allegations from Dominic Cummings that they played a key part in the government delaying the first lockdown, as the prime minister’s former adviser blamed a herd immunity plan for leading to tens of thousands of deaths. Cummings told the Commons science and technology select committee that the only plan, as the coronavirus spread across the UK in February last year, was herd immunity. He said he did not understand how ministers could deny it, because it was in official documents of the time. “Essentially, the logic of the official plan from the Department of Health was that this disease is going to spread,” he said. “It was seen as an inevitability. You will either have herd immunity by September after a single peak, or you will have herd immunity by January with a second peak. Those are the only two options that we have,” he said. At one point, the prime minister talked of encouraging the equivalent of “chickenpox parties”, where parents used to take their children to get infected and get the disease over with. Boris Johnson also joked that he would have himself injected with coronavirus by Chris Whitty on TV, said Cummings. Imposing a lockdown to reduce the first peak in March/April 2020 could lead to a second, bigger peak in the winter, it was believed. Nobody thought vaccines could be available in 2020. But assumptions about the reaction of the British public to lockdown was wrong, he said – and he blames behavioural scientists. In that field, he said, “there are a lot of charlatans”. “One of the critical things that was completely wrong in the whole official thinking in Sage and in the Department of Health in February, March, was the British public will not accept a lockdown,” he said. “Secondly, the British public will not accept what was thought of as a kind of east Asian-style track-and-trace type system and the infringement of liberty around that. “Those two assumptions were completely central to the official plan and were both obviously, completely wrong.”
Behavioural scientists on SPI-B, a subcommittee of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), vigorously rejected his attack. The notion that “behavioural fatigue” might set in if restrictions were imposed too early had not come from them, said John Drury, a professor of social psychology at Sussex University and a member of Spi-B. “It’s well documented now that the CMO [chief medical officer Chris Whitty] said it as part of the rationale. SPI-B submitted a note explaining why fatigue was a wrong idea without supportive evidence,” he said. Susan Michie, the director of the University College London centre for behaviour change, said SPI-B responded to questions it was asked. “We were not asked whether the British people would accept a lockdown and we weren’t asked that if there was one [last spring] there would be another worse peak in the winter. Hence we did not express opinions on it,” she said. SPI-B was shown a long document from the modelling scientists with different scenarios, she said, and asked to comment on the social and behavioural implications. “I remember one meeting that felt quite rushed to discuss it. It may be that this is the document that is being referred to,” she said. Cummings said he began to think the policy was wrong towards the end of February, after speaking to people outside the usual government circles. One of those was the mathematician Prof Timothy Gowers from Cambridge University; another was Demis Hassabis, an artificial intelligence expert and co-founder of DeepMind. Cummings also relied on the brothers Ben Warner, a data scientist whom Cummings sent to Sage meetings, and Marc Warner, the founder of AI company Faculty who was working with NHSX, a joint unit of NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care. But he also credited a senior civil servant, Helen McNamara, with warning that “something had gone catastrophically wrong”. On 13 and 14 March last year, Cummings said, he presented figures to the prime minister compiled with the help of the NHS chief executive, Sir Simon Stevens, to show how intensive care wards would be swamped as infections rose. On 16 March, social distancing was introduced. “As far as I could tell from Sage, and as far as the minutes show, the fundamental assumption remained: we can’t do lockdown, we can’t do suppression, because it just means a second peak later,” he said. Cummings said he believed the UK should have acted earlier in the way that Taiwan and South Korea did, imposing restrictions, shutting borders and ramping up testing and tracing. • This article was amended on 27 May 2021. Marc Warner was working with NHSX, a joint unit of NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care, but was not “at the DHSC” as an earlier version stated. The spelling of his first name has also been corrected.