There was a "bit of a row" when former no 10 senior adviser Dominic Cummings said he wanted to attend Sage meetings during the Covid-19 crisis, the UK Covid-19 public inquiry has heard.
England’s chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty said: "When it was known that Mr Cummings himself sometimes came to Sage, this caused quite a row actually, I wasn’t the person who made the decision to make that possible."
Whitty has taken the stand at the official Covid inquiry today in a highly anticipated evidence session.
He was at the heart of decision-making during the pandemic, working closely with then prime minister Boris Johnson and others at the top of government.
During yesterday’s session, it emerged that Sir Patrick Vallance, the former government science adviser, privately referred to Whitty as a lockdown “delayer” as “palpable tension” emerged between the two over policy.
Sir Patrick made an entry in his own diary in February 2021 in which Sir Chris had spoken to him about the inquiry they knew was coming, and whether the lockdown in March 2020 had been imposed too late.
“He was a delayer of course,” Sir Patrick wrote.
