COVID RESPONSE ONE OF UK’S WORST EVER ‘PUBLIC HEALTH FAILURES’, REPORT SAYS

Tue 12 October 2021:

According to a parliamentary report, the government’s early handling of Covid-19 “amounted in practice” to herd immunity, and the delayed decision to lock down in spring last year rates as one of the “most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced.”

Ministers have denied that the government intended for the virus to spread freely in the UK in order to build up population immunity. However, findings from a cross-party investigation demonstrate that this was the “effective consequence” of the original response to Covid, which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.

The cross-party group of UK legislators also noted the government failed to develop an effective test-and-trace system, which could have helped curb the spread of the virus, and followed a policy of what effectively amounted to “herd immunity”.

“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,” said the 151-page report published on Tuesday. The review was based on hours of testimony from more than 50 witnesses, including advisers on government policy, health and science.

More than 138,000 people have died from the coronavirus in the UK, one of the world’s highest death tolls.

The UK government declared the first lockdown on March 23, considerably later than some other European countries, delaying it for an aimed herd immunity by infection goal.

While the country’s top emergency decision-making body met for the first time about COVID-19 on January 4, 2020, the legislators said, a lockdown was not imposed until March 23 of that year. The “gradual and incremental approach” to non-pharmaceutical interventions cost lives, it added.

“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.

The report also criticised the government’s decision to return elderly patients to care homes without testing them for the coronavirus – a move which led to a surge of cases among the most vulnerable people in the population – as well as decision making in relation to ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.

Vaccine Effective initiative

But the country’s vaccine program was one of the most efficient in Europe, although the COVID-19 death toll is over 150,000, the report by the Health and Social Care Committee said. It was “one of the most effective initiatives in UK history.”

“A significant part of the success of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was due to the Government’s early investment in research and development which originally started with the UK Vaccines Network set up in 2016,” the report said. “That investment and support through successive governments has clearly paid off.”

The chairs of the committee, Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, who are both Conservative MPs, said it was “impossible to get everything right” because of the nature of the pandemic.

“The UK has combined some big achievements with some big mistakes. It is vital to learn from both,” they said.

The study comes ahead of an independent public inquiry investigating the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which Johnson said will start next year.

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