Government ‘tried to block’ rival coronavirus app, says expert

‘We were hampered from the beginning,’ says Professor Tim Spector

The government has been accused of trying to block the development of rival coronavirus apps while it pursued its failed contact-tracing technology.

Professor Tim Spector, of King’s College London, claimed officials ”hampered” his team’s Covid-19 symptom tracker, which has 3.5 million users, after they first contacted the health service’s tech arm, NHSX, in March.

He said that the government refused to endorse the ”COVID Symptom Study” app despite using its data for meetings of its scientific advisors and across most departments.

“We had discussions with them from the end of march, saying why don’t you use our app, and they have said we can’t do that because the public will be confused when our app and they wouldn’t be able to distinguish between the two,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

The professor of genetic epidemiology also told The Observer: “We were hampered from the beginning, in March when we first contacted NHSX... lots of signals went to places like the universities, my university, the medical charities and the royal colleges not to back our app because that would interfere with their one.”

Prof Spector is now planning to launch a public campaign to pressure the government to back his team’s app, which he claimed was “the best way of tracking what is happening with the virus”.

“It’s really not fair all these people are contributing and it’s not been publicly recognised,” he added.

The government were also unsupportive of another app, Ink C-19, which was set up by tech security firm Agitate, according to the firm’s CEO, Ian Gass.

“I got the impression that there was just a lot of panic going on in governmental circles, and they didn’t know what to do or how to do it,” Mr Gass told The Observer. “They intimated that they’re doing stuff, and we don’t want others doing it.”

It comes after the government ditched plans to develop a custom-made NHS contact tracing app and announced it was going to switch to technology provided by Apple and Google.

Health secretary Matt Hancock said trials of the app revealed a “technical barrier” which meant that it picked up just 4 per cent of contacts on Apple phones and 75 per cent of contacts on Android handsets.

Professor Spector reacted by tweeting: “For 3 months NHSx and NHS England have refused to support our covid symptom app or work with our 3.5 million dedicated users because of the NHS Covid-19 contact-tracing app – and now it’s dead. Another wasted opportunity!”