are and how we have collected data to see people's lives? we are and how we have collected data to see people's lives?— are and how we have collected data to see people's lives? we have used data i think, — to see people's lives? we have used data i think, better, _ to see people's lives? we have used data i think, better, in— to see people's lives? we have used data i think, better, in the _ to see people's lives? we have used data i think, better, in the health i data i think, better, in the health care over the last year than ever before. and we have proven the point that you need high quality rigorous use of data and data architecture that protects privacy, to make sure that protects privacy, to make sure that people can be reassured that some of the conspiracy theories are just that. whilst making sure that you can improve care. and really the proof point of this argument is the success of the vaccination programme. both its operational success, because we drew up a very high quality data architecture right at the start... learning the lessons that we had learnt during the crisis, but also in terms of how thatis crisis, but also in terms of how that is then applied on the ground. we use data to be able to target groups who need an author of the

vaccine brought closer to home —— offer. to make sure they get the opportunity to have the vaccine, and the opportunity to consent to do that. so that's just one example of how this has improved, but there is so far to go for the nhs to really get the value out of the darter. —— data. the country has got used to dashboards now. from daily briefings. how do you see that playing out moving forward outside of the pandemic, do you think that information will continue to be available? there are huge strides forward we need to keep pushing on. using data for research purposes for new treatments, get them fast to people. using data to make sure we can

better manage things and have better coordinated delivery of care for instance. using data to take preventative action to stop people getting ill. we will launch a data strategy for the department that will set this out in detail. when you planned that? in the next few weeks. we made big strides but there is a lot further to go. would you say moving forward especially as a lesson from the pandemic that data will be at the heart of the nhs moving forward? i very much hope so, the opportunities are huge, opportunities are huge, opportunities to save lives, improve care, for the uk to be at the forefront of research. one small example, the recovery trial based out of oxford university led to the discovery dexamethasone could save

lives from covid, overi million people are alive today who would have died, that is the latest estimate, because of that discovery based on high quality nhs data in the recovery clinical trial, that is a really good example of the sort of thing we can do. from a personal perspective, so many people now where abdulle watches, chack with apps, their phone, in the 19th century, people donated organs, it seems now people can save lives by donating data anonymously and securely, do you see that? yes, of course, my view is every citizen should allow their data to be used anonymously and carefully for research purposes. we have seen that in covid. huge numbers came forward and signed up for that approach. i think it is something we

can learn. i would say the public as a whole and everyone across the uk has far more used to dealing with data and their health data in particular. the final thing i will sit on this because i know you want to move on, is the data on your personal health, your health record, in my view that belongs emphatically to you, not your gp, not the nhs, thatis to you, not your gp, not the nhs, that is your data and people should be able to care for you based on that data. and if you want it to be used for research purposes that is your decision. one small question, looking at organisations like abdulle that are good at collecting data, do you see an opportunity to partner more with those big organisations, to say, could we find a way to use that to help people? 7 lp people. he up help people? up to a point but what matters is we

maintain people's trust and consent. personally i would be happy to do that but people need to be brought with us. thank you. i think you will find your predecessor health secretary has the same view on health data. on the topic of vaccines, i will be as quick as i can. on behalf of the committee, we hope you might come to speak to us further. they have been the triumph of the whole thing, the development, procurement, has been world class, doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be learned. i wanted to ask you from quote from a last october, "matt hancock is the only person who thinks there will be a vaccine, it is a running joke with other departments." is that an accurate reflection of your position

in government with the vaccine and who do you think that boat may have come from? i have no idea who said that and others may speculate. it was a view that was held amongst some but the whole health family was absolutely determined to get a vaccine over the line. we first talked about it in january and the advice was it would take a year, 18 months, if everything went well, and i set the team the target of getting on with that within the year and i am incredibly proud of the team. dominic cummings said vaccines were taken out of your department to make sure it was done successfully with the vaccine task force, was that the right move? there was a big effort on vaccines. alok sharma played a vital role, because the industrial side and the science budget, but the deployment

is on my side of the fence. the head of deployment, wejust is on my side of the fence. the head of deployment, we just worked together as a team. some people who were not very involved in vaccines and never believed they would happen. and i would say partly because we just got on with it and we did not have interference, that is one of the reasons why the vaccine project was so successful. we brought in kate bingham did an amazing job, we brought in kate bingham did an amazingjob, one we brought in kate bingham did an amazing job, one of the reasons she did is because she brought with her huge amount of talent, and had the same team attitude. there were some times when i had to make big calls and was happy to do that but most of the time i let the team get on with it. on that one, did you as was reported, increase the budget, a personal interference? yes, but it is unfair to say that

