At least £486 million of taxpayers’ money was spent on implementing the ‘traffic light system’ for international arrivals during the coronavirus pandemic. But the Government “does not know” whether it worked or not, according to a powerful committee of MPs. The Guardian has more.
The traffic light system set the rules for arrivals from every country depending on whether it was on the red, amber or green list. Arrivals from red list countries had to stay in a quarantine hotel for at least 10 days.
The testing and quarantine requirements for people arriving in the U.K. were changed 10 times between February 2021 and January 2022, according to the report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) published on Tuesday.
The report said the Government “does not know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused”.
Airlines and holiday companies blamed ministers for the slow recovery of foreign travel due to the rules, with many European countries imposing fewer restrictions.
“Managing cross-border travel was an essential part of health measures introduced by government during the pandemic,” the report said. “Despite spending at least £486m on implementing its traffic light system to manage travel, [the] Government did not track its spending on managing cross-border travel or set clear objectives, so does not know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused.”
Taxpayers subsidised £329m of the total £757m cost of quarantine hotels, according to the report. That is despite the bill for individuals rising to more than £2,200 for a single adult. Only 2% of guests in hotel quarantine tested positive.
Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the PAC, said: “The approach to border controls and quarantine caused huge confusion and disruption with 10 changes in a year. And now we can see that it is not clear what this achieved.
“We can be clear on one thing – the cost to the taxpayer in subsidising expensive quarantine hotels, and more millions of taxpayers’ money blown on measures with no apparent plan or reasoning and precious few checks or proof that it was working to protect public health.”
Hillier said the Government was not learning the lessons from the pandemic fast enough, missing opportunities to react faster to new variants and the spread of monkeypox.
“We don’t have time and it is not enough for Government to feed these failures into its delayed public inquiry,” she said.
Worth reading in full.
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I wouldn’t be too blasé saying “Gov inevitably lost..”, but it does increase my confidence in the judges! Also reported on GBN recently.
Call me paranoid but my guess is the judges’ motivation is to expose evil Tory incompetence and corruption rather than getting to the real truth about covid.
“unredacted”….. Highly unlikely.
BREAKING.. the Daily Sceptic has received the first glimpse of Johnson’s papers.. verdict.. clear as mud..
Squeaky bum time for Gove, Cummings and Sunak me-thinks.
I wish I could believe that, but the whole premise of the inquiry is that there was a pandemic, so the focus will be on poor execution of the stupid, evil rubbish they made up pretending it was to do with public health. The basic lie will not be exposed in our lifetime because there are too many vested interests who were all in on it in some way or another. In fact, name a powerful institution in the rich world that wasn’t an enthusiastic supporter of the covid scam.
Yes TOF.. name one indeed.. I certainly can’t..
We were lied to about the efficacy and safety of the jabs just like we were lied to about the severity of the pretend ”pandemic”. The maniacal obsession with getting everybody jabbed, using whatever means necessary ( not just the PsyOp, remember the crazy examples of bribery from all around the world? Remember when they did that for previous years’ flu vaccines? Nope, me neither! ) looks even more sinister now doesn’t it? That’s why I’ve personally done a 180 and now think no world leaders and no people with real influence took the damn things at all. They’d have just had placebos, I’m convinced of it. Because they *knew* the whole thing was a hoax and the death jabs were both unnecessary and highly risky, in a dangerously ‘mass global human experiment using novel technology’ kind of way.
”Drug regulators and public health agencies have saturated the airways with claims that serious harms following COVID-19 vaccination are “rare.”
But there has been very little scrutiny of that claim by the media, and I couldn’t find an instance where international agencies actually quantified what they meant by the term “rare” or provided a scientific source.
The best evidence so far has been a study published in one of vaccinology’s most prestigious journals, where independent researchers reanalyzed the original trial data for the mRNA vaccines.
The authors, Joseph Fraiman et al., found that serious adverse events (SAE)—i.e., adverse events that require hospitalization—were elevated in the vaccine arm by an alarming rate—1 additional SAE for every 556 people vaccinated with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine.
According to a scale used by drug regulators, SAEs occurring at a rate of 1 in 556 are categorized as “uncommon” but are far more common than what the public has been told.
In response to the criticism, Fraiman, an emergency doctor and lead author on the reanalysis said, “To be honest, I’m not that surprised that agencies have not determined the rate of SAEs. Once these agencies approve a drug, there’s no incentive for them to monitor harms.”
He said it’s hypocritical for health agencies to tell people that serious harms of the COVID-19 vaccines are rare when they haven’t even determined the SAE rate themselves.
“It’s very dangerous not to be honest with the public,” said Fraiman, who recently called for the mRNA vaccines to be suspended.
“These noble lies may get people vaccinated in the short term, but you’re creating decades or generations of distrust when it’s revealed that they have been misleading the public.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/sorry-but-serious-harms-from-the-vaccine-are-not-rare_5373840.html
We still have the core question: why? To me the elephant in the room is that only the (gullible) people of the collective west were given deadly mRNA, while China’s sphere of influence were given what I assume were basically placebos. This seems incredibly significant to me. If the shots are a bioweapon, which I think they are, and the mRNA tech is owned by China, which Naomi Wolf and others have shown, what does that suggest? To me it suggests that world war 3 is a biological war…
Anyone else having probs with the site being slow or not loading tonight? I posted something over an hour ago and it’s disappeared into the ether. Oh well…just some friendly neighbourhood gremlins perhaps…
From Peter McCullough’s Telegram;
”After high volumes of downloads overnight @TheLancet censored our paper. They don’t want the truth to get out on autopsies in C19 deaths. Why not let people read it and make their own conclusions?”
No wonder the shady buggers censored it. Look at the authors and you’ll see at least six names of doctors/experts who have been outspoken and opposing the narrative from the start. You can still access it here;
https://www.zenodo.org/record/8120771
All a pantomime for those that believe any of this stuff still matters.
The fact is that during the “deadliest virus the world has ever seen” members of the govt, opposition, civil service and expert class were swanning around drinking and screwing while they told the rest of us it was too dangerous to sit in a cold church 20 feet from someone else. If you can’t work out what that means then you need to listen to a little more “London Calling”.
Described brilliantly AMAT..
Never mind, the waste of yet more taxpayers’ money is par for the course of all governments.
Nothing like this happens by accident. I suspect they want to paint the picture of the chaotic response to Covid by our elected government so that they can push the line that we need to hand over our sovereignty to unelected technocrats at the WHO.