The former Health Secretary Matt Hancock has denied reports this morning that he chose to reject the Chief Medical Officer’s advice to test for Covid all residents going into English care homes during the first lockdown
The Telegraph has obtained 100,000 WhatsApp messages handed to the paper by Isabel Oakeshott who argues that releasing them now is in the public interest because the official COVID inquiry — to which Hancock claims to have submitted all this — could take years to conclude.
The paper reports that Hancock did not follow advice from Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty to test all residents going into English care homes for the coronavirus. Instead, he decided to test those being admitted from hospital but not the community, saying that doing the latter “muddies the waters.”
A spokesman for the former Health Secretary says the exchanges have been doctored that the Telegraph omitted the first part of the message, where he noted he “wasn’t in [the] testing mtg” that had happened earlier.
At this meeting, they claimed, it was established that it wasn’t feasible to test everyone being admitted to care homes from the community.
More than 39,000 people died of COVID in care homes across the country between March 2020 and April 2021
