Does anyone else think Chris Whitty is getting smaller?

[WowLucky]

He obviously lost weight while he was ill, his suits have been too big since then, but, to me, he still seems to be shrinking, almost withered. I hope he's OK, I'd imagine the stress and frustrations he's facing are huge.

@carly2803 apparently he is single though when he was vetted for this job the only thing that ca,e up was a question about why he wasn't married . In 2020? Really?

Can we send him A Mumsnet emergency food hamper full of calorie-laden snacks?

😍😍😍😍 chris whitty

[quote SecretSpAD]@carly2803 apparently he is single though when he was vetted for this job the only thing that ca,e up was a question about why he wasn't married . In 2020? Really?[/quote]
i dont get why thats a question for the job! madness.

although as a woman, i have been asked that (illegally i know)!, with jobs if im married with kids, or plan any.

hes still fit.

[quote SecretSpAD]@carly2803 apparently he is single though when he was vetted for this job the only thing that ca,e up was a question about why he wasn't married . In 2020? Really?[/quote]
i dont get why thats a question for the job! madness.

although as a woman, i have been asked that (illegally i know)!, with jobs if im married with kids, or plan any.

hes still fit.

Can we send him A Mumsnet emergency food hamper full of calorie-laden snacks?

Or just a hamper full of mumsnetters to feed him naice ham and Pom bears

Not those people who exist on half a lettuce leaf a week of course

@carly2803 I was asked if I was able to work late in my first job and surely I needed to be home to cook my fiancées dinner. Erm, no. He did the cooking.

I was then passed over for promotion even though I was better qualified than the man who got it because (I was told this unofficially after) I was wearing an engagement ring so they assumed marriage and babies.

I didn't marry him and broke up with him about a year after. Strangely enough I was then suddenly seen as taking my career seriously. I kept any relationships shags etc quiet after that.

It didn't become an issue until I met my husband when I was 35. Couldn't hide that one as he also worked for the civil service. Then of course it was assumed that I was gojng to get pregnant immediately.

He of course started to flourish in reputation because he'd been previously written off as maybe secretly gay but definitely hiding something.

And this is only in the last 25 years.

Anyway, back to Chris. My teenage daughter is aghast at my taste in men. Then realised that he looked just like her dad (adoptive it still feels wonderfully weird to refer to them as my children)

He’s not getting smaller, Bojo’s ego is getting bigger? The leg twitching could be suppressed desire to kick someone hard?

I think with the job question relating to marital status it's likely to suss out if he might be open to blackmail etc. My husband filled in a clearance form for a colleague and he was asked whether he knew if the man was faithful to his spouse and all sorts of questions like that.

It was for security clearance so not a usual office job...

I have found myself wondering if his suit fitted him at the start of all this. He reminds me of David Byrne in the Big Suit. Maybe he's trying to send subliminal messages about Dominic Cummings.

And you may find yourself
In another part of the world
And you may find yourself
Behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?

...

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?

More seriously, he comes across as a very personable, nice man but we shouldn't forget he is the CMO for England and you don't get to that sort of position unless you have a lot of drive and ambition, as well as talent and luck.

He's not a little forest animal caught in the headlights. He holds a lot of power and his part in the management of this pandemic should be examined as critically as anyone else's.

One thing that I still cannot fathom is that Chris Whitty, together with Neil Ferguson, gained a huge amount of credibility through their work during the Sierra Leone ebola outbreak, which focused very heavily on contact tracing and isolation as effective strategies against contageous disease.

www.nature.com/news/infectious-disease-tough-choices-to-reduce-ebola-transmission-1.16298

Why then did he stand there like a chump while our government abandoned this strategy from early February onwards? Why isn't he more outspoken about the urgent need to get this strategy working well now, if we are to come out of lockdown without risking a second wave?

The last CMO for England was Dame Sally Davies. I thought she was horrible and she said a lot of things I disagreed with but nobody ever shut her up and she had huge influence on government policy.

What has changed?

My 16yo DS2, on the security clearance for an apprenticeship with a defence company, was asked questions about things that might leave him open to blackmail, that's what the marriage question is supposed to be about

I didn't much take to Davies either Lang. I imagine there are massive battles going on behind the scenes between the scientific advisors and politicians. My guess is he thinks resigning would cause more chaos so he's sticking it out to do what he can. I don't envy him. He looks exhausted and he's aged quite a bit too by comparison to photos from a year ago.

@Lisette1940 both my husband and I went through that level of vetting. Neither of us were married at the time. To each other or anyone else. Nothing came up in either case.

His advice is taking this country into economic ruin

Nobody is asking his advice on the economy. That’s the politicians’ job. They need to balance scientific opinion with economic consequences. Things are never as clear-cut as you’d like them to be.

I don't know why it was on the form Secret but it was very thorough.