was overruling, the advice was to buy 30 million doses, i said we needed enough for the whole adult population even if other vaccines came off. so i decided we needed 100 million and got agreement with that across whitehall. there were other areas, for instance, oxford university who had done this brilliantly, were initially lined up with a different vaccine company but i was determined we would have uk manufacturer within a uk provider —— with a uk provider and critically make sure we had an exclusive contract to those critical early doses. and when the other manufacturer was not willing to sign up manufacturer was not willing to sign up to those conditions, we switched to astrazeneca and oxford signed the deal with astrazeneca big government support and the rest is history. i

had my red lines on this and i provided the resources and leadership, tried to come to make it happen. but this is not my personal success, it is a massive, massive team effort. so you said earlier about three hours ago now that you advised it would take five years on the 20th of january. it would normally take five years. at that point moderna had already designed their vaccine, the genome of the covid—19 was identified on 11 january, they had their vaccine tonight —— designed on the 13th, the first trial dose was on march the 16th. could we have done things even quicker? i except it has been breakneck. what lessons do you learn and what should the scientific community learn and should we have adopted human challenge trial given the devastation to economic and health? it is worth asking an expert like

jonathan van—tam or clive dicks if you want a view on whether we could have accelerated human challenge trials. my view was, i pushed for the system to go as fast as possible, for them to use human challenge trials. but i was not prepared to go faster than the sites would credibly allow. and when it came to other clinical trials, i do hope that for varied vaccines we can get them through quicker because the platform will have already been approved, and the agreement we made in oxford last week at g7 level will undoubtedly speed up future vaccine production. the reason is at the moment in each country, clinical trials are essentially separate because the design of the data standards can be different in different countries, and therefore you cannot always amalgamate the

data, and therefore get the extra power you would need to get a clinically validated result sooner, as soon as you could if the data standards where the same and therefore the data was into operable. this may sound technical but the consequence of that clinical trials charter that we aim to implement rapidly will be that we will be able to get both vaccines and treatments faster and with a more diverse range of clinical trial treatments. it is that sort of granular hard work improvement that we need to do to make sure we are better prepared and can do these things faster still in future. yes, absolutely. i understand you did not want to compromise on safety and regulatory approaches, but do you think there was an element of groupthink in the scientific community that did not recognise the scale of what the world was facing required a change to scientific methods to try to produce these

things even quicker? no, i would say the nhra under doctorjun raine did and it's done thejob of removing doctorjun raine did and it's done the job of removing anything that was on the critical path while maintaining safety standards. probably the most important innovation, you have to ask her, that they came up with was the idea of a rolling data which meant, instead of doing the trial, having the data package, submitting that to the data package, submitting that to the nhra, then them analysing it, the nhra, then them analysing it, the main vaccine companies opened their data to the nhra during the process. they still needed to check the final results but that took a number of days, not weeks. one other thing we have learned which is the nhs itself has such good data systems now that after deployment you can track the effectiveness of a particular treatment whether it is a

vaccine or a medicine. therefore deployment in the nhs is itself a very large clinical trial. that raises a longer term question of whether the helsinki declaration that currently is the guiding international treaty, not a treaty, principle on clinical trials, could be improved to take into account the fact now in later stage you are actually watching what happens but that has to be done carefully, rigorously, with scientific backing of the experts. you can'tjust wave a magic wand and say this could have gone faster, because you have to make sure you have the clinical confidence in safety, efficacy, otherwise things would not work. the proof point of that is we managed to get the vaccine at record times but still have uptake in 96, 90 7%, we

have the highest enthusiasm for vaccines in the world because we took the approach we did, and we didn't eitherjust remove steps that were required for safety. critically were required for safety. critically we did not stop clinical trials early as they did in other countries on —— and on hydroxychloroquine, some figures decided early it was right and declared victory on it. but when the recovery chance or its route to the end with a clinically validated sticks physically accurate answer, found no benefits in hydroxychloroquine. you have to follow the signs on this and this is one area where britain absolutely nailed it, and political intervention to undermine that science would have been wrong. so i was willing to drive and intervene where appropriate but i absolutely would not undermine the science in this area and there is one reason it worked so well. if we can finish, this is lessons learned for the uk but i think there

