Thread by @PaulNuki

1/ There's a lot of balls circulating about the UK's pandemic response and specifically *herd immunity*. Yet most of it is fully documented. Here's a thread pulling together some of the key points...

2/ Did the UK have a herd immunity strategy? YES, it was always the default. We had no other plan. The idea of suppressing the virus via lockdown etc was made up on the hop in late March when it became clear the NHS would be overwhelmed. Everyone knows that.

3/ Why did we not have a suppression plan? This is more interesting and the answer is that the DH/PHE/Cab Office explicitly rejected the idea when it reviewed the nation's pandemic strategy in 2010/11 assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

4/ As you can see from the report, it considered all the main options - do nothing, mitigation and suppression. And it clearly understood what those different options would mean in terms of deaths ...

5/ So why if it knew there was an alternative did it not plan for it? The answer is given on p54 of the report. They didn't think there was enough evidence and they were worried about the cost...

6/ Did other countries reach the same conclusion? Absolutely not. NZ and much of east Asia had suppression plans ready to go and they were used to great effect. Even in the US, a suppression plan was put in place ahead of time stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/11425

7/ Michael Lewis's new book The Premonition is a brilliant account of how the US suppression plan was put together. Unfortunately, the Orange Clown ignored it. If you read just one book on the pandemic make it this one amazon.co.uk/s?k=the+premon…

8/ So the UK had a herd immunity strategy by default because it had explicitly rejected the idea of trying to suppress a new virus in the event of an outbreak.
But surely the gov would have changed tack had it tested its flawed plan in advance - in 2016, say?

9/ Alas not. In 2016, the UK held Exercise Cygnus. Just as with Covid, the result was catastrophic but ministers concluded the answer was not a new strategy but more body bags. And to be fair, we haven't run out of body bags .... telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/2…

10/ Did the findings of Cygnus ever go to Cabinet? Yes. Jeremy Hunt presented them when May was PM. Boris was there as Foreign Sec. The discussion was very brief but the then Brexit Sec @DavidDavisMP saw there was a problem telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…

11/ Mr Davis called for a separate Cabinet meeting to be dedicated to the issue but that never happened. The UK pandemic plan, therefore, went unchanged until Covid-19 arrived just three years later....

12/ So @DominicCumins is right when he says herd immunity was the plan? YES - in the sense that it was the default. There was no suppression plan in the UK pandemic strategy when it was dusted off in January 2020. Let it rip was the only option...

13/ Did herd immunity ever become the *explicit* (rather than implicit) strategy? This is not yet known but certainly, someone briefed to that effect in early March just ahead of a key Cobra meeting on March 12 spectator.co.uk/article/Herd-i…

14/ Why would anyone be so daft as to use such a phrase openly? As me and @sneweyy suggested last May, it looks like part of an ill-fated attempt to justify sheltering the most vulnerable at the 11th hour telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…

15/ Bloody hell! So Cummuings is a bit of a hero then? Not really. As far as I can tell, he only got involved in March - by which time it was already far too late. For a suppression plan to have worked it would have had to be deployed in early Feb telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…

16/ Is there a hero? Not in the UK. As Michael Lewis says in The Premonition, the US had a small group of heroes who did everything right but ultimately failed. In the UK, it was much the same but without the first bit.

17/ Apologies. Wrong @Dominic2306 account earlier on. Here's his epic thread

https://twitter.com/Dominic2306/status/1394245014440529921?s=19