Matt Hancock rejected advice to cut Covid isolation as it would ‘imply we’ve been wrong’

Matt Hancock rejected advice from England’s Chief Medical Officer to replace the 14-day Covid quarantine with five days of testing because it would “imply we’ve been getting it wrong”.

Mr Hancock was told by Prof Sir Chris Whitty in November 2020 that it would be “pretty well as good” for contacts of positive Covid cases to test for five days “in lieu” of a fortnight’s isolation.

WhatsApp messages between the two have also revealed that the 14-day quarantine period was likely to have been “too long all along”. 

By then, nearly a million people in England who had come into contact with an infected person had been told to self-isolate for a full fortnight, even if they had no symptoms.

Although ministers reduced the self-isolation period to 10 days in December 2020, it was not until the following August that some groups were made entirely exempt from the requirement.

In November 2020, Sir Chris and other government advisers were “in favour” of trialling the alternative system.

But Mr Hancock, the then health secretary, resisted, saying it “sounds like a massive loosening” and that removing the quarantine requirement could make it appear that ministers had made a mistake.

The release of the messages about isolation came as other leaked WhatsApps revealed how Mr Hancock fought to take credit for the success of Britain’s vaccine campaign, telling colleagues: “Everyone knows I’m Mr Vaccine and this is the route out.”

He feared being overshadowed by others, including the medicines regulator, saying that speeding up approval of jabs was a “Hancock triumph”.

Dame Kate Bingham, the vaccines tsar, was also criticised by Mr Hancock as “totally unreliable” and “wacky” after she questioned the need to inoculate the entire population.

On Sunday a former minister, MPs and scientific experts criticised the “Project Fear” narrative that has been exposed by The Lockdown Files, saying that the “psychological warfare” employed by ministers must never be repeated.

The Telegraph has revealed that Mr Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to ensure public compliance, while his team spoke about how best to use “fear and guilt”.

In the exchange with Mr Hancock on Nov 17, 2020, Sir Chris said: “CMOs [chief medical officers] and Sage [the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] in favour of a pilot with presumption in favour of testing for 5 days in lieu of isolation (alternative 10 days isolation). But needs a pilot to test this out and check it works and Mhra [the medines regulator] have not yet signed off for self use.”

Mr Hancock replied: “So test every day for just 5 days? That sounds like a massive loosening.”

Sir Chris told him: “The modelling suggests it’s pretty well as good. And we think adherence likely to be good. The modellers were in favour of 3 days (given the lag time to get a result) but we were not in favour.”

Mr Hancock initially responded that he was “amazed”. But after questioning whether it meant that the 14-day isolation period may have been “too long all this time”, he again pushed back against the scientific advice.

Mr Hancock asked Sir Chris: “So has the 14 day isolation been too long all this time?”

The Chief Medical Officer responded that self-isolating for a fortnight was only “marginally safer” than 10 and that this tiny benefit came “certainly at the expense of reduced adherence”. He concluded: “So it probably balances out.”

Mr Hancock replied: “I think moving to 7-day daily testing for contacts would be HUGE for adherence, but going below that would seriously worry people and imply we’d been getting it wrong.”

Sir Chris replied, saying that he would “go back” and speak to the other chief medical officers, adding that he thought they would be “sympathetic” to Mr Hancock’s concerns.

By the summer of 2021, mandatory isolation for contacts led to the “pingdemic”, when more than 600,000 people a week had to stay at home after the NHS Test and Trace app on their mobile phones alerted them to close contact with a Covid case.

The app was so sensitive that neighbours were reportedly being “pinged” through walls.

Industries including manufacturing, hospitality, transport and healthcare were thrown into chaos. The Government was forced to release some critical workers from the policy in a bid to keep trains running and avoid food shortages.

By the time self-isolation was totally dropped in February 2022, more than 20 million people had been told to self-isolate.

Mr Hancock has always claimed he was “guided by the science” when making policy decisions that curtailed people’s freedom to go about their daily lives.

The messages about isolation came six months after the 14-day self-isolation rule was introduced, and two months after it was enshrined in law.

From May 28 2020, when NHS Test and Trace was launched, to the day when the message was sent, 923,656 people in England were told to stay at home for a full fortnight. Many workers lost out on pay while they were waiting for the all-clear.

In the period from the day the message was sent to Aug 16 2021, when exemptions from self-isolation were announced, more than eight million people were identified as contacts of positive cases and told to stay at home.

Presented with the news that the chief medical officers believed the 14-day isolation period could be removed and replaced with just five days of testing – provided the medicines regulator signed off on at-home testing – Mr Hancock said: “This sounds very risky and we can't go backwards.” 

He then asked: “Wouldn't test every day for ten days be a safer starting point?”

Sir Chris replied: “We could push out to 7 but the benefits really flatten off after 5. We would expect symptomatic people to get a pcr test as normal.”

The self-isolation period was shortened to 10 days on Dec 14, 2020, the same day Mr Hancock announced the existence of the so-called Kent variant of Covid and said cases of this new strain were “increasing rapidly”.

Despite this change, disruption caused by the self-isolation policy escalated in 2021 as thousands of workers every day were “pinged” by the NHS Covid app and told to stay at home.

By July that year, almost a third of people said they had removed the app from their phone, according to a Telegraph poll.

A daily testing pilot for contacts was launched in May 2021. This allowed some people identified as close contacts to take daily tests for seven days rather than isolating. However, it was not offered to people contacted through the NHS app. 

From Aug 16 2021, people who were double jabbed or aged under 18 and six months were no longer legally required to self-isolate if they were identified as a close contact of a positive case. Everyone else was still legally mandated to self-isolate or risk a fine of at least £1,000.

A year earlier, scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a study in Lancet Public Health that looked at whether “test to release” could reduce or replace quarantine for contacts of positive cases.

They found that – provided all tests were returned negative – releasing contacts on day seven, or daily testing for five days without quarantine, were both just as effective at preventing the spread of the disease as making people self-isolate for the full 14 days.