SNP hit by new secrecy row over ‘cover-up’ in wake of Nike virus outbreak
HEALTH Secretary Jeane Freeman has been accused of pointing ‘the finger of blame’ at coronavirus victims after failing to disclose Scotland’s first outbreak.
Yesterday she insisted there had been ‘no failure’ by the Scottish Government in tracing those who came into contact with delegates at a Nike conference in Edinburgh in February.
This is despite claims that employees working at nearby businesses fell ill with coronavirus-like symptoms just days after the event – and have still not been contacted by health officials.
Instead, Miss Freeman suggested those who tested positive for the virus had failed to disclose sufficiently detailed information about their movements.
It emerged last week that Nike held a conference at the Hilton Carlton hotel in Edinburgh at the end of February.
Out of the 70 people who attended, 25 later tested positive for the virus – eight of whom live in Scotland.
But Nicola Sturgeon failed to inform the public of the outbreak, claiming that it may have breached ‘patient confidentiality’ to do so. Instead, the First Minister waited a week before banning mass gatherings.
Before that ban was announced on Thursday, March 12, 67,000 people had gathered at Murrayfield the previous Sunday to watch Scotland play France at rugby.
Ian Murray, Labour MP for Edinburgh South, said: ‘The Scottish Government still refuses to accept responsibility for this cover-up and its impact, with Jeane Freeman trying to point the finger of blame at those who attended.
‘This is a woeful excuse from the Scottish Government. The explanation by Miss Freeman is surely the very reason the public should have been told.
‘If tracing is based on recall of everyone you have been in contact with, then that’s ineffective, so you have to inform the wider public. Instead, the Government chose to keep Scottish businesses and workers in the dark.’
The outbreak prompted an international tracing operation, but it has since been revealed that many of those who came into contact with the attendees were never told they were at risk.
A Sunday newspaper has revealed claims from two business owners that their employees came down with coronaviruslike symptoms after coming into contact with delegates from the conference. They said they were not informed of the outbreak – and there was no contact from Health Protection Scotland warning them of the potential threat to their health.
A source from kilt shop in Edinburgh, about 100 yards from the conference venue, said: ‘An employee fitted kilts for ten delegates to the conference. This involves close contact. The employee became unwell shortly after and had to take time off work due to flu-like symptoms and increased use of their asthma inhaler.’
At the Scottish Government’s daily briefing on the pandemic yesterday, Miss Freeman said: ‘All the proper, clinically led standard protocols were covered, and were followed. All of the normal standard contact-tracing approaches that we used then
‘Freeman trying to point the finger of blame’
and we use now, and we will use as we continue, were followed.’
But she added: ‘Essentially, contact tracing sits on the information that is given by the individual, that, if you like, is the trigger case. So they are asked about where they’ve been, who they’ve been in contact with.’
‘Knowing where people have been, what they have told us, we then, or those clinical professionals in health protection then, go and trace those contacts and advise them to isolate.
‘There was no failure in the approach at all, but if we are not told by someone all the contacts they have had, we cannot trace. We can only trace on the basis of what the trigger case says – “here’s what
I’ve been doing, here’s who I’ve been in touch with, here’s where I’ve been over the recent period”. And from that the contact tracers begin their work.’
It is believed the virus was brought to Scotland by one of the foreign delegates, then passed on to a number of Nike conference attendees.
The event was held on February 26 and 27, and officials in Scotland were advised of the first positive case from the conference on March 2. The first Covid-19 case in Scotland was reported on March 1, with a further case confirmed to the public on March 4 – though the link to the Nike conference was not revealed.
Despite officials knowing about the outbreak, it took them two days to notify the Hilton Carlton Hotel. The public was not informed until the news was broadcast in a BBC documentary last week.
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘All appropriate steps were taken to ensure public health was protected. All of the cases linked to this event were assessed by their close contact, or contact with conference delegates who tested positive after the event so public health authorities were satisfied there was minimal infection risk.’
‘There was no failure in the approach at all’
THE cover-up is what hurts you,’ Richard Nixon can be heard growling on a scratchy White House tape, ‘not the issue’. The 37th president was speaking to his aides three days after the Watergate burglars were indicted. Two years later, he would become the only US president to resign from office.
Nixon learned his own lesson the hard way and, instead of paying heed, so many politicians who have followed him have also opted for painful instruction.
The late-February coronavirus outbreak at a Nike conference in Edinburgh’s Hilton Carlton hotel was not the Scottish Government’s fault and no one could have blamed them for it. They could have gone public, implemented an earlier lockdown and contained the spread of a virus that has killed more than 2,000 Scots.
Instead, they chose to withhold information the public and health practitioners had a right to know. In other words, they orchestrated a cover-up. only when BBC Scotland’s disclosure exposé aired last week did we learn about what immunology professor denis Kinane posits ‘could have been one of the “ground zeros” in Scotland’.
