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Key takeaways as Whitty and Vallance give evidence to Covid inquiry

Pair say UK lacked capacity to ‘scale up’ testing and treatment, and not enough was done about health inequality

By finlay johnston
Key takeaways as Whitty and Vallance give evidence to Covid inquiry
Boris Johnson flanked by Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance at the UK's first coronavirus press conference, 16 March 2020 | Richard Pohle – WPA Pool/Getty Images
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England’s chief medical officer and chief scientific adviser during the Covid pandemic have faced the UK’s public inquiry for the first time.

Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer (CMO), and Patrick Vallance, who was chief scientific adviser (CSA) between 2018 and 2023, frequently flanked Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock during daily Covid briefings. Both said today that the UK did not have sufficient capacity to scale up testing and treatment programmes when the pandemic struck.

Whitty, giving evidence this morning, said: “We had a very good capacity to do a very small amount of diagnosis really quickly [but] we did not have the ability to scale up – and I could repeat that across multiple other domains.”

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