Matt Hancock says ministers were told COVID could kill 820,000 people in UK

Published

3 years ago

December 5, 2022

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Matt Hancock has said he was warned the COVID pandemic could kill hundreds of thousands of people in the UK two months before the country was put into lockdown and claims ministers “did not really believe it”.

The former health secretary said the chief medical officer for England, Professor Sir Chris Whitty, informed him in January 2020 that, in a “reasonable worst case scenario”, as many as 820,000 could die.

Mr Hancock said when he passed on the warning to other ministers at a cabinet meeting three days later, the reaction was “shrug shrug” as they did not really believe it.

The details are revealed in Mr Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story Of Britain’s Battle Against Covid, serialised in the Daily Mail and The Mail+.

He said that on 17 January, Sir Whitty warned that there was a “50:50” chance that the virus would reach Britain and laid out the figures.

“The whole room froze. We are looking at a human catastrophe on a scale not seen here for a century.”

However, when he shared the warning with a Brexit Day meeting of the Cabinet on 31 January, he said it was met largely with indifference.

“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.

Johnson: ‘It will probably go away’

Mr Hancock also suggested that Boris Johnson had been reluctant to engage on the issue.

When he first raised the outbreak in China with him in early January, his response had been: “You keep an eye on it. It will probably go away.”

A month later he said he warned Mr Johnson that while it might still be possible to contain the virus, it was “more likely we’re going down”. The reply, he said, was simply: “Bash on.”

More than 200,000 people with COVID have died in the UK, figures show.

The details were released as Mr Hancock returned to Westminster for the first time after his controversial appearance on I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!

Hancock defends release of care home residents

Mr Hancock also defended his handling of the controversial decision to release care home residents from hospital without testing, which was blamed for thousands of deaths.

On 2 April, he noted: “The tragic but honest truth is we don’t have enough testing capacity to check anyway. It’s an utter nightmare, but it’s the reality.”

In April, the High Court ruled the government acted unlawfully by discharging untested hospital patients into care homes during the early stages of the pandemic.

The first national lockdown began on 23 March 2020.

World

Israel’s PM tries to get on front foot in propaganda war he knows he is losing

Published

4 hours ago

August 11, 2025

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Israel's PM tries to get on front foot in propaganda war he knows he is losing

Israel’s prime minister added more detail to his deeply controversial plans for military escalation in Gaza at a news conference with foreign media yesterday – despite the condemnation of the UN Security Council, which met in an emergency session and urged him to rethink.

Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of a “fairly short timetable” to establish designated “safe zones” for the one million or so set to be displaced from Gaza City.

He also vowed to seize and dismantle Hamas’s final strongholds there – in the central refugee camps, and in al Mawasi, along Gaza’s southwestern coast.

This, per Netanyahu, is the only way to destroy the terror group, which he claimed “subjugates Gazans, steals their food and shoots them when they try to move to safety”.

Al Mawasi is already home to a significant displaced population, most of whom live in tents cramped up against the Mediterranean Sea, in what is already a designated humanitarian zone.

If members of Hamas live among them, rooting them out will be hugely complicated and will involve significant civilian casualties. If the residents of Gaza City can’t evacuate south to al Mawasi, where will they go?

Netanyahu’s plan is to set up more aid distribution sites through the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and to flood Gaza with food.

He claimed his policy was not one of forced starvation – describing particular photos of starving babies as “fake news”, and accusing the media of painting a false picture.

“The only ones who are being deliberately starved in Gaza are our hostages,” the prime minister claimed.

I asked Netanyahu how he would go about preventing the kinds of daily killings taking place at aid distribution points in the months since GHF has been operating.

Doctors Without Borders has described these incidents as deliberately orchestrated.

The prime minister said increasing the amount of aid heading into the Strip was the answer.

“And by the way, a lot of the firing was done by Hamas seeking to have a response by our forces,” he added. “And very often they didn’t, they held back. They stayed their own fire even though their own lives were on the line.”

This was Israel’s prime minister trying to get on the front foot in a propaganda war he acknowledged he was losing. He was loath to admit the presence of famine in Gaza.

It took two questions before he acknowledged there was “deprivation”, even if he would not be drawn on whether his 11-week total blockade of the strip earlier this year had played any role.

He recognises that the appalled response of the international community to the human cost of this war, and the accusations of war crimes and genocide which Israel so vehemently rejects, are a terrible look.

This was his attempt to reclaim the narrative.

World

Defiant Netanyahu sets out plan for military escalation in Gaza – and describes photographs of starving babies as ‘fake news’

Published

11 hours ago

August 10, 2025