'Groupthink' led advisers to urge UK to prepare for wrong pandemic, says ex-chief medical officer

Scientific advisers were guilty of "groupthink" when they told ministers to prepare for the wrong sort of pandemic, the former chief medical officer has told MPs.

Dame Sally Davies suggested advisers had shown "a form of British exceptionalism" in the years leading up to the Covid crisis by ignoring lessons from other countries. Instead, she said, they decided that the next disease to strike the UK would be influenza rather than a Sars-like virus.

That meant Britain never practised how to "step up" contact tracing and mass testing, unlike countries in south-east Asia which were much better prepared when Covid struck earlier this year.

Speaking at the science and technology committee, Dame Sally, who served as chief medical officer between 2010 and last year, said: "The south-east Asian countries have done better, and a lot of this is down to having some knowledge of working with these different viruses and also having sorted out test and trace, also having good manufacturing and supplies of PPE [personal proetective equipment].

"So why have we not learned from them? I think quite simply we were in groupthink. Our infectious disease experts did not think that another Sars would get from Asia to us. I think it's a form of British exceptionalism. We have not been good at learning from others."

Sir Oliver Letwin, who served as minister for Government policy in the Cabinet Office from 2010 until 2016, told the committee that the scientific advice to prepare for flu had turned out to be "not the whole truth".

"It's been pointed out that countries like Korea and Vietnam were better able to handle this particular disease because they were geared up to prevent diseases similar to it," he said. "There was indeed, I'm sure, groupthink in those scientists who advised that those diseases were not likely to affect the UK."