From Science Chief to Minister of Controversy

Yesterday, it was announced that the former Government Chief Scientific Adviser (2018-2023), Sir Patrick Vallance has been appointed as Minister of Science in Keir Starmer’s new government. He will serve as a Minister of State (Minister for Science) in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

It came as some surprise that Sir Patrick, who is not an elected MP, was appointed as science minister. To circumvent the democratic process, the former Chief Scientific Advisor will receive a peerage enabling him to sit in the House of Lords as a minister. 

This has happened from time to time – for example, during Rishi Sunak’s November 2023 reshuffle, the former PM, David Cameron was brought back into the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary. He was appointed directly to the House of Lords as Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton to override the fact that he was no longer an MP. 

The reward of becoming a minister in Keir Starmer’s government was made on the heels of Vallance endorsing Labour’s plans for Great British Energy, a publicly-owned company that would be charged with driving the zealously pushed Net Zero agenda. 

It is noteworthy that Vallance described how the mission of driving net zero carbon emissions should be treated “like the vaccine challenge.”

A national mission for clean power by 2030 is achievable and should be prioritised. We desperately need to end the era of high energy bills, excessive carbon emissions and energy insecurity by accelerating the transition to clean, homegrown energy. Britain can lead on this by treating this mission like the vaccine challenge. We can be the innovators and the implementers, helping ourselves and exporting our solutions worldwide. But if we choose to go slowly, others will provide the answers, and ultimately we’ll end up buying these solutions rather than selling them.

Sir Patrick Vallance, Former Chief Scientific Adviser

It was under the ex-Big Pharma R&D Head’s tenure as Chief Scientific Advisor that the Government’s fixated vaccine-based response to Covid was heavily pushed. While at the same time, early Covid off-label treatments such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were not just ignored by Government but blacklisted. It appears these cheap drugs with their proven track record of long-term safety data were the real challengers to the experimental “safe and effective” vaccines. 

It was also under his leadership of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that brought down the heavy hammer of lockdowns – “one of the gravest governmental failures of modern times” – across the UK, not so long ago. 

Even though, only ten days prior to the nation being plunged into its first-ever draconian lockdown, Sir Patrick Vallance told Sky News about the government’s aim of building “herd immunity” by letting “enough of us who are going to get mild illness to become immune.”

While leading SAGE and in turn its subsidiary groups, SPI-B (which weaponised public fear so Covid regulations could be adhered to) and SPI-M (responsible for the infamously flawed ‘Lockdown Paper’ authored by SPI-M member Prof Neil Ferguson – I have written about both groups for TCW, Defending Freedom, which can read be here and here) Vallance came under fire by former PM Theresa May for presenting ‘dodgy data’ to the public to justify the nation’s second lockdown, which came into effect on November 5, 2020. 

During the October 31, 2020, Downing Street press conference, key projections by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) were presented to the public by Sir Patrick containing major errors.

Sir Patrick showed a medium-term projection that had a top-end range of nearly 9,000 admissions a day by December 8, 2020 (slide 4 shown above). 

After heavy criticism, the top-end range was revised down to just over 6,000 a day.

Slide 5 (seen below) also presented by Sir Patrick originally showed projected daily deaths in England at the top-end range of more than 1,400 deaths a day by December 8.

This slide was also reissued with the top-end range revised down to around 1,000 deaths a day by December 8 (seen below). 

A month prior, Sir Patrick was directly embroiled in another scandal, which I wrote about in my 3-part investigative series ‘SAGE’s Covert Coup’ for TCW, Defending Freedom. The following is an extract from Part 1 of my report. 

In September 2020 The Telegraph revealed that Sir Patrick Vallance, Government Chief Scientific Adviser, had £600,000 worth of shares in GlaxoSmithKline, which was contracted to develop a coronavirus vaccine. In December 2020 the British Medical Journal wrote that ‘by July the UK government had signed a coronavirus vaccine deal for an undisclosed sum with GlaxoSmithKline, securing 60 million doses of an untested treatment that was still being developed.’ If this is not a blatant conflict of interest, I don’t know what is.

Vallance not only held GSK shares but was also President of Research and Development at GSK from 2012-2017. It was while he was President, in 2013, a partnership between GSK and the Gates Foundation was announced to ‘accelerate research into vaccines for global health needs.’

The then Health Secretary “frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain” Matt Hancock (no stranger to scandals himself ranging from care-home deaths; being forced to quit government after a coronavirus rule-breaching affair and being embroiled in PPE contact scandals) denied that this was the case. According to the Standard: 

When asked on LBC radio when he discovered the news of Sir Patrick’s personal shareholding, Mr Hancock said: “Well, I didn’t know about it until I read it in the newspapers.”

Pushed on whether he thought he should have been informed as Health Secretary, he replied: “No, not particularly. I think there are rules around this and it is important he abided by the rules.”

When evaluating Sir Patrick’s tenure as a government advisor, several concerning points emerge:

• Lockdown Advocacy: He was a key proponent of lockdowns, which the June 2023 Herby-Jonung-Hanke meta-analysis described as “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions.”
• Vaccine Promotion: He heavily promoted experimental Covid vaccines labeled as “safe and effective,” which have been linked to excess deaths in the Western world.
• Conflict of Interest: He failed to disclose his shares in GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), raising significant ethical questions.

Now, the Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath has secured a powerful position within the Government by being aligned with its Net Zero agenda, which begs the question: Is he really a ‘man of Science,’ or one with a self-serving agenda?

Republished from the author’s Substack