Professor Steve Turner, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (“RCPCH”), provided evidence to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry on 8 October 2025, on behalf of the paediatric workforce.
His testimony focused on the impact of the pandemic on children, young people and their health services, highlighting that the de-prioritisation of children’s healthcare services persisted for too long and that the indirect effects on their health and wellbeing were not adequately recognised.
Speaking of the most vulnerable children who had serious health issues and should have been at risk of falling victim to covid, as the official narrative had claimed, Prof. Turner explained that it was known very early on that this was not the case.
“When we started, we thought this [covid] could be really nasty, and there were three categories into which people of all ages were placed in terms of risk. But very, very, very, very quickly, our patients and their parents told us that if … children who have gone through heroic surgery, have life-threatening problems, are ventilated at night, when they get covid and the rest of the family gets covid, it was the parents and the carers who were [sick].
“Children who had kidney transplants, whose immune system was suppressed – we were really worried about them. But the virus bounced off them. So, we knew very, very quickly that this virus, for whatever reason, was not doing harm for the vast majority of children in whom we thought it would,” he said.
When asked what the Government and its advisors had not done well in responding to covid, Prof. Turner said: “There was not enough consideration given to the innumerable harmful indirect harm that was done to them as a consequence of the provisions made around covid.”
At the end of April 2020, RCPCH undertook a snapshot survey of more than 4,000 paediatricians across the UK and Ireland through its British Paediatric Surveillance Unit. 32% of emergency department paediatricians responded to say they had witnessed delayed presentations for, for example, new diabetes and cancer diagnoses and sepsis due to restrictions in place in response to covid. In other words, children were not being taken to the hospital as soon as they should have been.
At the time of the survey, 9 children had died from sepsis and new cancer diagnoses. Delayed presentations were considered to be a significant contributing factor in these deaths. These 9 deaths were higher than the number of childhood covid deaths reported over the same period in England.
It was expected that a few months later, say in June 2020, a follow-up impact assessment would be conducted. Prof. Turner suggested that questions such as, “What have we learnt for children, what have we done to children, what harm are we doing to children and what should we do to address this?” should have been asked at this point. “I see very little evidence of that ever happening,” he said.
“The evidence is that, come the second lockdown at Christmas 2020, the same thing was done. Even though we knew that children, mercifully, were spared from the harm that came from covid. Even my most sick patients, when they and their families got covid, it was the parents who were unwell – these vulnerable children were remarkably unaffected,” he added.
While the virus “bounced off” children, children suffered psychological harm from the measures imposed in response to covid.
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