 At each phase of the coronavirus crisis, we hear a different excuse for government failure over and over again when health workers complained of a chronic shortage of PPE and testing capacity. We were told, oh, it's because of a global shortage. What could the government possibly do? All of that ignoring the fact that that is why we were supposed to have a stockpile in the first place. And when it came to our comparatively high death toll, the government said, oh, you can't compare numbers across countries. Everyone's counting it differently. You know, they ignored the fact that even their own statisticians said that, yes, no, I mean, we can compare. Of course, we should. That's how we learn from our mistakes, not something the conservatives like to do. But now the government is being consistently called out on its catastrophic failure to protect care homes from COVID-19. They found a new line to, I suppose, justify their own failures. Let's take a look at Matt Hancock on The Andrew Marsh Show last Sunday. 25,000 people were moved from hospitals where there was some COVID into care homes. Do you know how many of those people had COVID-19 when they went into care homes? No, we didn't, because at that point, You didn't test. You didn't know. Well, no, it comes back to this point about asymptomatic transmission. At that point, it was not known about the asymptomatic transmission of this disease. Really? Yes, because no other coronavirus transmits asymptomatically, is my understanding. And this point about asymptomatic transmission was something that the whole world was learning about in that period, but we did not know about. So don't blame us for the catastrophe that was our failure to protect care homes from coronavirus. It's because we didn't know about asymptomatic transmission and no one knew about it. This line was rolled out again by Business Secretary Alok Sharma on Tuesday. This was him appearing on BBC Breakfast. But I think the point the Prime Minister was making was that nobody at the time knew what the correct procedures were, because I mean, we didn't really know the extent of that asymptomatic transmission that was taking place. I mean, nobody knew that at the time. That's why we put in place the guidance. That's why we put in place the support in terms of getting PPE to care homes. That's why we made sure there is a proper testing regime. And that's why we provided further funding. No one is suggesting that care homes haven't done a great job in really difficult circumstances. And I want to thank all of those people working in the care sector. Forgive me again. That's exactly what the Prime Minister said yesterday. Yeah. And the Prime Minister said that again today at PMQ. So here he is pushing the same excuse. On Monday, when asked why care home deaths had been so high, the Prime Minister said, and I quote, too many care homes didn't really follow the procedures in the way that they could have. That's caused huge offence to frontline care workers. It's now been 48 hours. Will the Prime Minister apologize to care workers? I'm grateful to the right Honourable Gentleman. And the last thing I want to do is to blame care workers for what has happened or for any of them to think that I was blaming them because they worked hard, incredibly hard throughout this crisis, looking after some of the most vulnerable people in our country and doing an outstanding job. And as he knows, tragically, 257 of them have lost their lives. And when it comes to taking blame, I take full responsibility for what has happened. But the one thing that nobody knew early on during this pandemic was that the virus was being passed asymptomatically from person to person in the way that it is. And that's why the guidance and the procedures changed. So that same excuse again. How will we to know? How will we to know that we should have tested people who were going into care homes who didn't even have symptoms? So we told people that if you've got raving fever, if you're coughing continuously, you shouldn't go into a care home. Why was that not enough? Who could possibly have imagined that people might be able to spread coronavirus without symptoms? Now, this is all very coherent. It makes sense. The story ties together. If it were seen as impossible or incredibly unlikely that coronavirus were passed without symptoms, and it would seem reasonable to have a policy whereby unless you had symptoms, you were basically free to act as normal when you're walking around sites with incredibly vulnerable people such as care homes. Coherent. The problem is, it's not true. Complete falsity, falsity, falsehood, complete lie. Let's get up some evidence. So this is from the 26th of January. Boris Johnson is saying, back in March, no one could have predicted that asymptomatic transmission was possible. Let's look at this BBC headline. China coronavirus spreads before symptoms show. And then a new coronavirus that has spread to more than 2,000 people is infectious in its incubation period before symptoms show, making it harder to contain Chinese officials say. So the article there goes on to write in humans the incubation period during which a person has the disease but no symptoms yet ranges from between one and 14 days without symptoms. A person may not know they have the infection, but still be able to spread it. Now, this isn't some tweeter, some person with foresight on the dark corners of the epidemiological web. This is the BBC in January. Boris Johnson now saying, no one in March could have possibly predicted there was asymptomatic spread. You might say, oh, but that was the Chinese officials. That's what they understood. Let's go to German researchers who were saying exactly the same thing, exactly the same times. This is the first of February. And this is an article from CNN. German researchers found that the virus was transmitted by people without symptoms in five instances in one cluster of people from a parent to a daughter, from that daughter to two colleagues, and from one of those colleagues to two other co-workers. There's no doubt after reading this paper that asymptomatic transmission is occurring. So Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This study lays the question to rest. So you had Boris Johnson there saying, no one in the world understood that this could, that coronavirus could spread via asymptomatic transmission. You've got there the director of diseases in the United States. He's saying, you know, there's no doubt this is obviously happening. And that was back on the 1st of February. You could say, again, if you want to give our government the benefit of the doubt, maybe they're so parochial that they weren't paying attention to what was going on in China, Germany or the United States, even if it was written on the BBC website. Again, this falls down. We can look at this excerpt from Sage Minutes on the 28th of January. Obviously, Sage is the group of scientists that gives the government advice. So they write, there is limited evidence of asymptomatic transmission, but early indications imply some is occurring. Now, some is occurring, or you might say it's still saying it's not conclusive. We don't 100% know that asymptomatic transmission is occurring. That seems to be what Sage is saying. But the reasonable response there would be to say, if it's possible, let's err on the side of caution. You know, if we think it's possible, we should act