(Health): Lockdown ‘Damaged a Generation’, says former Chief Medical Officer

 

Dame Sally Davies holds back the tears as she tells Covid inquiry that children are still suffering from the effects of national shutdowns

Lockdown “damaged a generation” of children, the country’s former top doctor has told the Covid inquiry.

Prof Dame Sally Davies, who was chief medical officer for England from 2011 to 2019, before Prof Sir Chris Whitty, helped the Government plan for a future pandemic.

She admitted to the official inquiry that “no one thought about lockdown”.

Dame Sally said she was upset by the impact of Covid and lockdown policies on children and young people, despite being in favour of the first national shutdown.

Now the master at Trinity College, Cambridge, she said she had seen the damage done to children and that it had been awful “watching young people struggle”.

It comes as a new study, published in The Lancet, suggested that lockdown fuelled a “staggering rise” in eating disorders among teenage girls, with cases surging by 42 per cent.

Dame Sally told the inquiry: “It’s clear that no one thought about lockdown. I still think we should have locked down, although a week earlier.

“But during that we should have thought: do we need to [think] further?

“The damage I now see to children and students from Covid, and the educational impact, tells me that education has a terrific amount of work to do.”

She added: “We have damaged a generation and it is awful as head of a college in Cambridge watching these young people struggle.

“I know in pre-schools they haven’t learned how to socialise and play properly, they haven’t learned how to read at school. We must have plans for them.”

The inquiry also heard evidence from George Osborne, the former chancellor, who suggested that the West copied the idea of lockdowns from China.

Dame Sally is one of the first former government officials to criticise lockdown, amid allegations that the long-awaited inquiry is “limiting outside voices” on the policy’s negative effects.

She also told the inquiry that the Government would have benefitted from weighing up the wider impact of measures and listening to “a second group of experts” advising on social and economic impacts. She held back tears as she apologised to bereaved families for the failings.

The first national lockdown was announced in March 2020 by Boris Johnson, then the prime minister, and lasted until June.

A second was announced in November that year and a third followed in January 2021, with many areas also facing localised rules.

Dame Sally, who was also the chief scientific adviser for the Department of Health between 2004 and 2016, apologised that plans to prepare for a pandemic had not examined the impact on civil liberties.

She was asked if one of the more notable failures of pandemic planning was not foreseeing the need for lockdown.

“I’m sorry, we didn’t plan for that,” she responded.

“I would prefer to have planned to not get us to that stage, but we didn’t recognise that it could – something could get to that stage and then how would we manage it.”

Several senior figures including David Cameron, the former prime minister, have admitted the UK focused on the wrong pandemic – worrying about influenza instead of a new emerging virus.

Dame Sally said she put up some “challenge” to what she described as “groupthink” around flu by raising the alarm about Mers and Sars outbreaks abroad, but wished she had done more.

Appearing to hold back tears, she told the inquiry: “Maybe this is the moment to say how sorry I am to the relatives who lost their families.

“It wasn’t just the deaths, it was the way they died. It was horrible. It was harrowing and it remains horrible.”

Giving his evidence, Mr Osborne admitted that lockdown had not been discussed when he was chancellor between 2010 and 2016, and that he believed governments had copied measures implemented by the authoritarian regime in Beijing.

“I think the Chinese lockdown is what gives the rest of the world the idea of a lockdown, and it’s the overwhelming of the hospital system in northern Italy that leads all Western governments to reach basically the same conclusion,” he said.

He also criticised experts and unions blaming austerity for failures during the pandemic. He said that rebuilding the public finances had better prepared the country for Covid.

The inquiry also heard from Oliver Letwin, the minister in charge of resilience in government from 2011 to 2016, who said so-called churn within the Civil Service – whereby officials repeatedly move posts – was “a disaster for the country”.

He described some elements of Whitehall bureaucracy as “totally catastrophic”.

The inquiry resumes on Wednesday and will hear evidence from Jeremy Hunt, who was health secretary between 2012 and 2018 as the Government made preparations for a pandemic.

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