Tuesday, October 12, 2021

UK govt fumbled start of Covid crisis: MPs' probe

By AFP
Published October 11, 2021
Former special advisor Dominic Cummings gave a scathing assessment of Johnson's handling of the crisis during his evidence. — © AFP

British government delays locking down society when Covid-19 hit last year were “one of the most important public health failures” in the country’s history, a parliamentary report said Tuesday.

In a damning assessment, a cross-party group of British MPs found government pandemic planning was too focused on flu and had failed to learn the lessons from the prior Sars, Mers and Ebola outbreaks.

The study, published by two parliamentary watchdog committees after months of hearings, comes ahead of an independent public inquiry into the government’s coronavirus handling due to begin next year.

Britain has been hit hard by the crisis, with nearly 138,000 Covid-19 deaths since March last year, raising questions about why it has fared worse than other nations.

MPs on two parliamentary committees said the government had waited too long to push through lockdown measures in early 2020.

Leading advisors had pushed a “deliberate policy” to take a “gradual and incremental approach” to interventions such as social distancing, isolation and lockdowns, said the report.

That approach had been proved “wrong” and cost lives, they noted.

“Decisions on lockdowns and social distancing during the early weeks of the pandemic — and the advice that led to them — rank as one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced,” they wrote.

There was a “policy approach of fatalism about the prospects for Covid in the community”, which contributed to the failures.

– ‘Groupthink’ –


Government planning for a pandemic was also misplaced and too “narrowly and inflexibly based on a flu model”, while ministers and advisers were accused of “groupthink” by some experts, according to the report.

“The Government took seriously scientific advice but there should have been more challenge from all to the early UK consensus that delayed a more comprehensive lockdown,” it stated.

Britain had also been too slow to introduce the isolation of infected people and their households, and mistakenly implemented “light-touch border controls” only on countries with high Covid rates.

The panel took evidence from a range of figures, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s controversial former chief adviser Dominic Cummings, who assailed his ex-boss’s handling of the crisis.

Johnson has also faced criticism over his refusal to start the public inquiry sooner.

The British leader announced in May that the probe would go ahead and examine his government’s actions “as rigorously and as candidly as possible and to learn every lesson for the future”.

But he has refused to allow it to begin before spring next year, arguing the inquiry could hamper the country’s ongoing pandemic response.


Report by MPs says government’s response to Covid was ‘one of the worst ever public health failures’

Basit Mahmood Today
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The UK has one of the world’s highest death tolls from Covid, with more than 138,000 deaths



The UK’s early handling of the Covid pandemic has been described as ‘one of the worst public health failures in UK history’ in a landmark report.

Published by the Commons science and technology committee and the health and social care committee, the report was scathing of the decision to pursue ‘herd immunity’. It states that ‘the UK, along with many other countries in Europe and North America made a serious early error in adopting this fatalistic approach and not considering a more emphatic and rigorous approach to stopping the spread of the virus as adopted by many East and Southeast Asian countries.”

The UK has one of the world’s highest death tolls from Covid, with more than 138,000 deaths. The cross-party group of MPs also said that the pandemic had exposed ‘some major deficiencies in the machinery of government’, with protocols to share vital information between public bodies ‘absent’.

The 151-page report also says that the decision not to impose an earlier lockdown and act with urgency had resulted in a higher death toll. It adds: “This slow and gradualist approach was not inadvertent, nor did it reflect bureaucratic delay or disagreement between Ministers and their advisers. It was a deliberate policy— proposed by official scientific advisers and adopted by the Governments of all of the nations of the United Kingdom.”

Decisions on lockdowns and social distancing during the early weeks of the pandemic – and the advice that led to them were described as “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced.” The report concludes: “This happened despite the UK counting on some of the best expertise available anywhere in the world, and despite having an open, democratic system that allowed plentiful challenge.”

The decision to discharge elderly patients into care homes without testing them for coronavirus was also criticised. The MPs stated: “The UK was not alone in suffering significant loss of life in care homes, but the tragic scale of loss was among the worst in Europe and could have been mitigated.”

The report did however praise the vaccination programme, describing it as “one of the most effective initiatives in the history of UK science and public administration”.

Cabinet Office minister Stephen Barclay refused to apologise 11 times on Sky News following publication of the report.

