Hancock stated he had needed to check everybody coming into care properties for the coronavirus, however the U.Ok. lacked the capability on the time, so precedence was placed on testing individuals being discharged from hospitals into the properties.

“The messages imply Matt simply overruled clinical advice. That is categorically untrue,” stated a press release launched by means of a spokesman. “He went as far as was possible, as fast as possible, to expand testing and save lives.”

Like many nations, the U.Ok. had little capability to check for coronavirus when the pandemic started. The virus unfold quickly by means of nursing properties within the preliminary months of the nation’s first outbreak in 2020, resulting in round 20,000 deaths.

Britain is because of maintain a public inquiry into authorities’ dealing with of the pandemic, however the hearings have but to start.

Hancock’s assertion stated “the right place for this analysis of what happened in the pandemic is in the inquiry.”

The Telegraph stated it obtained 2.3 million phrases from Isabel Oakeshott, a journalist who helped Hancock write a memoir. Oakeshott, a critic of the stringent lockdowns imposed in the course of the pandemic, defended leaking the messages, saying she had executed it to keep away from a “whitewash” of the disaster.

James Bethell, who served as a junior well being minister below Hancock, stated “the reality was there was a very, very limited number” of coronavirus exams within the first months of the pandemic.

“The thing that held us back was not a dispute about the clinical advice. It was simply the operational ability to deliver tests,” Bethell advised the BBC.

Hancock resigned from the federal government in June 2021 after breaching social distancing guidelines that have been then in impact by kissing an aide with whom he was having an affair in his workplace on the Department of Health.