Matt Hancock said that Government ministers responded to a terrifying warning about the impact of Covid with a "shrug shrug" two months before the UK was placed into its first lockdown.
The MP, who was the UK Health Secretary from 2018 to 2021, said that he was informed by England's chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty in January 2020 that up to 820,000 people could be killed from the virus in the UK in a "reasonable worst-case scenario". But Hancock said that he was met with indifference when he passed the dire warning on to fellow ministers at a Cabinet meeting on 31 January.
“The reaction was somewhat ‘shrug shrug’ – essentially because they didn’t really believe it. I am constantly feeling that others, who aren’t focused on this every day, are weeks behind what’s going on,” he said.
