Nafeez Ahmed reports on Home Office private advice suggesting a ‘zombie herd immunity’ policy risking hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Leaked recordings of a Home Office conference call on Tuesday, exclusively obtained by Byline Times, reveal that the Government has all but given up in its fight against the Coronavirus and is intent on simply finding “a method of managing it within the population”.
The recordings show Home Office Deputy Science Advisor Rupert Shute stating repeatedly that the Government believes “we will all get” COVID-19 eventually. The call further implied that the Government now considers hundreds of thousands of deaths unavoidable over a long-term period consisting of multiple peaks of the disease.
Premature Defeatism
While urging the importance of reducing the burden on the NHS by staying at home, Shute downplayed the risk of people contracting the virus at work.
He said: “It’s perfectly okay to carry on around your business. And it’s vitally important that you do as there’s a whole bunch of supply chains and the economy that needs to continue running… So carrying on with your normal work is not putting you in harms way anymore so than staying at home or going out shopping. So I keep coming back to this point that we are all going to get this at some point. And it’s about making sure that we have a really strong NHS there to support us when we do get sick.”
The policy being communicated by the Home Office privately among Government staffers is at odds with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s statement at a press conference three weeks ago that the next 12 weeks could “turn the tide of this disease”.
Selective transcripts of the recordings were published by BBC News and widely reported across the British press from there. But the BBC News story focused primarily on fears that the Home Office’s insistence on staff showing up to work for Her Majesty’s Passport Office would put them at heightened danger of contracting COVID-19.
While valid, this angle failed to cover the leak’s wider revelations regarding the Government’s broader strategy. A fuller analysis of leaked recordings obtained by Byline Times reveals that the Government remains committed to the idea that the vast majority of the UK population will contract COVID-19, making a minimum number of deaths inevitable, albeit over a longer period of time.
Using the Government’s own lowest estimate of a fatality rate at around 0.5%, this confirms that it has resigned itself to the expectation that some 264,000 Britons will inevitably die in ensuing months and years from the disease.
Which Model?
The recordings provide a sobering insight into how the scientific advice feeding into Government policy is evolving – without, however, being meaningfully communicated to the British public or being subjected to external scientific scrutiny.
During the Home Office call, Rupert Shute spent significant time explaining what he described as the “scientific advice that sits behind the Government guidance”, which he said unmasks “the gravity of the situation we find ourselves in globally”.
The strategy sounds almost indistinguishable from the previous ‘herd immunity’ approach which the Government has attempted to distance itself from.
Reflecting on the “reality of the situation”, he said that “we will all be exposed to it at some point”. According to the “current modelling we are working on, 80% will get it – of that, a large portion won’t notice that they have it. Another substantial portion will have very, very mild symptoms. And a small portion will have a very significant reaction”.
Shute repeatedly insisted that “we can’t hide away from it forever, but we can manage the way in which we are exposed”.
The Home Office refused to provide any further clarification on the modelling the Government was using to justify this projection.
UK Government strategy, he confirmed, is not attempting to contain the spread of the virus, but simply to slow down “the rate at which we get this virus [which] has direct impact on the NHS. It’s vitally important that we don’t get it at the same time. But that does not mean we won’t still get it at some point… We’ve got to keep functioning our lives, go out for food and medication, and go out for work”.
Shute’s comments indicate that the Government’s strategy remains at odds with World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines. On 11 March, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on governments to continue working to stop the spread of COVID-19: “Let me be clear: describing this as a pandemic does not mean that countries should give up. The idea that countries should shift from containment to mitigation is wrong and dangerous.”
In contrast, the leaked Home Office recordings reveal Shute speaking at length on the idea that COVID-19 is here to stay. This may well be the case, but epidemiologists and public health experts have argued that it is still too early to simply admit defeat.
Zombie Herd Immunity?
Meanwhile, New Zealand Government science advisors are aiming to “squash” COVID-19 after just two weeks of lockdown. Their strategy is consistent with the approach explained to me by former WHO director Anthony Costello, who has argued that an eight-week suppression strategy even now could begin to bring the spread of the virus “under control”.
“The evidence base is now very much heading in the direction that COVID-19 is something that humanity is going to have to learn to live with, and to manage it,” said Shute. “It’s certainly not something we’re going to be able to squash and eliminate. The current interventions are to see within [indecipherable] a few weeks whether we can find a method of managing it within the population. That is just a managing of it, that is not an elimination of it.”
The strategy sounds almost indistinguishable from the previous ‘herd immunity’ approach which the UK Government has attempted to distance itself from. Shute warned that he expected the virus would likely not disappear for “many months and many years” and that, as a result, while waiting for a vaccine, we would inevitably see repeated resurgences of the virus.
He said: “We’re in this for the long haul. Talk for the moment is around a peak and managing the current outbreak. This doesn’t mean that isn’t going to be second, third, fourth, fifth or even more peaks as we go into many months and many years. In the absence of a vaccine there is nothing to stop this virus… Life is never going to be normal again. How far away from normal is yet to be worked out and fathomed… We’re going to have to get used to a different way of living with this at home and at work.”
Balancing Deaths and Bad Science
In this context, Shute also claimed that current social distancing measures were already killing people.
“So we need to find ways where we can still function as a society,” he said. “And we are acutely aware that the measures which are in place at the moment aren’t without their side-effects… There’s been other forms of death that are starting to increase as a direct result of these measures. We have to balance two different approaches – do nothing and a lot of people will die; do something and some people might die. So this is a really hard tension to deal with there.”
However, the Home Office was unable to provide any data to substantiate Shute’s assertion that the lockdown was already causing “some” deaths in the UK.
The Home Office was unable to provide any data to substantiate Shute’s assertion that the lockdown was already causing “some” deaths in the UK.
Shute provided scientifically incorrect advice on the length of time that COVID-19 can survive on surfaces. Referring to “various international research projects looking at survival on hard surfaces and clothing”, Shute said that “so far it’s showing that it doesn’t hang around very long at all. So you’re talking about 24-48 hours. You then need to have a transmission path from that into your system. And that’s where washing your hands becomes a key and strong part of it.”
But widely publicised scientific studies show that COVID-19 can in fact survive on hard, shiny surfaces like plast