The UK achieving herd immunity from COVID was a “clearly ridiculous goal of policy” and “very dangerous”, England’s chief medical officer has told the public inquiry into the pandemic.

Giving evidence for a second day on Wednesday, Professor Sir Chris Whitty said 80% of the population would have had to have contracted coronavirus to achieve herd immunity.

But he said that by the end of the first wave that figure was only 20%.

He said the public debate around herd immunity caused “considerable confusion” and was “frankly unhelpful”, particularly as it was led by people who “had at best half-understood the issue”.

“It would have been inconceivable that this should have been an actual goal of policy because it would have led to an extraordinarily high loss of life,” he told chief counsel for the inquiry Hugo Keith KC.

Professor Whitty added that herd immunity should have only been talked about in the context of vaccines – not natural infection.

“We had no idea whether, even in a theoretical situation, the population would by natural infection even get to the herd immunity threshold,” he said, stressing the “very significant risks of mortality” for higher-risk groups such as the elderly and immunocompromised.

The chief medical officer said that modellers were referring to the concept “in the sense of gradually increasing levels of immunity” in the population.

But he said many were publicly employing a “completely different use of the term”.

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Also on communication, Professor Sir Chris admitted his comments on “behavioural fatigue” – the willingness of the public to comply with restrictions – were his “most prominent error”.

On Monday, he refused to single out individual politicians, saying only that then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson had his “own unique style”.

But on Tuesday he added that he was not convinced that “all parts of the Downing Street machinery” was “seized of the urgency” of acting against COVID in early March 2020.

“This was a lot of people really not getting what exponential growth was actually going to mean,” he said.

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He added that there were “people who had been heavily looking into this”, including former aide Dominic Cummings, who “realised that this was heading in a very difficult direction”. But he said: “I don’t think everyone in the building did.”

On Monday Professor Whitty criticised the decision to allow mass gatherings such as the Cheltenham races and Champions League football match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid to take place in mid-March 2020 – just before the first lockdown on 23 March.

He described it as “logically incoherent” and creating a “false sense of normality”.

Sir Chris’s former colleague, then-deputy chief medical officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam is giving evidence on Wednesday.

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