Prof Sir Jonathan Van-Tam and his family were advised by police to move out of their home during the pandemic because of a threat that they would have their throats cut, he has told the Covid inquiry.
In other evidence given on Wednesday, it emerged that Prof Sir Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, said that the scale of threats against him meant he had close police protection for nine months.
Van-Tam, one of Whitty’s deputy chief medical officers during the pandemic, said he was worried that the scale of hate from people who objected to lockdown measures could put off others from doing jobs like his.
“My family didn’t sign up for that,” he said. “I did not expect the police to have to say, ‘Will you move out in the middle of the night or in the middle of the evening for a few days while we look at this and potentially make some arrests?’
“I make this point because I’m so worried that if there’s a future crisis, people will not want to sign up for these roles and these jobs, because of the implications that come with them.”
Van-Tam said he and his family chose not to move out as advised because there was no one who could look after their cat, but said it was a “very stressful time indeed”.
Such abuse and threats came from a very small number of people, Van-Tam said, adding that he wanted to thank the “vast, vast, vast majority of public” who were, and remained, supportive of his role.
In Whitty’s written statement to the inquiry, published at the end of his evidence on Wednesday, he said he and other scientific advisers “received substantial abuse and hostility from a minority”.
Whitty wrote: “In my case, I was advised by the Home Office that the threat was sufficiently high that I had to have police close protection for nine months. Others had threats made to their families.”
The inquiry heard evidence that Van-Tam – who has now left government and is a consultant for Moderna, which developed one of the primary Covid vaccines – was among the first government advisers to raise concerns about Covid, sending an email in early January 2020 to Whitty and others highlighting his concerns about the situation in China.
In the email, Van-Tam caveated the alert using one of the football-linked metaphors for which he became well known at Covid press conferences, saying it came from an infectious disease website called ProMed, which was “somewhat akin to a football transfers website (excitable in January)”.
Asked whether he had been keener to alert the government about the threat than Whitty, Van-Tam said this was the case, but he fully supported what Whitty did, saying “he knew when to press buttons when I didn’t”.
Van-Tam added: “I’m the one who chases the ball, and Chris is the one who looks at the ball and makes a more qualified decision about whether it is worth chasing.”
He said he agreed with Whitty that in retrospect the first lockdown in mid-March 2020 should have been imposed one to two weeks earlier, but cast doubt on the idea that earlier action could have eliminated the need for any lockdown.
“For me, the balance of probabilities, looking at just how infectious this virus was proving to be in places like Italy, France, that there were almost certainly no alternatives,” he said.
“My view is that we would have first run out of high-intensity care beds. and it is possible within a couple of weeks, if we had not acted when we did, that we would have reached a position where the number of people requiring admission with Covid – severe enough to require hospital care – could not have been admitted, with some pretty awful potential considerations at that point.”