are lessons for the global scientific community, we talked about some of the things sage got wrong, internationally that the who got wrong, do you think they got it wrong on the origins of coronavirus, we have now seen this lab the hypothesis gaining credibility around the world with intelligence agencies and scientists. do you think the who that is down at the start of the pandemic? i do not know and nobody knows. i know the clinical advice and that is public. but i think it is vital that we have a fully independent investigation in china into finding out all we can about this and that is allowed to happen without being encumbered, and part of the reforms we need to the way the world by systems operate is to make sure we

can properly find answers to these questions. at the moment it is impossible to know. it will be hard to get into china but do you feel let down by the way the british scientific establishment backed up the original position of the who without any real evidence for doing that? no, i don't. for doing that? no, idon't. i for doing that? no, i don't. ithink for doing that? no, i don't. i think that we need to get to the bottom of this. but of course for the day—to—day management of a pandemic, the origin is only of secondary consequence. what matters is the problem you have in front of you. for learning the lessons and avoiding future pandemics, these things are very important. thank you. secretary of state, thank you for spending so much time with the committee today, i think all of us appreciate that. we know that in march things were obviously frantic and you have said this morning that

you had limited information and working at pace. by september we should have had a clear idea of what we were dealing with so i would like to ask some questions about that. in september the prime minister rejected the sage advice for a short circuit breaker lockdown. dominic cummings told us two weeks ago that the prime minister took that decision without consulting cabinet, and without any formal advice against a lockdown. what is your recollection of the decision process? process ? well, process? well, the challenge of having a two week so—called circuit breaker is that, the question of what you do at the end of the two weeks. in wales they did try a two week lockdown and at the end of the two weeks the cases started to go up again. the scientific theoretical argument for a two week circuit breaker is if everybody on the planet did not see a single other person on the planet

for two weeks then the disease would not be able to pass on. but unfortunately in real life, that obviously can't happen. so the practical question in this period was what action to take to slow the spread of the pandemic, and we turned to the tiered system and international lockdown in november, and in this time, we had the growing problem that we only fully knew about in early december of the new variant that made life so much more difficult. did the prime minister discussed this circuit breaker that sage was advising with the cabinet? i suddenly discussed it with him, i can't recall whether it was specifically discussed at cabinet. did anyone challenge the prime minister? well, we had a debate, ongoing debate over that period over the appropriate action given there were rising cases especially in some

parts of the country but it was very regional whereas the first peak had been uniformly national. and then we took the action at the end of october. dominic cummings also claimed in september the prime minister had said, we should not have done the first lockdown and i am not going to make the same mistake again. is this true? i certainly never heard the prime minister say anything like that. 0k. anything like that. ok. i mean, if this isn't true, why was there not more discussion about the circuit breaker lockdown? i am sorry, that is a non sequitur. well, when sage was giving clear advice for a circuit breaker lockdown, why was a decision taken? you said, what do we do after a circuit breaker, we understand what a circuit breaker is. why was there not more discussion about a

lockdown, in september? there was a constant discussion about how to respond to the rising case numbers. i said in public at the end of august that we could see a second wave coming. and from that time, onwards, we had a debate in government about this, these incredibly stiff —— difficult balances and we took action in local areas where it was needed. you previously told our committee that a circuit breaker lockdown you felt was disproportionate. it has also been reported you yourself argued for that very circuit breaker. what is the truth of this and if you are arguing for the circuit breaker lockdown, why did the prime minister reject your advice? he didn't, and also, it misrepresents the way the government makes decisions of this magnitude. we have discussions of the pros and

cons. of course as the health secretary, i am cons. of course as the health secretary, iam inclined cons. of course as the health secretary, i am inclined to take the cautious view, that is myjob. my job was to protect lives and to get us out of this, that has been my central mission for the last 18 months since the 1st of january when i first heard about this virus and certainly since it became clear it was coming here a month or so later. and so, of course i am going to make the cautious arguments, other people make arguments for the absolutely serious, realand immediate make arguments for the absolutely serious, real and immediate costs of lockdown, as was discussed. we did this on a regional basis over the autumn until november. we then had the national england wide lockdown, and then a regional approach over december untiljanuary the 4th. and all that while the situation got more difficult to manage because of

the rising number of what became the alpha variant as colleagues from kent i delighted it is now called. one of the points that mr cummings made repeatedly to our committee a fortnight ago was decisions were taken by the prime minister himself and he would ignore other people's opinions or advice on this. is that the case? is that your experience? i discussed all these issues with the prime minister throughout, all these issues with the prime ministerthroughout, i all these issues with the prime minister throughout, i speak to their promise to almost every day, usually several times a day, and have done since i first alerted him to this problem on the 7th of january. it is an incredibly intense period for any government and remains so, because these judgments and the consequences of the judgments we make affect everybody in the country. and the way

