{"id":413330,"date":"2026-02-07T18:38:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T18:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/413330\/"},"modified":"2026-02-07T18:38:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T18:38:11","slug":"jeane-freeman-snp-politician-who-led-covid-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/413330\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeane Freeman: SNP politician who led Covid response"},"content":{"rendered":"

True at the best of times, this was doubly so when Covid struck in 2020. Governments across the world battled to limit the spread of infection, implement lockdown, and keep the economy going.<\/p>\n

Freeman stood beside Sturgeon in press conferences throughout the next year. There would be praise for their calm stewardship and she was there at the start of the vaccine roll-out.<\/p>\n

But the decision to discharge elderly hospital patients to care homes during the first few weeks of the pandemic without a requirement for a negative test was one which hung over Freeman for the rest of her time in politics and beyond.<\/p>\n

The worst mortality rates were later seen within care homes as the virus spread among vulnerable residents, and it was another month before the guidance on testing was changed.<\/p>\n

Speaking to the BBC in 2025<\/a>, Freeman said she understood the anger of those who lost loved ones and recognised that people died because of that policy – but stood by their decisions as being the best they could make at the time.<\/p>\n

She regarded tackling waiting times as her big mission when health secretary. It’s fair to say Covid robbed her of her desire to do this.<\/p>\n

The other controversy which hung over her time in office was inherited from Sturgeon’s time in the health department – the question of whether deaths at the new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow were related to problems with its ventilation and water systems<\/p>\n

Amid constant claims of cover-up and political attacks, including repeated calls for her resignation, Freeman set up a public inquiry in 2019.<\/p>\n

More than five years later in January 2026, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde admitted<\/a> that on the “balance of probabilities” the hospital environment, particularly the water system, caused some infections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"True at the best of times, this was doubly so when Covid struck in 2020. Governments across the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413331,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-413330","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}