London – Britain’s former health minister denied wrongdoing on Wednesday after a newspaper published extracts of private messages he sent in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Daily Telegraph said the exchanges show then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock ignored scientific advice to test everyone entering nursing homes for COVID-19. Hancock said the WhatsApp messages had been deceptively edited, with leading lines removed to give a “distorted account”.
Hancock said he had wanted to test everyone entering care homes for coronavirus, but the UK lacked the capacity at the time, so the priority was to test people leaving hospital at home.
“The messages imply that Matt has simply rejected clinical advice. This is categorically untrue,” said a statement issued through a spokesperson. “He went as far as possible, as quickly as possible, to expand testing and save lives.”
Like many countries, the UK had little capacity to test for coronavirus when the pandemic began. The virus spread rapidly through nursing homes in the first months of the country’s first outbreak of 2020, leading to an estimated 20,000 deaths.
Britain will hold a public inquiry into the authorities’ handling of the pandemic, but the hearings have not yet started.
Hancock’s statement said “the proper place for this analysis of what happened in the pandemic is in the investigation.”
The Telegraph said it received 2.3 million words from Isabel Oakeshott, a journalist who helped Hancock write a memoir. Oakeshott, a critic of the strict lockdowns imposed during the pandemic, defended the leaking of the messages, saying she had done it to avoid a “whitewashing” of the crisis.
James Bethell, who served as junior health minister under Hancock, said “the reality was that there was a very, very limited number” of coronavirus tests in the early months of the pandemic.
“The thing that stopped us was not a disagreement about clinical advice. It was just the operational ability to give tests,” Bethell told the BBC.
Hancock resigned from the government in June 2021 after breaching social distancing rules then in place by kissing an aide with whom he had an affair in his office at the Department of Health.
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