decisions are made is through discussion. of course people have a tendency for one side of the organ or other at times. at the moment everyone is very aligned and the data is still not yet clear head of the 21stjune decision. but there is, the way decisions are made is people, they make their argument and then the prime minister makes the decision and then you fall in line behind that decision because that is what collective agreement is all about. and ministers go out and explain it and advises advice. what we are trying to establish is whether the picture painted by mr cummings is a true reflection of what was taking place, whether it was a 1—person decision, whether cabinet were involved, but advice was taken on board. this is what i am trying to get to. and what i would say is i spoke directly to the prime minister throughout this period, and he took

advice from a huge range of people, as he should end as he does. the point of learning lessons is to identify where things have gone wrong, identify mistakes and address these for future, hopefully we won't have another global pandemic, but even forfuture dealings have another global pandemic, but even for future dealings with covid. what would you do differently? where to start. there is so much we have learned. the best place to start is probably the things we do differently now than at the start. we had different policies on protecting care homes, different policies on the border. we have learned a huge amount all the way through. so lessons learned exercise is when we see three weeks for the

border from is when we see three weeks for the borderfrom india to be is when we see three weeks for the border from india to be closed is when we see three weeks for the borderfrom india to be closed no, you don't, we acted when we saw the data. the data showed from public health england, shows the indian cases positivity from india was three times greater than the positivity from bangladesh but that was, that data was not acted upon for over three weeks. we did not have that data because there is a long lag from the cases, to the day when the sequencing result comes back. you have to act on the data you have, i keep repeating this whenever i am accused by somebody with the benefit of hindsight that i should have acted sooner. and i try to stress this, there is... people are saying you could have acted sooner in the early stages and that did not happen.

the governments across the uk including the snp government acted at the same time in these things because we are based, acting on the same scientific advice. that is not true, the snp government closed the borders. the... you are referring to the period of march and april last year and we all had the same scientific... i am talking of april this year. do ou i am talking of april this year. do you want to come back on that or shall_ you want to come back on that or shall we — you want to come back on that or shall we move on? well, _ shall we move on? well, the... government in scotland took a different approach, and international travel is essentially, the rules around international travel are essentially a decision for the uk government, but i am not sexually i have to move on to the next question. just two more people on screen in front of you and then we will be

through —— but i am not essentially on those decisions made in september, what mr cummings told us very directly was by september it was the economic arguments against lockdown that outweighed everything else, is that correct? it is not correct. what you had to do when you are making a decision as a minister or as the prime minister is way all of the factors. you have to weigh the economic factors, they are real, people's livelihoods are at risk. but you also have to way the health factors, and the growth of the virus. and so the proper and appropriate way of taking a decision is to listen to all of the voices, and some voices were arguing one way, some the other. and then take a decision based on thosejudgments.

where did the balance in decision making light between scientific, medical, economic and social factors? how did they change over time? ultimately that balance is a balance that only the prime minister can bring together. of course i will make the arguments i believe in, and representing, being the head of the health department, and the health and family if you like, i am going to make that argument but ultimately these judgments come together through the prime minister. 0k. through the prime minister. ok. just on a different question, on may 27 you said the new variant, the delta variant, represent as many as three quarters of new cases, what is the most recent assessment? the assessment i saw from last night is the delta variant now comprises 91% of new cases in the uk.

91, ok. just to return to questions barbara asked, i want to refer on dnr notices. you said that no one was denied treatment, and your guidance, or nhs england, was very clear. what the daily telegraph is saying today is at least one person died because she was issued with a notice which very clearly said learning disability was listed as the reason that cpr was likely to be unsuccessful. i know there are many factors or suggestions to try to show guidances across the country were acted on a prevelly but can you commit to investigating this one case? absolutely. and if you or anyone

else disobeying the guards, i want to know about it and the coc is there to investigate as the health regulator to make sure that this guidance is followed. when i said what i said, what i meant of course is that is what the guidance states, people should not do it. in a system as big as the nhs, making sure that happens everywhere is a challenge in the same way that on patient safety issues everybody follows the guidance, making sure everyone follows the guidance is a challenge, thatis follows the guidance is a challenge, that is always a problem with a very large system, but as secretary of state, along with the entire clinical and nonclinical leadership of the nhs, i am absolutely crystal

clear that having learning