February 27, 2024 - 11:00am
Former Government chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance has joined the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), the ex-prime minister’s organisation has announced. Vallance has been appointed to the TBI’s “team of expert Strategic Counsellors”, alongside former chief of the defence staff General Sir Nick Carter.
The Institute’s statement claims that Vallance “brings significant expertise to TBI’s work on the transformative role science and technology can play for governments and societies around the world”. The physician served as the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser from 2018 to 2023, presiding over the country’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He appeared in regular televised briefings alongside then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, and was thus considered a key architect of Britain’s lockdown policy.
Vallance will reportedly “provide strategic advice and guidance to TBI’s global policy work”, while Blair himself says that “the opportunities provided by advances in science and technology will be enhanced enormously by [his] contributions.”
Having initially considered a “herd immunity” approach to managing the virus, Vallance quickly became a proponent of further Government restrictions, and at the Covid inquiry last year suggested that the UK should have gone into lockdown earlier. He has cited the introduction of a vaccine as “chang[ing] the course of the pandemic”, though received criticism in late-2020 when it was revealed that he had a £600,000 shareholding in GlaxoSmithKline, a firm contracted to develop Covid vaccines for the Government.
Earlier this month, Vallance told a health commission that “you can’t innovate without taking risks” and that the NHS’s approach to technological advances is “too conservative”. Hearings at the Covid inquiry last year drew from the scientist’s private diary entries, in which he criticised Johnson’s “impossible flip-flopping” when responding to the pandemic as Prime Minister. He also described the atmosphere within 10 Downing Street as “chaos”, and claimed that ministers used scientists as “human shields”.
An UnHerd investigation published in August of last year revealed the inner workings of the TBI, which is partially funded by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Ellison purchased digital health records company Cerner for $28 billion, while the TBI has previously advocated selling health records to fund scientific research.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeFair enough. Oodles of intellect and experience to now be deployed as Blair peddles Oracle AI healthcare solutions. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
could hate both?
But one must remember leadership screens for narcissist and pseudo pyschopathic intellect. maybe oodles of intellect but alas lesser developed prefrontal cortex. It’s time for a computerocracy where everyone has access to a vote, where all global leaders are chipped with RFID and surveilled for their lives and finally psychopaths like Tony Blair and Valence are put away on an island on the west coast of Scotland like BARRA with lots of bars so they can’t escape. But we must remember the world has been run by psychopaths for time immemorial and nothings going to change without radical change in political science. One has to laugh at the comedy or tragedy of our leadership!
BARRA. No just to be disposed of when the tme comes. We must not be squemish about the deed. “Sometimes someone has to do what has to be done” [WS Churchill].
Blair and Vallance. A marriage made in Hell !
Should they procreate we may have more to worry about than Mutant Ninja Turtles.
It must be nice to be so wrong and cause so much damage to the UK population during the COVID pandemic, and to be rewarded so highly by climbing to the heights of the greasy pole. Knighthood, election to the Royal Society, cushy number at the TBI (a totally phony and quite frankly dangerous and scary organization).
Yesterday Phillip Pilkington wrote a piece suggesting that ‘do something-ism’ was a possible explanation for Rishi Sunak’s decision to bomb Yemen. I commented that it may have been that, but more likely it was a result of the fact that there are never any deleterious consequences for those making those decisions to do the something no matter how disastrous their consequences turn out to be. In fact they just get rewarded. The Vallance news is just another, sorry example of this. That he’s joining a group that includes Sir Nick Carter just hammers home my point given the recent (and seemingly relentless) news of our military’s hollowing-out, useless procurement and general ineptitude
So hats off to me everyone.
It’s all just one big club.
… and we’re not in it.
Every time I see ‘TBI’, I think ‘traumatic brain injury’…
Wow … today it doesn’t seem to matter whether you succeed and make life better for your fellow humans or fail miserably or make little difference … you still get rewarded by other ‘snouts in the trough’ who were rewarded before you.
Blair should be in jail for what he did to Iraq and Britain not out hiring useless institutionalised muppets and ex socialist progressive ravers for his ego feeding machine.
Interesting that a man who told his son not to worry about catching Covid (which he did, as did his house mates) told the rest of the country something different.