Matt Hancock rejected advice from Sir Chris Whitty that self-isolation should be slashed over concerns it would ‘imply we’ve been getting it wrong’.
WhatsApp exchanges from November 2020 show that England’s Chief Medical Officer thought it would be ‘pretty well as good’ for close contact of positive cases to test for five days rather than staying at home for two weeks.
But the former Health Secretary warned the approach was a ‘massive loosening’ of the rules that would ‘seriously worry people’ and ‘imply we’d been getting it wrong’.
The messages, the latest to be published by The Telegraph, also reveal that the MP for West Suffolk was determined to spin the rollout of Covid jabs as a ‘Hancock triumph’.
WhatsApp exchanges from November 2020 show that England’s Chief Medical Officer (left) thought testing for five days to be ‘as good’ as two weeks of staying at home. But the former Health Secretary (right) warned the approach was a ‘massive loosening’ of the rules that would ‘seriously worry people’ and ‘imply we’d been getting it wrong’
The tranche of more than 100,000 WhatsApps were passed to The Telegraph by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott (right), who was given the material by former Health Secretary Matt Hancock (left) when they were working together on his book Pandemic Diaries
On November 17 2020, Mr Hancock asked Sir Chris about the status of ‘test to release plans’.
At this point, people with confirmed or suspected Covid only had to isolate for 10 days but close contacts had faced a 14 day quarantine.
There was also a legal duty to quarantine and those who broke the rules could be fined £1,000 — increasing to £10,000 for repeat offenders.
Sir Chris said that the UK’s Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) and SAGE, a group of scientists that advised No10, backed daily Covid tests for five days instead of isolating among close contacts.
He suggested that it would need to be piloted initially to ‘check it works’ and noted that the UK’s medicines watchdog had not yet approved Covid tests for self use.
But Mr Hancock replied: ‘So test every day for just 5 days? That sounds like a massive loosening’.
Sir Chris said: ‘The modelling suggests it’s pretty well as good [as isolating for two weeks]. And we think adherence likely to be good.’
The former Health Secretary said he was ‘amazed’. ‘This sounds very risky and we can’t go backwards — wouldn’t test every day for ten days be a safer starting point,’ he said.
Sir Chris said: ‘We could push out to 7 but the benefits really flatten off after 5. We would expect symptomatic people to get a pcr test as normal’.
Mr Hancock questioned whether the two week isolation advice had bee ‘too long all this time’.
The policy drove down cases by around four per cent compared to 10-day isolation but ‘almost certainly at the expense of reduced adherence’, Sir Chris said.
Data from SAGE at the time suggested just one in five people fully complied with the self-isolation rules.
Mr Hancock said: ‘I think moving to 7-day daily testing for contacts would be HUGE for adherence, but going below that would serious worry people and imply we’d been getting it wrong.
‘Presumably we can explain some of the shorter period because the test would pick up the disease before symptoms’.
Sir Chris said he would feed this back to the other CMOs who he thought would ‘be sympathetic to this’.
The Government reduced self-isolation to 10 days on December 14, four weeks after the exchanges between the two men.
A statement from the UK’s CMOs confirming the rule change said: ‘After reviewing the evidence, we are now confident that we can reduce the number of days that contacts self-isolate from 14 days to 10.’
By summer 2021, the policy developed into the use of the NHS Test and Trace app, which alerted people if they had been in close contact with a positive case and told them to self-isolate for up to 10 days.
But the resultant ‘pingdemic’ saw up to around 600,000 people isolate per week, with the app being so sensitive that people were being needlessly ‘pinged’ through their walls if their neighbour was infected.
Sir Chris said that the UK’s Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) and SAGE, a group of scientists that advised No10, backed daily Covid tests for five days instead of isolating among close contacts. He suggested that it would need to be piloted initially to ‘check it works’ and noted that the UK’s medicines watchdog had not yet approved Covid tests for self use. But Mr Hancock replied: ‘So test every day for just 5 days? That sounds like a massive loosening’
Parts of the country ground to a halt and ministers were forced to release key workers from quarantine to keep the NHS, transport and food supply services functioning.
A daily testing pilot had been launched in May 2021, which saw those taking part allowed to take a daily test for seven days rather than isolating. However, this did not apply to people contacted via the NHS app.
By August 2021, children and double-jabbed Brits no longer had to isolate if they were a close contact. However, they were advised to take a PCR test and had to quarantine for 10 days if they tested positive.
Self-isolation was finally ditched in February 2022, by which point more than 20million Brits had been told to stay at home, according to The Telegraph.
MailOnline has not seen or independently verified the WhatsApp messages, leaked to The Telegraph by Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who helped Mr Hancock write his book Pandemic Diaries.
Other newly-released messages show Mr Hancock was told by advisors that the public would ‘forgive’ him for being supportive of lockdowns if he could claim vaccines as his success, leading the MP to try to be the face of the campaign.
Mr Hancock’s media special adviser Damon Poole sent Mr Hancock a link to a Daily Mail article in January 2021 which reported that the jab rollout was accelerating.
He MP replied: ‘I CALLED FOR THIS TWO MONTHS AGO. This is a Hancock triumph!’
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