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. UnHerd‘s Rob Lownie has more.
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 U.K. 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 U.K. 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. …
According to its website, the TBI provides guidance for over 30 governments, including Saudi Arabia under a £9 million deal between the two parties. Of its $81 million turnover in 2021, $79.4 million was from “government advisory work”.