Presentation by David Osborn to the Safer Healthcare Biosafety Network (21 November 2025)

Summary

David is a health and safety consultant and member of the Covid Airborne Transmission Alliance (CATA).

The Safer Healthcare Biosafety Network (SHBN) is an independent forum focused on improving healthcare worker and patient safety. It is made up of clinicians, professional associations, trades unions and employers, patient organisations, industry, and government agencies with the shared objective to prevent occupational and patient safety incidents and improve occupational health and safety and patient safety in healthcare. It includes representatives from the UK-Health Security Agency, NHS, Health and Safety Executive (HSE), Care Quality Commission (CQC), Public Health, Royal College of Nursing (RCN), British Medical Association (BMA) and many others.

You can watch the recording of David’s presentation to the Network below. This took place the day after Baroness Hallett published her report for module 2 of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry. David was speaking on behalf of CATA, the COVID Airborne Transmission Alliance, a core participant in module 3 (impact on healthcare).

Content

Summary of presentation

David reminded the Network that Baroness Hallett, in her module 1 report (July 2024), had already confirmed that the primary routes of transmission for coronaviruses (including SARS-CoV-2) are “airborne and respiratory”. This was based on expert evidence presented to the Inquiry. David felt it was discourteous to Baroness Hallett for anybody to claim that COVID-19 is not an airborne disease, yet that is exactly what ministers (Andrew Gwynne and his successor Ashley Dalton) have been repeatedly saying in their correspondence with CATA.

In her module 2 report, Baroness Hallett mentioned that “policy makers paid insufficient attention to … airborne transmission”. She went on to commend Professor Cath Noakes for the evidence she provided, praising her for raising her concerns and highlighted a comment that there could have been “significant public concern” (i.e. panic) if the disease was declared to be airborne.

David shared evidence of this in the form of a WhatsApp message from Matt Hancock sharing concerns that if mainstream media published stories about the advisability of wearing masks, there would be a “loo roll type rush” on them.

The Inquiry report had included comments that Professor Sir Jonathan Van Tam had made to the Inquiry during his oral evidence that “If we knew then what we know now, there may have been less emphasis on contact transmission and more emphasis on airborne transmission and ventilation”. David rejected this statement outright, maintaining that, right from the start of the pandemic, it was known to be airborne. He presented proof of this via a statement by the the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) to its inspectors in April 2020 confirming that the risk of aerosol transmission was at its greatest within a metre of the infectious person—exactly the setting where most care is given to patients.