Since these revelations, the Scottish Government’s taxpayer-funded spin machine has gone into overdrive. With much fanfare, they released a timeline of events covering the outbreak and health bureaucrats’ response. Releasing timelines is a favourite ploy of special advisers because it gives the appearance of transparency while allowing them to control the story. In fact, what we have been permitted to know was granted to us by the same people who prevented us from knowing in the first place.
Honesty
The two most important questions of all have still not been answered fully. To adapt another saying from the Nixon era: What did the First Minister know, and when did she know it?
We do not know how many needless infections and even preventable deaths the cover-up might have enabled. What we are beginning to see are glimpses of how rapidly and widely the virus spread from that conference.
The Scottish Mail on Sunday reported on two companies that believe their staff were infected via the Nike event. a marketing firm which shares a building with a Glasgow branch of Nike says four of its staff developed Covid-19 symptoms in the days after the conference. Two weeks later, the sports shop was ‘deep cleaned’ but its neighbouring business was not told why. No one at the marketing firm was contact-traced.
Meanwhile, a kilt shop employee who fitted ten delegates for the conference came down with symptoms, as did a number of others.
These are just the businesses we know about. Many of the conference attendees were from overseas. How many will have squeezed in a spot of sightseeing on the crowded Royal Mile or popped into a cramped whisky shop to pick up a nice malt to take home? That the residents and business owners of Edinburgh were kept in the dark is inexcusable.
as Edinburgh South MP Ian Murray points out, almost 70,000 fans were allowed to cram into Murrayfield for Scotland v France on March 8.
‘This is now a test of the Scottish Government’s honesty with the people of Scotland,’ he says.
Nicola Sturgeon has angrily dismissed talk of a cover-up as ‘highly politicised nonsense’. What euphemism would she rather we used? a delayed disclosure of the facts? a flawed public information campaign? There is nothing politicised about calling a spade a spade.
Perhaps the Scottish Government feared Westminster would step in and throw its weight around if Edinburgh was revealed as a ‘ground zero’ spot. Perhaps they are so used to government-bysecrecy that it never occurred to them to share the information with the public. Whatever the reason, there is no excuse.
once Sturgeon and her Health Secretary, Jeane Freeman, were made aware of the Edinburgh outbreak, the public should have been told immediately so that we could take our own precautions and demand that the Government act swiftly to trace and contain the virus.
Some ‘grown-up’ talk about Freeman’s performance is long overdue.
another Sunday newspaper brought us the news that not a single dedicated contact-tracer has been hired two weeks after the Scottish Government announced 2,000 vacancies as part of its test, trace, isolate (TTI) strategy. Since then, there have been almost 8,500 applicants and zero hires, despite 1,500 having been recruited already in England.
an offer of help from St andrew’s First aid went unanswered for eight days and the charity’s chief executive was eventually told to send an email.
TTI is not a coronavirus-specific innovation that ministers might justifiably be struggling to get to grips with. It is standard practice in any viral outbreak and one ministers were urged to adopt early on. almost two months ago, Professor allyson Pollock, a health expert from Newcastle University, wrote to the First Minister and Health Secretary warning about ‘the apparent failure to implement fundamental public health measures to address the Covid-19 outbreak – specifically, community contact tracing and testing’. She received no reply.
Speedy, effective TTI begins with that first T: testing. yet Scotland continues to lag behind England in using its testing capacity while care home workers are still coming forward to say they have not been tested. If failing to test those who work with the primary targets of this contagion – the elderly and the vulnerable – seems like an egregious dereliction, it was compounded by new recommendations from Health Protection Scotland that staff be ‘permitted’ to finish their shift after testing positive for the virus. It’s hard to decide which is more offensive: the audacity or the callousness.
Transparency
I do not doubt Freeman is working hard but the pace of action is grindingly slow. It is long past time for her to get a grip.
This government has enjoyed a far easier ride than the one in Westminster. The opposition is divided and of uneven quality. BBC Scotland is less aggressive than its network counterpart and STV sometimes forgets there is a government other than the one in Westminster that needs held to account. Even steadfast critics of the First Minister have shown goodwill. We have set aside our grave reservations about her government and hoped it would rise to the moment. We have pulled punches and bitten lips. No more.
If ministers are going to withhold vital information during a pandemic, then they have forfeited their right to the benefit of the doubt. We must be able to trust what the First Minister says, and after the Nike cover-up we can’t. This is the problem with cover-ups: when the truth outs, the public’s confidence in those who kept it under wraps plummets. If they didn’t tell us about this, what else aren’t they telling us?
The longer this PR agency posing as a government drags on, the more nostalgic I become for the old Labour-Liberal democrat executives. They were made up of men and women driven to improve the lot of ordinary people. Sometimes they succeeded, often they failed, but in the endeavour they were faithful.
There are ministers in this government who share that drive and that faithfulness but they are held back by a political apparatus more concerned with party management and constitutional sabrerattling than good governance.
Nicola Sturgeon has to put that apparatus in check. This is not a time for secrets and spin but for honesty and transparency. The public’s trust is essential to leading us out of this crisis and the First Minister has stretched it to breaking point. It can be stretched no further.