Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance offer advice. Government makes policy decisions. Just because Whitty and Vallance are wheeled out night after night to justify the decisions does not mean that the government have 100% followed their advice when making policy.

The ideologues in this thread would scare the scientific community, the scientific process is about learning and making necessary adjustments. The only thing that makes me retain my faith in this whole debacle is that when the evidence was overwhelming that we were following the wrong strategy we changed course. The question should be, 'why had other countries made that adjustment beforehand?' and we should be asking it and learning from it. Science shouldn't be used as a shield for bad policy decisions that may have cost lives.