Jonathan Van-Tam’s family ‘threatened with having throats cut’, Covid inquiry hears

Prof Sir Jonathan Van-Tam and his family were advised by police to move out of their home at one point during the Covid pandemic because of a threat that they would have their throats cut, he has told the inquiry into the pandemic.

Van-Tam, who was one of the deputy chief medical officers for England during the pandemic, said he was worried that the scale of hate from people who objected to lockdown-type measures could put off other people from doing jobs like his.

“My family didn’t sign up for that,” he said. “I did not expect my family to be threatened with having their throats cut. I did not expect the police to say ‘will you move out for a few days’ in the middle of the evening.

“I’m worried that if there is a future crisis, people will not want to sign up for these roles.”

In the end, Van-Tam said, he and his family chose to not move out as advised because there was no one who could look after their cat.

Such abuse and threats came from a very small number of people, Van-Tam said, adding that he wanted to thank the “vast, vast, vast majority of public” who were, and remained, supportive of his role.

As an expert in respiratory viruses, Van-Tam played a leading role in combating the pandemic, but he told the inquiry that this involved “pretty peripheral” contact with Boris Johnson’s Downing Street, saying that from his recollection, he only went there to take part in the nightly press conferences.

Once the response to Covid got moving, Van-Tam said he spent much of his time preparing for a vaccine taskforce, calling this the “very dominant part of my work for the rest of my time in government”.

The inquiry heard evidence that Van-Tam – who has now left government and is a consultant for Moderna, which developed one of the primary Covid vaccines – was among the first government advisers to raise concerns about Covid, sending an email in early January 2020 to Sir Chris Whitty and others highlighting worries about it in China.

In the email, Van-Tam caveated the alert using one of the football-linked metaphors for which he became well known at Covid press conferences, saying it came from an infectious disease website called ProMed, which was “somewhat akin to a football transfers website (excitable in January)”.

Asked whether he had been more keen to alert government about the threat than Whitty, Van-Tam said this was the case, but he fully supported what Whitty did as the chief medical officer for England, saying “he knew when to press buttons when I didn’t”.

Van-Tam added: “I’m the one who chases the ball, and Chris is the one who looks at the ball and makes a more qualified decision about whether it is worth chasing.”