Science committee chair cherry-picked Covid facts ‘like a West End review’

The chair of the House of Commons’ science committee has been accused of misrepresenting the findings of a scientific report on Covid by cherry-picking out lines like it was “a West End review”.

In a May 2020 letter to then prime minister Boris Johnson, Conservative MP Greg Clark used a line from a paper by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) to call for two-metre social distancing rules to be dropped.

But Clark failed to mention that the following line in the paper, which was on transmission of the virus, argued against stopping social distancing, today’s Covid inquiry hearing heard.

Referring to the evidence cited by Clarke, Catherine Noakes, an environmental engineering for buildings expert and a contributor to the SAGE report, said: “It's paragraph 44 In that paper and he’d taken one line from it.

“The second sentence says ‘however’ and describes the fact that actually this model that we've referred to had quite significant limitations.

“So essentially, it was using one part of a paragraph, but not the rest of that paragraph.”

Hearing this, Baroness Heather Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, added: “Sounds like a West End review.”

The inquiry is now 13 days into its second module, which focuses on the government’s response in the early stages of the pandemic.

Clark, the chair of the Science and Technology Committee and the former levelling up minister, referenced the “turbulent jet mixing theory” mentioned in SAGE’s report to justify reducing social distancing guidelines to 1.5 metres in his letter to Johnson.

But he appeared to ignore a subsequent line, which stated that infected particles and droplets could “travel over a longer distance than expected”.

Had we been asked about Eat Out to Help Out, I think we would have had a concernCatherine Noakes, SAGE’s Environment and Modelling Group

Noakes also revealed that SAGE’s Environment and Modelling Group (EMG), which provided advice on environmental measures to limit Covid’s spread, was not consulted on the government’s flagship Eat Out to Help Out scheme.

She said that as a member of the EMG, she would have been worried by the scheme, which was introduced in summer 2020 to support the hospitality industry.

“Had we been asked, I think we would have had a concern that encouraging people to get together indoors – and only on perhaps three days of the week, which perhaps encourages crowding – was not necessarily a well-designed approach,” said Noakes, a professor at the University of Leeds.

Concerns about Eat Out to Help Out were also raised at yesterday’s evidence session, when behavioural science expert Lucy Yardley said the scheme “came at a really crucially problematic time”.

Clark has been contacted for a response to the comments made at the inquiry.

The inquiry continues.