Chris Whitty refutes Prime Minister's claim care homes were to blame for coronavirus deaths

England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has refuted Boris Johnson’s comments blaming care homes for coronavirus deaths saying his “enthusiasm for blaming people for anything is zero”.

Mr Johnson angered the care sector, when he said during a recent visit to Yorkshire "we discovered too many care homes didn't really follow the procedures in the way that they could have".

The care home sector has been on the frontline during the pandemic, with care workers putting their lives at risk, with some even leaving their own families to go into lockdown with residents in order to keep them safe. They have had to cope with losing residents who are often like family to them, with COVID-19 deaths in care homes in the UK reaching over 20,000, according to the Office of National Statistics.

Nadra Ahmed, chair of the National Care Association, called it a “slap across the face of social care” and said Boris Johnson needed to apologise and retract his statement.

Yesterday, Chris Whitty seemed very keen to distance himself from the Prime Minister’s comments during a grilling by MPs at the Health and Social Care Select Committee.

'Outrage' over Prime Minister's comments

MP Barbara Keeley who sits on the committee asked Professor Whitty: “Comments made by the prime minister have sought to blame care home deaths on procedure not being followed. Later he said this related to the fact we didn’t know about asymptomatic transmission at early stages of the pandemic.

“Could you give me your view as to whether care home deaths were caused by them not following procedure as I think there has been a lot of outrage over those comments and a lot of sensitivity over those comments and we need to have a view on that.”

In response, he said: “So first of all my enthusiasm for blaming people for anything is zero. That is absolutely not the way you deal with any kind of situation in health care or social care and absolutely should not and that is across the board.”

He added: “I think it is clear that every country that has a care sector has not handled this well” and admitted “the UK is one country that has not handled this well in terms of issues in social care”.

“This has been a major problem. Some of this I think comes from the fact that we had not recognised what are in retrospect obvious but were not obvious points early on.

“For example the fact people were working in multiple homes and people who were not paid sick leave. That is a clear risk. These were major risks in social care settings.”

In the wake of the committee meeting, GMB Union reacted with incredulity that medical advisors and ministers did not recognise a lack of sick pay in the care sector would heighten the infection risk in the care sector.

Ministers could have saved 'many lives' if they had responded to warnings over sick pay

Rachel Harrison, GMB national officer, said: “We wrote to the Health Secretary raising concerns that social care had been excluded from initial PPE guidance, excluded from regular and universal testing and denied access to full pay should workers need to be off work. They can’t pretend they weren’t aware.

“Common sense will tell you if people on already low wages are told they won’t get paid if they have to take time off sick or to self-isolate, they have no other option than to go into work ill and risk spreading the virus around.

“If ministers had read and responded to our warnings they would have known this. They could have acted to save many lives.”

She added: “This Government should be ashamed they have neglected the care sector since the start of this pandemic - to say now that they did not recognise the issues faced by the workforce is an absolute insult”.

During the committee session, Professor Whitty also welcomed the success so far of Oxford University's vaccine trials and said he hoped the vaccination would be free.

He also said that the chances of getting a highly effective vaccine in use before Christmas was in his view “very low”.