Cabinet Wasn’t Told of Evidence in Favour of Shortening COVID-19 Quarantine, Rees-Mogg Says

Jacob Rees-Mogg, then serving as business secretary, is seen in Westminster, London, on Sept. 21, 2022. Rob Pinney/Getty Images

The Cabinet wasn’t told during the COVID-19 pandemic about the argument for cutting short the self-isolation period, former minister Jacob Rees-Mogg has said.

It comes after The Telegraph reported that England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty told former Health Secretary Matt Hancock as early as November 2020 that taking daily tests for five days would be “pretty well as good” as a 10-day isolation.

Reacting to the revelation, Rees-Mogg, who was a Cabinet minister during the pandemic, told GB News that he would have questioned the government’s decision to stick with a longer isolation period.

The Telegraph’s Lockdown Files series is based on more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages it obtained of government ministers and officials discussing work during the pandemic.

The messages, mostly involving Hancock, were released by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who had been given access to them by the former health secretary himself when he enlisted her help to co-write his “Pandemic Diaries” book.

Since Feb. 28, the newspaper has published more than 40 stories based on some of the messages. The Epoch Times did not review the messages and could not independently verify the context in which the discussions were taking place.

Test-to-Release

The newspaper published a thread on Sunday that appeared to be a discussion between Hancock and Whitty on COVID-19 self-isolation on Nov. 17, 2020, shortly before the government announced its COVID-19 Winter Plan.

At the time, people who were told by NHS Test and Trace that they had come into close contact with someone who had tested positive had to self-isolate for 14 days.

Asked to give an update on the so-called test-to-release option, Whitty told Hancock that chief medical officers and the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) were in favour of piloting a programme to try using five daily testings or a 10-day isolation instead of 14 days of isolation.

Hancock responded by saying five days sounded “like a massive loosening.” Whitty then said the modelling suggested “it’s pretty well as good.”

“And we think adherence likely to be good. The modellers were in favour of 3 days (given the lag time to get a result) but we were not in favour,” Whitty said.

Hancock pushed back again, saying, “this sounds very risky and we can’t go backwards.”

He suggested a “safer starting point” to test every day for 10 days, but Whitty told Hancock that they “could push out to 7 but the benefits really flatten off after 5” as those who showed symptoms were also supposed to take a PCR test.

“So has the 14 day isolation been too long all this time?” Hancock asked.

Britain's then Health Secretary Matt Hancock speaks during the daily COVID-19 digital news conference in London, on April 15, 2020. Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/Handout via Reuters

After being told 14 days was “marginally safer than 10” but the marginal benefit would “almost certainly” be wiped out by reduced adherence, Hancock decided on seven days of daily testing, which he said “would be HUGE for adherence.”

“But going below that would serious worry people and imply we'd been getting it wrong. Presumably we can explain some of the shorter period because the test would pick up the disease before symptoms,” he wrote.

Six days later, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson told MPs that week-long daily tests instead of two-week isolation for contacts would be tried out in Liverpool.

Hancock’s office has said The Telegraph’s Lockdown Files stories “are wrong as they’re based on an entirely partial account.”

The Quad Made Decisions

Speaking to GB News about the revelation, Rees-Mogg said the decisions during the pandemic were not made by the whole Cabinet, but by “the quad”—a nickname for the small group including Johnson, Hancock, then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak, and then-Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove.

“I was in the Cabinet ... I didn’t know that Chris Whitty was saying that we could perfectly safely reduce the quarantining period to three days. Otherwise I would have been saying, ‘Well, why aren’t we doing this?’” he said.

During the first two years of the pandemic, Rees-Mogg was the leader of the House of Commons. He later served in other ministerial roles under Johnson and his successor Liz Truss. After Sunak became the prime minister, Rees-Mogg was put on the backbenches and has recently become a host for GB News.

In this photo illustration, the UK government’s new test-and-trace application is displayed on a handheld device, in London, on Sept. 24, 2020. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Questioned how he could have missed the information, which co-host Beverly Turner said has been “there for anybody that wanted to find it,” Rees-Mogg said it “wasn’t what was being briefed at the Cabinet.”

The former minister said the wider Cabinet was told of the decisions being made, but “the enthusiasm for locking people up was something that was not shared with the rest of the Cabinet—or the evidence.”

Noting that Sunak “was making the case for easing lockdowns,” Rees-Mogg said by the time Cabinet discussions happened, “most of the decisions had already been made.”

“We had a pre-Cabinet briefing for those of us who weren’t in the quad, basically to tell us what had been decided, the result,” he said.

Rees-Mogg agreed with the statement the lockdowns caused mental health and civil liberty issues and had “a calamitous impact” on the economy, saying, “We must never do this again.”