Why then did he stand there like a chump while our government abandoned this strategy from early February onwards?

This was explained by (iirc) Jenny Harries. By the time we were aware of the outbreak being apparently imported in Europe, it was already actually so widespread here that they could never employ enough contact tracers to deal with it. There was vertically zero testing capacity as we simply didn't have similar medical industry set up to (for eg) Germany. Therefore, the only option was to lockdown, build testing and tracing capacity, then begin test and trace once disease levels were minimised and lockdown could be lifted.

I don't know why it was on the form Secret but it was very thorough.

I remember feeling paranoid throughout the process because my dad was a member of the communist party in the 70's!

My point was that it just seems ridiculous that they only picked that up. Guess he really does lead a completely blameless and innocent life except in the fantasies of MNetters

I was referring to the form DH filled in for his colleague secret The colleague got clearance so everything must have tallied. But yes I can understand the apprehension filling these forms in.

SecretSpAD I saw your thread about your son and daughter, and I'm still grinning to see you call them that, too. And having a little unMumsnetty sniff.

OK, the rest of you can have your thread back now.

You've set me off too SecretSpAD .

I am totally signed up member of Chris Whitty fan club, but are we just assuming he was advising things and the govt didn't do them?

What were his views on Italy/Spain travellers returning? Valance has said that genomics reveal that the UK outbreak was largely seeded by that movement from Europe, but at the time those travellers weren't restricted because they were focusing on risk from China/Asia.

We may not have known early enough how big a risk Europe was, but we still knew long before we did anything. I don't accept that it was then too late for it to make any real difference, especially since the measure would have relatively few side effects. It only applied to a relatively small sub section of society. In my DM's county which is probably typical, four out of five of the first confirmed cases were people returning from Italy. One was from South Korea.

Van Tam said in one conference that we did have quarantine in place at one point for Italy returners, but we never really did. People were encouraged not to cancel trips. Many never got the message about what to do on returning, those that did were free to ignore it, they were initally told only to isolate if symptomatic, and even it was a loosely defined self isolation. This isn't hindsight, everyone said it at the time. Except any of the people in charge.

Also, do we know what Whitty advised about the timing of lockdown?

Not doubting him, just asking what we know as I have not read all --any-of the released SAGE minutes.

Odd about the head size thing OP, normally when people are very thin their head looks big in comparison to the body, while on very overweight people it can look small. I know what you mean though I think.

Don’t know if this story is true but I can quite believe this Government would stamp on anyone who won’t say what they want at the briefings. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-chief-nurse-dominic-cummings-ruth-may-daily-briefing-downing-street-a9562741.html
Haven’t seen my truth telling hero Prof VT for a while I hope they haven’t got him locked in the Tower!

According to DH's friend who writes for one of the broadsheets, Chris Whitty has a long-term partner whom he lives with in Westminster.

Rishi Sunak is tiny - I'd say 5ft 4 max. although I bet he claims to be taller.

This was explained by (iirc) Jenny Harries. By the time we were aware of the outbreak being apparently imported in Europe, it was already actually so widespread here that they could never employ enough contact tracers to deal with it. There was vertically zero testing capacity as we simply didn't have similar medical industry set up to (for eg) Germany. Therefore, the only option was to lockdown, build testing and tracing capacity, then begin test and trace once disease levels were minimised and lockdown could be lifted.

No, I don't accept this. Read the SAGE minutes.

They discussed contact tracing on 11 February. They didn't discuss how to build an effective contact tracing system or how to increase capacity. They asked SPI-M and PHE to work out when they could stop doing it.

We had 8 confirmed cases on 11 February.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-11-february-2020

PHE reported back on 18 February and said they could cope with tracing the contacts of five cases a week, based on an estimated 160 contacts per case (!) Again, there was no discussion of how to scale up the system or who else might be able to help besides PHE (e.g. local government - www.local.gov.uk/lga-statement-coronavirus-contact-tracing-strategy). There was no discussion of how to work out which of the ~160 contacts were the most important to trace. Once again it was all just 'when can we stop doing it?'

We had 9 confirmed cases on 18 February.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-18-february-2020

It's true that as time went on we also didn't have enough testing capacity but this wasn't just bad luck. Once again it was mismanagement and a lack of will. IIRC the initial problems were largely due to wanting PHE to run it all and ignoring testing capacity that was being offered elsewhere.

Fairly early on in this pandemic Jenny Harries was asked at a press conference why we were not following WHO advice (which was test, track, isolate). She said WHO advice was for low and middle income countries and we didn't need to follow it because we had a well developed public health system. I'll see if I can find the clip tomorrow.

And so here we are a few months later with a shockingly high death rate, having to play a massive game of catch up on testing and contact tracing while being put to shame by rather a lot of low and middle income countries which have handled this far better than we have.