Sir Patrick Vallance says the Eat Out to Help Out scheme is "highly likely" to have increased Covid deaths in the UK
Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, tells the Covid inquiry he was not consulted on Rishi Sunak's policy, which was aimed at supporting businesses
Sunak has said in a witness statement that he does not recall any pushback from scientists over the scheme
Earlier the inquiry heard a diary entry by Vallance describing Boris Johnson as a "weak and indecisive" prime minister
Vallance said the comments were made in a "late-night moment of frustration" with government decision making
The inquiry has also heard that Vallance described Johnson as "clearly bamboozled" by Covid science - but that he was not the only Western leader to struggle
Johnson - who will give his own evidence - is also said by Vallance to have been "very sceptical" about long Covid, and briefly suggested the virus should be allowed to "rip" through the population
Vallance has also criticised Matt Hancock - the health secretary at the time - alleging that he said things "too enthusiastically and too early... without having any evidence"
The former chief scientific adviser has also said key policies were not introduced early enough - including lockdown measures
Vallance is asked now about a period when Boris Johnson had Covid during March and April of 2020.
There was a period where he was “really unwell” and struggled to “concentrate on things”, Vallance says.
But after recovering and taking a few weeks to return “there was no obvious change between him and what he was like beforehand”.
Vallance is asked whether he is used to his advice being received in this way, given that he has worked with a number of governments.
"Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings were extremely keen to get scientific advice," he replies.
"As you can see, it wasn't always easy to provide it in a way that was understandable and actionable."
He adds that he doubts that the sorts of things described in the inquiry are "terribly surprising" to most people.
Image source, Crown CopyrightWarning: This post contains some strong language
We're moving on to a diary extract from September 2020 where Vallance has described some of the PM's behaviour in detail.
The lawyer picks out a line about a time when the PM, having returned from a Battle of Britain memorial service, was "distressed by seeing everyone separated and in masks" at a meeting.
Vallance's diary reads: "[PM] starts challenging numbers and questioning whether they really translate into deaths."
The extract says Johnson "looked broken - head in hands a lot", and quotes the PM saying "We are too shit to get our act together".
Vallance admits it was "difficult at times" to provide advice to the PM - this was an example of where he would have waited for a better opportunity to get across scientific concepts and spoken to others instead.
Image source, Crown CopyrightVallance is pushed now on information detailed in his diary which Andrew O'Connor KC says shows a “repeated failure” by Boris Johnson to understand things like graphs and scientific concepts, and regularly forgetting things he has recently been told.
Patrick Vallance says that the prime minister acknowledges himself that he gave up science when he was 15.
He notes this was not an issue unique to Boris Johnson, and recalls a meeting of science advisers from across Europe, where an adviser from one country said "the leader of that country had enormous problems with exponential curves” - something which raised a laugh in the meeting, as all the leaders had that issue.
"It was hard work sometimes to make sure [Boris Johnson] had understood what a graph of a piece of data was saying and I learnt from a number of meetings … there were certain things that would catch his eye and would work for him, and other things that wouldn't work for him," he says.
Andrew O'Connor notes that as the prime minister, it was "critical" Boris Johnson understood what he was being told - a point Vallance agrees with.
Jim Reed
Senior Health reporter
Vallance is being asked about how he was required to provide scientific advise to key decision makers.
He said earlier that only 10% of the civil servants hired as part of the government's graduate intake programme had a science, maths or engineering degree, with 90% coming from a humanities and social science background.
"It means that the routine consideration of science in policy formulation was not where it needed to be," he told the inquiry earlier today.
Earlier witnesses, including the No 10 adviser Dr Ben Warner, have raised similar concerns, saying they were worried about the lack of scientific skills in key government departments.
Vallance says the government now has a target for 50% of all fast track recruits to have a science or mathematics background by 2024.
He adds he will "look with interest from the sidelines to see whether it's achieved".
Image source, Crown CopyrightReturning to Vallance's diary entries, the lawyer highlights an instance where the chief scientific officer says former PM Boris Johnson was "clearly bamboozled".
The entry reads: "Late afternoon meeting with PM on schools. My God this is complicated and models will not provide the answer. PM is clearly bamboozled".
In response to a question about why politicians may have used this mantra, Vallance explains that there was a "great variability and uncertainty" with science in government.
He says people who have not had scientific training may view science as "immutable facts" - when in fact it is a "process" involving "overturning hypotheses" in order to advance.
Because this was not intuitive to everyone, Vallance says, there may have been "a bit of dependency" on the idea that the pandemic was a "scientific problem" - and, he says, ministers would "slightly hide behind it" at times.
Patrick Vallance is asked about the government using the mantra they were "following the science", and how the phrase implied there was a single view of what the science meant.
"When it was first said 'we're following the science', my reaction was 'good, they're listening to us'," he says, noting that it isn't always the case in government.
He says the implication in the way the phrase was heard in that politicians were "slavishly following the science" was completely wrong.
"I can also totally agree that there is no such thing as 'the science'. Science by its very definition is a moving body of knowledge."
Vallance explains his pandemic 'brain dump' notes
The inquiry is back after a short break, but here's a recap on what we've heard from Sir Patrick Vallance so far:
Jim Reed
Health reporter
Just before the inquiry took a short coffee break, Vallance was asked a crucial question: Could the first lockdown in March 2020 have been avoided?
He replied that if a fully functioning test, trace and isolate system had been in place by that point, then there would have been a "better chance" of keeping Covid under control.
That was the case in some Asian countries, such as Taiwan and South Korea, which had seen outbreaks of two related viruses in the decade before: Sars and Mers.
