Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam’s family was threatened with having their throats cut when he worked as deputy chief medical officer, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry heard.
Asked if he ever considered his position over increasingly “hateful messages”, Sir Jonathan said: “The workload was horrendous for all of us.
“It finally got to me when my family was threatened with having their throats cut and when I was asked by police to move out in the middle of the night. My family did not ask for that.”
It comes after former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and ex-chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty told the inquiry on Wenesday morning that the idea of herd immunity “was clearly a ridiculous goal of policy and a very dangerous one”.
Warning that, at the outset of the pandemic, “a very uninformed discussion was forming that was not helping policy-making”, Sir Chris said: “A lot of what was being said could have led to considerable confusion – and indeed did.”
