Damning!!

[strangeshapedpotato]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53433824

Key passage, re herd-immunity policy

*At the meeting on 13 March, Mr Enright is said to have relayed information from the government's top scientific and medical advisers.

The notes say the communications chief shared NHS England's own advice on holding internal work events, but say "we are not telling you what to do".

"We want people to be infected with Covid-19," the notes say. "The best way of managing it is herd immunity and protect the vulnerable."

Mr Enright was clear where the idea had come from, according to the notes. It was on the "direct advice" of the chief medical adviser and chief scientific adviser.

NHS England had cancelled one of its own events but only so staff could be retained to work on the coronavirus response, according to the notes.

"In other words - if you cancel events to stop people coming out of service that's fine, but don't cancel because of risk of infection."*

So why all the denial that herd-immunity was never a plan?? esp when it was quite obvious that it WAS the plan, until the scale of the casualties were made clear....

Do you have a link to anything that has chief medical or scientific advisers actually saying that? Rather than hearsay.

Because I suspect what they were actually saying was more nuanced - in the sense that herd immunity, which can be achieved either by vaccination or at great human and societal cost by everyone catching it in short order - is the only way of ending the pandemic.

II remember extensive discussion of this at the time, including sample advice for each possible scenario.

That's why we need the whole document from this originated - to settle if it was one of many options being laid out for consideration, which has been cherry-picked now for some reason. Or if it was an actual preference, and if so who made the policy decision who set it as the preference

But it's a bit of a side show, because it wasn't an enduring policy - lockdown being announced a mere 10 days after the commentary you cite

I do wonder what the alternative would have been if the vaccine had taken 5 years as was expected at the start. I still don't think we would have had much of an alternative to natural herd immunity because the NHS would have struggled to survive either way. Either huge numbers more dead or lockdowns crippling NHS funding.

Last year we were thinking it would be several years for hopefully one of the vaccines to prove a success. The fact we now have 4 in the UK and several more around the world and in under a year is amazing. We are so lucky for those amazing scientists.

We could have locked down quickly and hard and sacrificed aviation industry like NZ. Instead we opted to sacrifice lives, economy and ironically more civil liberties. No plans. Population control comments made by Johnson in the past. How is he still in power?