Following on from Witness Statements from HART and from CCVAC, below is the statement submitted by Mr Nick Hunt, chair of the Perseus Group. Nick is a retired senior civil servant who worked for many in the Ministry of Defence, where, through formal delegation from the Secretary of State for Defence, he was responsible for the safety and effectiveness of a wide range of explosive items used by the UK Armed Forces. His role included approving products for Service use, monitoring in-service safety and
effectiveness and, when necessary, taking decisions about limiting, modifying or suspending use of individual products in the light of safety issues.
With this experience of working in a safety critical role, he had assumed that similar checks and balances existed in the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) but in 2020-2021, like many of us, discovered that the MHRA’s attitude to safety was very different.
He set up the Perseus Group and was lead author on a detailed report on the failures of the MHRA published in April 2023: Safe & Effective ~ A report on MHRA’s Regulation of the Covid-19 vaccines
He, like HART, responded to a Rule 9 request for a witness statement to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, and like HART, was not called and the statement was not published.
A supplementary statement was also published following a number of FOI requests.
