Does Chris Whitty regret scaring the public witless over Covid?

‘If you go out, you can spread it. People will die.’ That was the spine-chilling message pumped out by the UK government during the spring of 2020, as the world was hit by the first wave of Covid-19. The fear-mongering over the then novel virus – from the government, from the media, from scientific experts – was relentless. Government campaigns told us in no uncertain terms that we, or our loved ones, were going to die, unless we followed the strict instruction to ‘stay at home’.

England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, who played a key role in the UK’s pandemic response, now seems to regret the government’s scare-mongering. Speaking to the Covid inquiry yesterday, he acknowledged that the risks of the virus may have been ‘overpitched’ – at least for younger, healthier people. ‘Were we either overpitching it so that people were incredibly afraid of something where in fact, their actuarial risk was low, or we were not pitching it enough and therefore people didn’t realise the risk they were walking into?’, he said. ‘I definitely think that the risk classification is really important because there are many other things that flow from [that].’

One adverse effect of the government’s scaremongering was that people were afraid to seek the NHS’s help for non-Covid health issues. ‘There is reasonable evidence… that the number of people who came into hospital with heart attacks was lower than you’d predict’, Whitty said yesterday. ‘So some of those people were staying at home, who otherwise would not have done, and they would have had remediable conditions.’ Fear killed, in other words.

Although Whitty remains adamant that lockdown was proportionate to the threat posed by Covid, it is hard not to divorce such a damaging and authoritarian policy from the broader climate of fear. The economy was shut down, the health service was suspended, education was thrown into disarray and liberties were abolished overnight. All this happened without any consideration of the collateral harms. Indeed, anyone who even asked questions or raised reservations about lockdown back then was branded a ‘Covid denier’ and accused of killing thousands of people. Sober, rational decision-making was not possible in such an environment.

Whitty may regret his role in scaring the public witless over Covid. But it seems he’s now busy behind the scenes terrifying ministers about the costs to the NHS from our lifestyles. As Tom Slater recently pointed out on spiked, the chief medical officer has been instrumental in Labour’s mooted outdoor smoking ban and limits on pub opening times. Lockdown may be over, but Whitty still wants to dictate how we can live our lives.

If anything should scare us, it is the boundless authoritarianism of the public-health establishment.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.