Poor communication between ministers and scientists was such a barrier at the start of the Covid pandemic that academics privately asked officials if they realised the scale of what was coming, Prof Neil Ferguson has said.
The Imperial College London epidemiologist, whose early modelling of the probable infection and death rate if countermeasures were not taken played a key role in the decision to impose a lockdown, told the official Covid inquiry that he and other scientific advisers had no idea what the government wanted to achieve.
Ferguson, who was a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) at the time, faced persistent questioning as to why he did not urge ministers to consider a lockdown before mid-March.
Ferguson said this was in part because he and other Sage members did not know what was being planned or thought about, and only gave scientific advice.
“There was a complete Chinese wall between Sage and Cobra [the government’s emergencies committee],” he said. “It was not as if Sage meetings started with a readout from Cobra about what the government were thinking and planning to do.
“The artificial divide between scientific advice and then operational planning and response was a hindrance. We had very little visibility of what was going on in terms of preparedness within government.”
Such was the concern, Ferguson said, that by early March 2020 he and John Edmunds, a professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who was also a Sage member, began to privately raise the alarm. Ferguson said the pair “started talking in the margins to government attenders, saying: ‘Do you know what this is going to be like?’”
By that point, Ferguson said, he was deeply concerned by what he called “a residual sense I got that some in government hadn’t really comprehended the figures, or didn’t think it was going to be as bad as it was going to be”.
He emailed Ben Warner, a data scientist brought into No 10 by Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, setting out the expected demand for hospital beds and the likely death toll, adding: “So long as the PM and cabinet accept and understand this is what is likely to happen.”
Asked why he did this, Ferguson said: “It felt uncomfortable, but at the time it felt like it needed to be said. I was increasingly concerned about this disconnect between the numbers we were actually presenting and the reality of what that would actually look like.”
Ferguson, who stepped down from Sage in May 2020 after it emerged that his partner had visited him at his home, in breach of lockdown regulations, led the Imperial team that produced modelling indicating that an uncontained Covid outbreak could kill as many as 500,000 people in the UK, a key factor behind the first lockdown.
Asked by the inquiry counsel, Hugo Keith KC, why he did not communicate this better, Ferguson pointed out that on 12 February 2020 he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that if nothing was done, up to 80% of the population could be infected in the coming months and up to 1% of them might die, adding: “I mean, I think that’s quite clear.”
He did, however, say that it was “personally somewhat frustrating” that officials waited for a second set of modelling to confirm this before acting.
While he has subsequently been portrayed in some parts of the media as “Professor Lockdown”, Ferguson told the inquiry that he was initially wary about the idea of so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as closing schools or full lockdowns.
Asked why he did not recommend such things before mid-March 2020, Ferguson said: “In part because of my belief that it isn’t the role of scientific advisers to determine policy, but also because I was very conscious of the huge economic and social costs which would be entailed by long-term and intensive use of NPIs.”
