The Microbiology Community’s Contribution to the COVID-19 Pandemic Response
As the UK’s Covid-19 Inquiry has finished hearing evidence and is starting to issue detailed reports on its various modules, there is an opportunity to reflect on the contribution that members of the Microbiology Society made to the national effort.
From the outset, it was plain that dealing with a microbial pandemic was going to require microbiologists and that the best place to access the widest expertise would be the Microbiology Society. So, in the early stages of the pandemic we were in contact with different parts of the British government on a more-or-less daily basis, brokering a relationship with the microbiology community that was such a crucial part of the country’s efforts to tackle the pandemic.
Throughout 2020 in particular, the Society was feeding into a system that was operating in an information vacuum (you can’t be sure of much about a virus that has only just evolved) and which was clearly not set up for the job in hand. Details of our efforts are published in the evidence we provided on behalf of members, which centres on the Inquiry’s module about the nation’s systems for testing for the SARS-Cov-2 virus during the pandemic. Of course, the Society and its members made many other contributions – in the three years between 2020 and 2022, we published 800 scientific papers that mention coronaviruses, more than one per working day. But it was on the theme of Test and Trace that the Inquiry was most concerned to hear from the membership.
The key point of that evidence is that important advice – based on members’ deep expertise - was not listened to. But at the time, whatever we thought about individual decisions, the Society’s trustees recognised that ministers and officials were having to make choices in rapid succession with little or no certainty about key issues, so they took the view that with people dying and the economy in crisis it was better to do what we could to make the government’s policies function effectively than to spend time and energy picking arguments we were not going to win in the short term, whatever the evidence would ultimately show. There were undoubtedly many things that the UK could and should have done better during the pandemic, but some of them would have been worse without the Microbiology Society’s efforts.
The staff worked tirelessly, and the membership willingly gave up their time and advice, even in the face of a system that sometimes seemed clumsily determined to ignore their thoughtful contributions and genuine offers of realistic practical help.
When the Public Inquiry was established and decided that one of its modules would focus on Test and Trace, the Microbiology Society was one of only two organisations outside of the public sector that were named in the initial hearing – the other was the Royal Statistical Society. The Chair Baroness Hallet and her team of lawyers recognised that if they were to get to grips with the strengths and weaknesses of the way the UK had gone about testing and tracing, the two most important groups to hear from would be scientists who understood the virus and the number-crunchers who could make sense of the data.
An account of some of the highlights of the Microbiology Society’s contribution is contained in our 20,000 word statement to the Inquiry. It is not, it should be noted, a free-flowing description of everything the Society did at the time, or even everything we considered important to the scope of the module, but a detailed answer to a specific set of written questions we were asked by the Inquiry’s lawyers. At the start of the process, Lady Hallet asked the lawyers to contact the Society with a unique request that our views and concerns were considered. We met the Inquiry’s legal team in the summer of 2024, discussed what the Society was well positioned to contribute and where we felt others were better placed, and then agreed on a final list of questions that the Inquiry wanted us to answer. This included everything from the difference between testing for nucleic acid or protein through to disclosing reams of emails from the time to and from different parts of the system working on setting up the testing effort.
Throughout the story we told were repeated contributions from the Society’s members. Some of these were very practical – on the day the first big testing lab opened in Milton Keynes, the scientists operating the PCR machines were all sourced from a list that we had hurriedly constructed by ringing Principal Investigators we knew and collating the offers of help from their postdocs and students.
Some of the ways in which members were involved focused on expert virology advice at the top of the system – Paul Kellam (currently the Treasurer-elect) was on the government’s Vaccine Taskforce and Mark Harris (who was General Secretary at the time) was meeting with the head of the “Test” half of the “Test and Trace” bureaucracy to help shape the best and most effective use of resources.
The key thrust of the Society’s contribution to the Inquiry’s Test and Trace Module is that with political will, the UK could have had more testing capacity much faster if it had drawn on the huge network of labs around the country with the right equipment, skills and people. That is not to say that the large ‘mega labs’ would not have been needed, but they were always going to take months to get going. And in March and April of 2020, the one thing we did not have was time – we needed whatever testing capacity we could bring on stream from a standing start, as quickly as possible.
In the oral evidence for the module, specific examples were provided by Alan McNally (a trustee of the Society) and Paul Nurse (an Honorary Member) both of whom had contributed to the Microbiology Society’s written submission. Anyone listening to what they said would be in no doubt that experts are certain we could have had more testing in place early in the pandemic, that the Society led calls for this to happen, and that the government did not listen. There remains no clear answer why – post hoc justifications have been inconsistent and unconvincing.
The Society’s principal lesson for the future would be that the next time a microbial pandemic hits us, we need far better mechanisms for putting the UK’s strong academic expertise, resources and infrastructure at the heart of the scientific response. Official communication with the community was inconsistently managed, leading to delays in essential elements of the strategy to combat the virus. Moreover, the testing capacity that was built for dealing with Covid testing has been dismantled and when the next infectious pandemic comes along, we will need to start all over again completely from scratch. The next pandemic will not mimic Covid-19 and efficient use of expertise will be essential to develop mitigation strategies. No matter what pathogen emerges, being able to test and trace its spread will be crucial, and the microbiology community will need to be at the heart of the strategy.
It remains to be seen what Lady Hallet and the Inquiry will make of the massive volume of evidence for this particular module of the Inquiry, but publishing the Microbiology Society’s detailed evidence provides a lasting record of the role that our UK-based members played in the national response to the pandemic.
You can read the Witness Statement provided by Dr Peter Cotgreave on behalf of The Microbiology Society, here.
If you’re a member who was based in the Republic of Ireland during the COVID-19 Pandemic, the Society wants to hear from you for its submission to Ireland’s Independent COVID Evaluation Panel. Complete the survey here.