Sajid Javid is Health Secretary for everybody — including the vulnerable 

Sajid Javid is what is known as a “low-key” parliamentary performer. But his remarks on Times Radio yesterday were strikingly blunt. “There are some seven million people…that have not come forward to the NHS to be looked after…with, let’s say, cancer problems, heart disease problems, mental health problems, because of the pandemic,” he declared. “I’m not just the Covid Secretary of State, I am the Health Secretary and I need to be looking at everything.” 

What Javid seems to be doing here is to weigh Covid against all the other health problems from which the population is suffering and suggesting that too much attention has been given to the former, not enough to the latter. This is a familiar argument in the armoury of lockdown sceptics, of whom the new Health Secretary is probably a moderate one, who also argue that the economy should be given greater emphasis compared to health. The upshot of this binary approach is to lift the prophylactic measures designed to protect the country from Covid and shift the focus of the NHS onto other serious diseases. And that is precisely what is happening. Javid appears to see the present situation as a zero-sum game: while he wears his Health Secretary hat, he cannot simultaneously wear his Covid Secretary hat.

Yet this is a strange attitude for any minister to take in the midst of a pandemic, let alone the one responsible not only for the NHS but for the national health. The whole problem about Covid is that it makes all other health problems much worse. The reason we have had to “protect the NHS” is in order to enable the Health Service to serve everyone, not just those suffering from Covid. The vaccination and testing programmes, social distancing, lockdowns, bubbles, quarantine, track and trace — the whole panoply of anti-coronavirus rules and measures have all been designed to keep doctors and nurses treating the innumerable other health problems that constantly arise in a nation of 68 million. 

So this is not an Either-Or but a Both-And predicament. The risk has always been that the pandemic would overwhelm the NHS and make it impossible for the staff to do their normal job of saving lives day in, day out. The gamble now, which we must hope has been carefully calculated by the Sage modellers, is that numbers of hospitalisations will not rise in proportion to the rise in cases, which Javid admitted could peak at 100,000 a day. We know that, thanks to huge improvements in hospital care, far fewer seriously ill Covid patients will die than in previous waves. But a big influx could still make it impossible for the NHS to handle the huge backlog of other patients.

We also know that those with underlying health conditions are much more likely to succumb to Covid — even when they have been double-jabbed. The two million people who were, until April, classified as “clinically extremely vulnerable” and advised to shield are all at greater risk than before as a result of the lifting of restrictions on July 19. The most vulnerable group are the 500,000 “immunocompromised” people whose bodies are unable to develop antibodies in response to the vaccines. Many of these people are cancer sufferers, with blood conditions such as leukaemia or whose immune systems have been weakened by chemotherapy. Journalists such as Sean O’Neill of The Times (who has leukaemia) and Robert Peston of ITV (whose wife Siân Busby died of cancer) have written movingly about their fears about the impact of the pandemic on the clinically vulnerable.

What is needed from Javid, then, is a balanced approach. He also needs to grasp the point that the seven million people who stayed away from hospitals because of fear of Covid were not, as lockdown sceptics like to claim, responding to a state-sponsored propaganda campaign intended to terrify them out of their wits. No: in fact they were ignoring the Government’s constantly reiterated message that it was safe to seek help from the NHS for all the usual health problems throughout the pandemic. People refused to go to hospital, not because the Government or the NHS tried to keep them out, but because they were afraid. Many did not trust official assurances, in part because they believed rumours or exaggerated claims on social media. The Government’s advice, rules and other measures were never the main cause of the many damaging phenomena that accompanied the pandemic, such as the economic crisis or the seven million who didn’t seek help from the NHS. The primary cause of all these secondary problems was fear of Covid. The Government made many mistakes, but whipping up panic was not one of them. Its efforts were entirely aimed at the opposite: preventing panic and reassuring the public. It was not to blame if people ignored its advice.

This does not mean that the fear was entirely irrational. The impact of Covid is still being felt across the world. The official death toll has now exceeded 4 million but the real one is likely to be much higher. Here in Britain, the fall in life expectancy of a year or more is unprecedented, apart from wartime, for more than a century. People knew that this was a dangerous disease that scientists were struggling to understand and doctors to treat. They acted accordingly. Who can say that they were wrong to be cautious?

The economy is now on track to recover the level of GDP of February 2020 by the end of the year. The country has had a huge shock and most people are eager to work and play hard, as they used to do. It’s right to remove restrictions if it’s safe to do so. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. There are millions of people who are anticipating “Freedom Day” not with jubilation but anxiety. In many cases, that anxiety is not irrational. They deserve not just reassurance, but protection as well. Sajid Javid is their Health Secretary too. In his zeal to move on, he should never forget that.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.