Asked by Kay Burley if he would be apologising in the wake of the report, Mr Barclay replied: “Well no, we followed the scientific advice, we protected the NHS, we took the decisions based on the evidence before us.”

UK 'waited too long' to impose COVID-19 lockdown, costing thousands of lives: report

By AP • Updated: 12/10/2021 - 

In this Friday, March 6, 2020 file photo, the front page of the Evening Standard is displayed at Bond Street Station, in London. 
 Copyright Alberto Pezzali/Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

The British government waited too long to impose a lockdown in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, missing a chance to contain the disease and leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths, a parliamentary report concluded Tuesday.

The deadly delay resulted from ministers’ failure to question the recommendations of scientific advisers, resulting in a dangerous level of “groupthink” that caused them to dismiss the more aggressive strategies adopted in East and Southeast Asia, according to the joint report from the House of Commons’ science and health committees. It was only when Britain's National Health Service risked being overwhelmed by rapidly rising infections that Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative government finally ordered a lockdown.

“There was a desire to avoid a lockdown because of the immense harm it would entail to the economy, normal health services and society,’’ the report said. “In the absence of other strategies such as rigorous case isolation, a meaningful test-and-trace operation, and robust border controls, a full lockdown was inevitable and should have come sooner.’’

The U.K. parliamentary report comes amid frustration with the timetable for a formal public inquiry into the government’s response to COVID-19, which Johnson says will start next spring.

Lawmakers said their inquiry was designed to uncover why Britain performed “significantly worse” than many other countries during the early days of the pandemic so that the U.K. could improve its response to the ongoing threat from COVID-19 and prepare for future threats.

The 150-page report is based on testimony from 50 witnesses, including former Health Secretary Matt Hancock and former government insider Dominic Cummings. It was unanimously approved by 22 lawmakers from the three largest parties in Parliament: the governing Conservatives and the opposition Labour Party and the Scottish National Party.

The committees praised the government’s early focus on vaccines as the ultimate way out of the pandemic and its decision to invest in vaccine development. These decisions led to Britain’s successful inoculation program, which has seen almost 80% of people 12 and over now fully vaccinated.

“Millions of lives will ultimately be saved as a result of the global vaccine effort in which the U.K. has played a leading part,” the committees said.

But they also criticized the government’s test-and-trace program, saying its slow, uncertain and often chaotic performance hampered Britain’s response to the pandemic.

The government’s strategy during the first three months of the crisis reflected official scientific advice that widespread infection was inevitable given that testing capacity was limited; that there was no immediate prospect for a vaccine; and the belief that the public wouldn’t accept a lengthy lockdown, the report said. As a result, the government sought merely to manage the spread of the virus, instead of trying to stop it altogether.

The report described this as a “serious early error” that the U.K. shared with many countries in Europe and North America.

“Accountability in a democracy depends on elected decision-makers not just taking advice, but examining, questioning and challenging it before making their own decisions,” the committees said. “Although it was a rapidly changing situation, given the large number of deaths predicted, it was surprising the initially fatalistic assumptions about the impossibility of suppressing the virus were not challenged until it became clear the NHS would be overwhelmed.”

Trish Greenhalgh, a professor of primary care health services at the University of Oxford, said the report “hints at a less-than-healthy’’ relationship between government and scientific bodies. With COVID-19 still killing hundreds of people every week in Britain, advisory committees continue to debate exactly what evidence is “sufficiently definitive” to be considered certain, she said.

“Uncertainty is a defining feature of crises...,’’ Greenhalgh said. “Dare we replace ‘following the science’ with ‘deliberating on what best to do when the problem is urgent but certainty eludes us’? This report suggests that unless we wish to continue to repeat the mistakes of the recent past, we must.”

Even senior officials like Cummings and Hancock told the committees they were reluctant to push back against scientific consensus.

Hancock said as early as Jan. 28, 2020, he found it difficult to push for widespread testing of people who didn’t show symptoms of COVID-19 because scientific advisers said it wouldn’t be useful.

“I was in a situation of not having hard evidence that a global scientific consensus of decades was wrong but having an instinct that it was,” he testified. “I bitterly regret that I did not overrule that scientific advice.”



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