Covid vaccines couldn’t have been fast-tracked any quicker because the virus wasn’t deadly enough
Covid vaccines couldn’t have been fast-tracked any quicker because the virus wasn’t deadly enough, Sir Chris Whitty claimed in leaked WhatsApps
Sir Chris Whitty told ministers Covid vaccines couldn’t be fast-tracked during the early days of the pandemic because the virus wasn’t deadly enough, according to leaked WhatsApp messages.
The chief medical officer was responding to a question by Dominic Cummings in February 2020.
Mr Cummings, then chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, asked about the credibility of a report that Israeli scientists were just weeks away from developing Covid vaccines.
But Sir Chris responded that a disease with a fatality rate as low as Covid’s — saying for argument’s sake that it was around 1 per cent — would need a ‘very safe’ vaccine and that no short-cuts could be taken.
‘There will be a lot of good vaccine candidates that enter early clinical trials in the next few months,’ he said.
Sir Chris Whitty reportedly told Dominic Cummings, then chief adviser to PM Boris Johnson, that Covid jabs could not be rushed as the virus wasn’t deadly enough
Sir Chris, pictured here in January, said standard safety tests for potential Covid jabs would be critical in leaked WhatsApp messages
‘The rate limiting steps are late clinical trials for safety and efficacy, and then manufacturing.
‘For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1 per cent) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut.’
Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, also responded to Mr Cummings by saying while the Israeli team’s research could work, it wasn’t going to be a matter of ‘weeks’.
‘All of these approaches will take many months at the very and most optimistic best,’ he wrote.
‘Remember we still don’t have a vaccine that we know works for Zika yet despite lots of work over years.’
Almost 54million Brits have had at least one dose of a Covid vaccine since the roll-out started in December 2020 — just nine months after it was declared a pandemic.
The tranche of more than 100,000 WhatsApps were passed to The Daily Telegraph by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott (right), who was given the material by Matt Hancock (left) when they were working together on his book Pandemic Diaries
But Mr Cummings would famously go on to claim to MPs in May 2021 that the UK’s vaccine rollout could have started months earlier in September, if the nation had abandoned traditional safety tests in favour of a ‘human challenge’ trial.
This would have seen ‘up to 10,000’ volunteers injected with the virus with their families given ‘£1 million or whatever’ if they died, the former advisor said.
Before Covid jabs became available, the general fatality risk of dying from the virus was estimated to be around 1 per cent.
However, individual risk of death from the virus, for example for the elderly, or for people with health conditions that made them more vulnerable to becoming severely ill with the virus, could be much higher.
Once vaccines started to blunt the impact of the virus, the chances of dying fell to about one in 3,000 — similar to seasonal flu.
The WhatsApp group the messages were posted in included ministers, experts, and officials.
MailOnline has not seen or independently verified the WhatsApp messages, leaked to The Daily Telegraph by Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who helped ex-Health Secretary Matt Hancock write his book Pandemic Diaries.
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