as if asymptomatic transmission is taking place. And indeed, that's what Yvonne Doyle, who's medical director of Public Health England, told MPs on the 26th of March. At the start, you said that you could pass on the virus when you are asymptomatic for potentially up to five days. Does that mean that today, NHS staff are likely to be passing on the virus to their patients? So, Chair, this is something we're learning about. In theory, when they're incubating viruses, they can be infectious. We still have to chart the nature of this virus and how infectious it is and at what point. So we're working here on first principles that it could be, and that's a precautionary principle. So in January, you had Chinese officials saying asymptomatic transmission likely. In January, you had SAGE saying it's possible, probably happening in some cases. In February, you had German officials and American officials saying it's definitely happening. In March, you had one of our public health officials speaking to MPs saying, what we should obviously do is have the precautionary principle and assume that asymptomatic transmission is taking place. That's the government's excuse for their catastrophic response to care homes just falling apart completely. It's a lie. And we know how it has happened that 20,000 care home residents have died, including 270 care workers. That's because it wasn't until the 29th of April, over a month after Yvonne Doyle was speaking there that care home staff without symptoms would even be able to order coronavirus tests. Before that, if you didn't have symptoms, you were denied. You couldn't get the test. You just went to work. And it was only on this Monday, this Monday. So three months after Doyle there was speaking to MPs, seven months after Chinese officials suggested that asymptomatic transmission was possible, that there is now routine mass testing of care home workers. So the idea that we didn't know is ridiculous. It was just complete negligence and incompetence on the part of the government, but they won't admit any mistakes. If there was an error in the past, it was because the science was unknown. Anyone would have made this mistake. No, there were so many people at the time saying your policy is irresponsible and the result has been 20,000 people dying, 20,000 care home residents dying, and 270 care workers. It's completely infuriating to have the most powerful person in the country feeding us this bullshit. The news might have been excellent on this because they've done a lot of profound investigative journalism on how vulnerable patients were released without being tested into the care home sector, which ceded the sector, which obviously is full of people who were very vulnerable, were older people with underlying health conditions. So the normal, in the last few months, the normal death rate you would expect is about 6%. 6% in these last few months would normally defy the average of dying, but actually 13% have died. So that's, as I've said, one in 14 have died directly because of the pandemic in care homes. And that's why there's evidence as well that when you've got a pandemic raging, an epidemic raging in the care home sector, that can then trickle out into the community as well because of care home workers. My worry is that already, we've seen with the likes of Dominic Cummings and Labour have not put their foot on the accelerator there and demanded head's role on these issues. And I think when Boris Johnson, and it was always going to happen, I mean, if we remember back in the crash, what the Tories very cleverly did is they took a crisis which was caused by the banks and the banking system and their political supporters and the economic system overall, and they displaced it onto vulnerable people, benefit claimants, recipients of welfare state, the argument was, we'll just reframe this and say the reason we're in this mess is because Labour spent too much money and that money went to people you shouldn't like, they're lazy, feckless people and we're going to cut and the cuts are going to fall on their backs. There's been many, many failures in this, you know, from PPE lockdown to late, terrible messaging and so on at the beginning, but the seeding of care homes in which lots of older people with vulnerable, you know, with health underlying health conditions was a deliberate catastrophic policy by the government and they should not be allowed to displace blame like they displace blame in the financial crash. We've got a tweet from Andy Walker, who I assume is a different Andy Walker to my cousin tweeting on the hashtag Tiskey Sour. The government appears to lie at will and no one picks them up on their mendacity. What is the media actually for anymore? Which is actually a good point. If you look at the timeline I just gave you there, which is Matt Hancock said this lie on Sunday. It was said again on Tuesday and now Boris Johnson has said it in Parliament on Wednesday. Now, you would have thought that, you know, on Sunday, someone would have picked that up and said, no, actually, this is complete bullshit. People did know that asymptomatic transmission was occurring back in January. They had confirmed it by February and even your own advisors were pretty certain that we should be acting as if it's going on in March. Yeah, it seems that it wasn't until today that this really got picked up by the mainstream media. And so the Conservatives have had days to sort of push this lie. It's kind of maddening, right? Yeah, I'm not surprised that Boris Johnson is lying. Of course, he's been sacked twice for lying. We know that he's a liar. The electorate even knows that he's a liar and they still voted for him. But, and you're right that the MPMQs at least Kerstama can pick up on these issues. The issue is that not everyone, most people don't watch PMQs and often what's discussed there doesn't really get cut through. And, you know, we are, the media isn't holding them to account. And, you know, the only time that we saw the media really holding the Tories to account was over the whole Dominic Cummins, you know, driving to test his eyesight to back all. And that that is how it should be on every one of these lies. And if they, and maybe it's just too exhausting because they lie so much, but it's, it's frustrating. And it just makes you so angry. It makes you so angry that they can lie with such ease, but also, you know, like more than half of care workers are paid less than £10 an hour. This is a sector that has been decimated over the last 10 years, but they've really struggled. There was like a local restaurant, a restaurant owner here who asked me to help him send meals out to people. And I said, send it to local care homes. And so I added lots of calling around care homes. And, you know, they've had such a tough time. And, you know, going back to the statement today, what we should be hearing from the Tories is like, we've been so wrong on care and we need that fundamental reform. And we've been, you know, we've completely not supported this sector. And, and yet here we get this. And, you know, oh, it's not really our fault yet again. And they just haven't admitted to doing anything wrong. It's just, so it just drives me nuts. But you just, we've just got hope that people see through it because the media isn't going to do it. And this is where Labour being relatively quiet is a problem because who is going to hold them to account?