Vallance said that kind of system - where every case is traced and contacts quickly put in quarantine - can only work at "low levels of prevalence".
And by the middle of March 2020 the UK was already seeing a sharp rise in cases, driven not by infections from China but by tourists coming back from their half-term breaks in Spain, France and Italy.
"With everything that we had in place or didn't have in place at the time, I'm afraid that the sort of ultimate option of trying to lock things down probably was the only route open at that time," he concluded.
Nick Triggle
Health Correspondent
There has been much focus on the mistakes made by ministers at the inquiry in recent weeks, but Sir Patrick Vallance admits scientists were also at fault.
Firstly, they underestimated how quickly the virus was spreading – this came to a head on the weekend of 14 and 15 March when new data suggested the NHS was at risk of “imminent” collapse.
He went on to say there was a fundamental error made by scientists that they believed they could accurately predict when and how far to apply measures to restrict contact among the public to control the virus.
He described it as a “scientific problem”, adding Covid could not be managed with the “precision” the government’s experts were thinking they could.
The learning was that “you had to go early”, he added.
Answering questions about the timing of when the lockdown was introduced, Patrick Vallance says he thinks the decision to lock down was made at “probably the earliest” point possible, due to the information available.
However, after that decision was made, there was a week-long delay in bringing it in.
“I’m not an expert in how you implement these things, how you operationalise these things, what the legal requirements are," he says.
"And there were some very significant legal requirements around that, and that took another week or 10 days for that to be in place.”
The lawyer again returned to the key weekend of 14 and 15 March.
Vallance says information showing the pandemic was "far bigger" and "moving faster" than expected came out on 13 March.
He said it became clear by the Sunday - and he made his views known - that "more stringent measures" would be needed to be introduced quickly.
On Monday, voluntary measures were announced.
He argues an "in principle, the decision" was taken on the 14 and 15 March weekend that a lockdown was required - but that it took a few more days to work that into a full mandatory process - which was announced the following week on 23 March.
Whether the lockdown was "mandatory or voluntary" is a "political issue", he says, "not a scientific one".
The inquiry is now taking a 15 minute break.
While they do that, we are going to catch you up on what else has been said.
The questioning moved into the relationship between Patrick Vallance and the Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty (who will give evidence tomorrow).
An extract from Sir Jeremy Farrar’s memoir is presented, which notes a “Palpable tension between Patrick and Chris in the early weeks of 2020”, something aggravated by a lack of political leadership.
Some extracts from Vallance's diaries are shown, in which Vallance wrote that Whitty was concerned about "pulling the trigger too soon”, and called him a "delayer" in bringing in harsher Covid measures.
"Chris Whitty is a public health specialist, and he was rightly in my opinion concerned about the adverse effects of the virus," says Vallance.
He notes that Whitty had concerns about "the indirect harms", including how measures would affect the NHS, and things like isolation, loneliness, and poverty.
"He was definitely on the view that the treatment and the result of that treatment needed to be considered together," he says, adding he was "more on the side of we need to move on this".
Vallance notes their conflicting positions on this meant they worked well together.
Vallance is being asked whether "alternative plans" like lockdowns should have been imposed earlier than they were when the pandemic first hit.
He replies that this was not a major issue with the government's response - "operational readiness" was.
"Operational development of plans" to implement NPIs (measures for individual protection such as social distancing and handwashing) were not advanced enough, he says.
The roll out of test and trace was also a problem, Vallance says.
We've been hearing a lot about government policies to bring the R number to one.
R is the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on average.
If R is one, each existing infection causes one new infection.
So it is a way of measuring the virus's ability to spread.
Andrew O'Connor KC is asking Vallance about the weekend of 14 and 15 March, the penultimate weekend before the first lockdown was introduced in the UK.
He questions whether, if analysis of NHS hospital capacity had been done earlier, the government could have been informed earlier than the NHS was going to be "overwhelmed" by R1 - the virus's ability to spread.
Vallance says people knew by February that this could happen.
He says that what changed on the weekend in March was that "numbers came in" that showed that Covid was "accelerating faster than anyone had expected".
This "triggered an urgent recognition" that there was an "imminent problem" of the NHS collapsing - this was not something that was weeks away, he says.
Jim Reed
Health reporter, BBC News
Vallance just made an important point which was quickly picked up by Baroness Hallett.
He was being asked about the early stages of pandemic - in February 2020 - as cases started rising in the UK and hospitals in northern Italy started to come under pressure.
He said researchers, including Prof Neil Ferguson from Imperial College London, had been working to understand the level of restrictions that would be needed to reduce Covid transmission in this country.
A rough estimate of a 75% reduction in contacts between individuals would be needed, he added.
But - crucially - Vallance added: "I am not convinced that there was a very effective operational response to that".
Using diplomatic language he is saying that, although the scale of the crisis was starting to become apparent, policies were not put in place fast enough to deal with it.
The conversation quickly moved on but Baroness Hallett interjected and asked Andrew O'Conner KC, the lawyer asking the questions, if he would return to that point.
He agreed he would later in the session.
We are hearing a bit now about the modelling which took place to ensure that the NHS had enough beds to provide for increased demand.
We are seeing on screen emails from Vallance to No 10 about the modelling for additional bed numbers.
He accepts when asked that modelling beds should have been relatively straightforward, and says it was looked at in February 2020 - and it was clear the NHS would be overrun at some point.
He says what the concern was involved the modellers having “better information” so they could understand when the health service being overrun “would occur”.
Vallance says it "would have been helpful" to have clarity from the government on what an acceptable rate of mortality from the virus was.
"We asked several times to try and define a number and nobody would give that," he says.
The focus was on "the NHS not being overrun," Vallance adds.