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Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee Oral evidence: Coronavirus: Lessons learnt, HC 95 Wednesday 26 May 2021 Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 26 May 2021. Watch the meeting Members present: Greg Clark (Chair); Aaron Bell; Paul Bristow; Dawn Butler; Greg Clark; Chris Clarkson; Rosie Cooper; Dr James Davies; Dr Luke Evans; Katherine Fletcher; Jeremy Hunt; Barbara Keeley; Mark Logan; Rebecca Long Bailey; Carol Monaghan; Taiwo Owatemi; Sarah Owen; Anum Qaisar-Javed; Dean Russell; Graham Stringer; Zarah Sultana; Laura Trott. Questions 944-1240 Witnesses I: Dominic Cummings, former Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister. Examination of Witness Witness: Dominic Cummings. Q944 Chair: The Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee are undertaking a joint inquiry into the lessons that can be learnt from the UK’s response to the covid pandemic. The public inquiry, which the Prime Minister has announced, will most likely take evidence and report well after most of the pandemic is over. Our inquiry, we hope, will be complementary to this, being focused on lessons that can be learnt already and which can be applied during the months ahead to benefit decisions that will have to be taken during those months. Of course, the evidence we gather in our inquiry will be available to the public inquiry. We will hear from the Health Secretary in just over two weeks on 10 June, after which we will make our report to Parliament. Just a word on how we will organise this morning’s proceedings. This is a hybrid meeting, with some members of the Joint Committee joining remotely and some in person. We will have four sections. The first is about the early days of the pandemic, which I will chair. My colleague Jeremy Hunt will then chair a discussion on lockdown measures and the performance of Test and Trace. I will then chair a section on vaccines. Jeremy will chair the final section on the lockdowns of the autumn and winter period. We will have a short pause between the sections during which the cameras will be briefly turned off. I am very pleased to welcome Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to the Prime Minister from July 2019 to November 2020. Good morning, Mr Cummings, and thank you for offering to appear. Perhaps I can start with some general questions about the background to the covid pandemic before turning to my colleagues. In your Rose Garden statement, you said, “For years I have warned of the dangers of pandemics. Last year I wrote about the possible threat from coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning.” Indeed, your blog of March 2019 warned of escapes of viruses from labs in Asia posing “a real danger of a worldwide pandemic that could kill human beings on a vast scale.” On 22 January, Wuhan, a city the size of London by population, was sealed off from the rest of the world. On 30 January, the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern. Given that context and what you had thought about this over the years past, did this set alarm bells ringing? Did you think what you had thought about in advance was happening? Dominic Cummings: I think it is right that the public’s representatives are trying to figure out what happened and the lessons to be learnt. I hope you will get all the senior people involved in here to speak to you about it. The truth is that senior Ministers, senior officials and senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its Government in a crisis like this. When the public needed us most, the Government failed. I would like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that were made, and for my own mistakes at that. Regarding the beginning of this crisis, yes, you are right that I, like many people, had talked about this before. When it started in January, I did think in part of my mind, “Oh my goodness—is this it? Is this what people have been warning about all this time?” However, at the time PHE here and the WHO and the CDC—generally speaking, organisations across the western world—were not ringing great alarm bells about it. I think in retrospect it is completely obvious that many, many institutions failed on this early question. I can’t remember the precise date, but the truth is that I think the Taiwanese Government basically hit the panic button on something like new year’s eve of 2019. That might not be the exact date, but within a few days. They put into effect a plan that they had figured out from having been terrified of previous outbreaks, like SARS and whatnot. They immediately closed the borders, they produced various new quarantine systems, they did a whole bunch of things right off the bat in January, but I think it is obvious that the western world, including Britain, just completely failed to see the smoke and to hear the alarm bells in January. There is no doubt about it. There were meetings— Q945 Chair: Do you remember a time when you personally were seized of the importance of it? Dominic Cummings: Well, I talked to people in January about it. On something like 25 January, I said to the private office in No.10 that we should look at pandemic planning. I said that I wanted to go to Porton Down and talk to some of the people up there about it. I think it was on the same day—possibly one day before or after—that I said to Matt Hancock, “Where are we in terms of scanning the pandemic preparations plans? Are we completely up to speed on this? Is it resourced the way that it should be? Etc, etc.” Q946 Chair: So that was about 25 January? Dominic Cummings: Do you want me to get the exact date? Chair: If you have it. Dominic Cummings: Yes, it was 25 January on both things. On 25 January I spoke to private office and on 25 January I said to the Secretary of State— Q947 Chair: When you say “said”, was that a conversation, a memo or a text? Dominic Cummings: I have got the exact words of a text that I sent him. I think I spoke to him, possibly the next day, at a meeting about it, as well. I said, “To what extent have you investigated preparations for something terrible like Ebola or a flu pandemic? Please ensure we take a risk-averse approach to funding preparations in the SR”—SR is an abbreviation for spending review—“I am going to dig into this plus bioterror.” To which Hancock replied, “We’ve got full plans up to and including pandemic levels regularly prepped and refreshed, CMOs and epidemiologists. We are stress testing now. It is our top tier risk register. We had an SR bid before this.” I replied, “Great. I am reading about the CDC and preparations for a flu pandemic. It is very worrying.” So— Q948 Chair: So on 25 January you instigated a set of inquiries within the system. Would you— Dominic Cummings: However, I would like to stress and apologise for the fact that it is true that I did this, but I did not follow up on this and push it the way that I should have done. We were told in No.10 at the time that this is literally top of the risk register. This has been planned and there have been exercises on this over and over again. Everyone knows exactly what to do. It is sort of tragic in a way that someone who wrote so often about running red teams and not trusting things and not digging into things— While I was running red teams on lots of other things in Government at this time, I didn’t do it on this. If I had said at the end of January, “We’re going to take a Saturday and I want all of these documents put on the table. I want it all gone through and I want outside experts here to look at it all,” then we would have figured out much, much earlier that all the claims about brilliant preparations and how everything was in order were basically completely hollow. We didn’t figure this out until the back end of February. Q949 Chair: Thank you; we will come on to more detailed aspects of that. In terms of those texts that you referred to that first documented your concerns and your involvement, will you share them with the Committee after the meeting? Dominic Cummings: Sure, yeah. Chair: Thank you. Dominic Cummings: Just to be clear, there were conversations about it before that, in January, in No.10. Obviously, it was periodically on the news. It would sort of flare up and be big news, and then it would die out again. I don’t want to imply that that was the first time No.10 talked about, because that’s not the case. There were conversations in No.10 about it right in the first week back in January. Q950 Chair: When we talk about No.10, there are lots of people who work in No.10. When did you talk to the Prime Minister about it first? Dominic Cummings: It was definitely raised with the Prime Minister in the first half of January, for sure, because it was on the news.