![]() One of his aides, Allan Nixon, responded that he had sent the request “to action”. They show how Mr Hancock expressed concerns that expanding testing in care home could “get in the way” of his self-imposed target of 100,000 Covid tests per day. The messages also reveal the often casual approach that ministers took to making major decisions, including the call to close classrooms, introduce face masks in schools and provide testing in care homes. Over the coming days, the Telegraph will reveal the messages, which lay bare the extent to which groupthink among aides and ministers affected pandemic decisions. The messaging groups have names such as “Top Teams”, “Covid 19 senior group” and “crisis management” – the name of a group created to deal with the fallout from Mr Hancock’s relationship with his aide, Gina Coladangelo. Other conversations involve Sir Chris, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, and Sir Patrick Vallance, its chief scientific adviser. The communications span the years of the pandemic and reveal discussions between the then health secretary and those at the heart of the decision-making process, including the then prime minister, Boris Johnson. The messages comprise 2.3million words - three times as many words as the King James Bible contains. The Telegraph has obtained more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between the then health secretary and other ministers and officials at the height of the pandemic. Mr Hancock himself later told MPs that transmission from the community – particularly from staff - was the “strongest route” for Covid into care homes. In the first two years of the pandemic, there were more than 40,000 Covid deaths in care homes in England, as the most vulnerable in society bore the brunt of the fatalities.
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