LCK In The News

LCK CEO Sammie McFarland, and former GB rower, Oonagh Cousins are interviewed outside the Covid Inquiry.

The BBC reports from the Covid Inquiry as Bereaved Families for Justice gather along with the Long Covid Support groups including representatives from Long Covid Kids.
There have been protesters outside the hearing on and off over the last few weeks, but never as many as today. There will be questions to Boris Johnson from lawyers on behalf of these groups as part of the hearing. This is likely to happen after the main evidence is finished tomorrow afternoon.

Mark Sedwill, the UK’s most senior civil servant at the start of Covid apologised for suggesting in a meeting in March 2020 that people could hold “chickenpox parties” to spread the virus so children and others could catch Covid and help the country reach herd immunity.
Sedwill said this was suggested in the context of the plan at the time to try to mitigate the peak of Covid, and that his idea was for people less susceptible to Covid to catch it and acquire immunity while those more vulnerable could quarantine.

Children with long Covid have been "dismissed and ignored" by those supposed to support them, the Scottish Covid Inquiry has heard. Long Covid Kids said the Scottish government and public health bodies had not done enough to help families and children had suffered as a result. Helen Goss said the charity represents more than 250 families in Scotland, with the number growing all the time. Getting these chronically ill children the treatment and support they needed was "an absolute battle every single day" for parents, she said. "There needs to be a lot more attention on long Covid," she added.

Helen Goss, charity COO and Long Covid Kids Scotland lead, told the inquiry she was shocked to overhear a top Scottish Government official describe parents as "extremists" if they wanted more done to limit the spread of Covid in schools.
She added: “I think it’s really important to highlight that because I think that it shows potentially what the Government were feeling at the time. That people who were campaigning for the health and wellbeing of children had ‘extreme’ views. I don’t believe that the health of children is an extreme view.”
Ms Goss also told the inquiry that "The impact on families is life-changing, devastating. It has broken up families".