The UK government withheld key information on health policy from the scientists tasked with modelling the pandemic during 2020, the Covid-19 inquiry was told today.
Giving evidence to the second module of the inquiry, Graham Medley – a professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine – claimed the government had failed to share details of its own policies for managing the pandemic, or to tell scientists what it considered a successful (or “less worse”) outcome. In his written evidence to the inquiry, he said this prevented the group from helping the government as much as it could.
During the pandemic, Medley was chair of a sub-group of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that advised the government on Covid-19 based on infectious disease modelling and epidemiology. The sub-group is known as SPI-M-O (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational sub-group).
