British health secretary allegedly ignored COVID-19 advice for elderly care homes

March 1 (UPI) -- Britain's former health secretary allegedly rejected critical advice from the country's top medical officer to test elderly people for COVID-19 and keep them segregated prior to admitting them to care homes, according to leaked text messages published Wednesday.

Then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock's response in April 2020 was to initially mandate testing and isolation for elderly people entering care homes after being discharged from the hospital only, and that he would rather "leave out" any commitment to test everyone, according to the texts reported by The Telegraph.

"I do not think the community commitment adds anything and it muddies the waters," he said in one of the texts.

The official guidance when it was published, said testing would begin with all those being discharged from the hospital and then "move to institute a policy of testing all residents prior to admission to care homes."

Hancock's decision to ignore Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty's advice may have resulted in thousands of additional deaths in care homes where COVID-19 spread like wildfire among elderly residents in the early stages of the pandemic in 2020.

Office for National Statistics figures show that between March 2020 and January 2022, there were 45,632 deaths involving COVID-19 in care homes in England and Wales.

However, Hancock and his supporters, who allege the texts were stolen and doctored, have hit back saying the decision was one over which Hancock had little choice due to the lack of testing kits and lab capacity available at the time in April 2020.

"These stolen messages have been doctored to create a false story that Matt rejected clinical advice on care home testing. This is flat wrong," said a spokesman for Hancock.

"Matt concluded that the testing of people leaving hospital for care homes should be prioritized because of the higher risks of transmission, as it wasn't possible to mandate everyone going into care homes got tested."

However, weeks later Hancock told a Downing Street press conference that he had from the start "thrown a protective ring around" care homes.

"Right from the start, it's been clear that this horrible virus affects older people most. So right from the start, we've tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes."

In June 2021 Hancock, testifying before Parliament's Health and Social Care Committee, said the evidence showed that the "strongest route of the virus into care homes, unfortunately, is community transmission."

Hancock qualified his statement with the impossible-to-prove claim that it was testing of staff that was the most important thing for keeping people safe in care homes, rather than testing of residents prior to admission.

ONS figures show COVID-19 was responsible for at least 19,000 of the 25,000 excess deaths of care home residents in England and Wales in 2020 but do not state the origin of their infection.

The latest official figures show there have been 24.4 million cases of COVID-19 in Britain over the past three years with a loss of almost 219,000 lives.

More than 100,000 of Hancock's WhatsApp messages from when he was Health Secretary were leaked to the Daily Telegraph newspaper by a journalist recruited by Hancock to ghostwrite his Pandemic Diaries book which hit bookstore shelves in December.

Hancock served as Health Secretary from 2018 to 2021 when he was forced to resign over an extra-marital affair.