The UK’s chief scientific adviser has said part of her job during the pandemic was to “paper over the cracks” when issues arose between academics and civil servants on several occasions, the Covid inquiry has learned.
Prof Angela McLean, who at the time was the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, said most of the time academics advising the government would speak “pointedly” on issues, but civil servants spoke in “weirdly emollient” ways at meetings.
“It was mostly that an academic on SPI-M-O [scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling, operational] had told a civil servant why they were wrong in some way that the civil servant felt was rude,” she told the inquiry.
“I was in contact with people saying: ‘I’m sorry, that was upsetting for you. They didn’t mean to be rude to you personally. What they were talking about was your work,’” McClean said.
The professor said the “best collaborators will listen and ask why” conclusions were made at certain times in order to get to the truth. But she recalled civil servants standing up in meetings and immediately saying they agreed with everything that had been said, which left her thinking: “Well, you can’t have been listening.”
“I don’t think they mean it, actually. I think it is sort of saying that means: ‘I’m here to work with you. We have things we have got to deliver,’” she added.
The inquiry also heard from Kemi Badenoch, who said giving minority ethnic people priority access to Covid vaccines or financial support, as recommended by experts, was “racial segregation”.
The equalities minister said it would have been wrong for the government to “do things which were less viable, less effective in order to deal with the emotional feelings of people who didn’t like vaccines or wanted other levels of support”, insisting she was always very mindful of “stigmatisation” and felt households and families should have been targeted instead of minority ethnic people as a group.
Badenoch claimed that if ethnicity had been recorded on death certificates earlier in the pandemic, the disproportionate impact on minority ethnic people could have come to light “a little bit earlier”, and questioned why it took so long for it to be recorded in the first place.
During the pandemic, McLean regularly attended meetings of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), and she co-chaired the subgroup that used epidemiology, data analysis and mathematical modelling to help inform the government’s response.
The professor told the inquiry of her distrust of the Treasury’s ability to handle data during the pandemic, “given their inability to spot egregious errors”.
Last month, the inquiry heard McLean had sent a secret message calling Rishi Sunak “Dr Death the chancellor” during a meeting attended by both in the Covid crisis.
Academics had created a simple “toy model” that kept things as “simple as possible” to teach policymakers about how infectious diseases work.
But the Treasury had changed the model, the inquiry heard, and did not make its own modelling transparent. In an email exchange, McLean said of the department: “Given their inability to spot egregious errors in other things they were sent, I do not have any confidence in their ability to hack a simple, sensible, model.”
McLean also told the pandemic inquiry that the problem of outbreaks in care homes was a foreseeable problem. Asked whether she expected there would be problems, she replied: “Yes. I think you only have to look at historical big epidemics, particularly of respiratory infections, that you would have expected that.”
Asked if the incidence of outbreaks and problems within care homes was something that was a “foreseeable issue from the outset of the pandemic”, she replied: “Yes.”
She added: “It was clearly going to be an issue. Of course, at that very early stage we did not have many tools in our pockets for helping, and testing would have been one of the few things we could do.”
