£1.4bn in personal protective equipment (PPE) has been destroyed or written off in what is apparently the most wasteful Government deal of the pandemic. BBC News has more.
Figures obtained by the BBC reveal that at least 1.57 billion items of PPE provided by the NHS supplier, Full Support Healthcare, will never be used, despite being manufactured to the proper standard.
The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), which was responsible for purchasing and delivering Covid PPE, said it was unable to provide a statement due to the pre-election period.
The Labour Party described the contract as a “staggering waste” while the Liberal Democrats said it was a “colossal misuse of public funds”.
Full Support Healthcare agreed a £1.78bn deal in April 2020 to deliver face masks, respirators, eye protection and aprons – the largest Covid PPE order from a single supplier, accounting for 13% of the Government’s total spend.
Before the pandemic, the Northamptonshire-based company, which was already a specialist manufacturer of PPE, had 25 employees and annual profits of £800,000.
Any profits since the contract was fulfilled are not known because in 2021 the Co-Directors, Sarah Stoute, 50, and her husband Richard, 53, based the business offshore in Jersey for privacy reasons.
They and the company continue to pay all U.K. tax. Neither Full Support Healthcare nor the Stoutes have done anything improper. …
Four years since the first national lockdown in England and Wales, the DHSC continues to store and dispose of billions of items of excess PPE at a cost of millions of pounds a week.
At a press conference on Tuesday morning, the Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said the £1.4bn figure was “not accepted” but the DHSC has not specified a different one.
Ms. Atkins said on the wider point “the whole country wanted us to get the PPE that our front-line staff needed both in healthcare and in social care, and we managed to procure billions of pieces of PPE equipment”.
“That was absolutely the right thing to do at the time,” she added.
Worth reading in full.
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Why not store it and/or give it to developing Commonwealth countries. Give it to Ukraine as they have a lot of messed up bodies to fix.
It looks as if it has just been dumped in a field to be blown around by the wind.
Storage has a cost. Warehouse space full of PPE, cannot be used to store other stuff – probably why it has been moved outside.
Shipping it abroad has a cost. It is less expensive to incinerate it.
The cheapest option would have been not to have bought it in the first place. PPE, unless a full HazMat suit, gives zero protection against an airborne respiratory virus which circulates the entire indoor space not just near the infectious person.
PPE is not worn for ‘flu cases at other times -because it is of no use.
As with lockdowns, masks, social distancing, one-way systems, the daily report of positive tests, it was all part of the Fakedemic theatre.
Yet another reason on a long list to shut down the NHS and return us to a private sector, medical care system which existed before the Labour Government nationalised it. Only then will there be fiscal responsibility, lower costs, improved service standards. But the pan-bangers don’t want that.
Can we just remember that, at the time, the whole world was desperately seeking PPE from wherever it could be bought, and both the Labour Party and the LibDems were stood at the despatch box every day demanding more, bigger, better, further and faster, and calling for ministerial resignations on an hourly basis. Its quite a thing for them to try and take the moral high ground now, as if they were advocating caution and prudence.
Both the Labour Party and the Lib Dims had their parts to play in the pantomime.
All that’s true, but another significant issue was Dominic Cummings’ determination to by-pass the established procurement systems as part of his neo-Maoist approach to undermine the role of the Civil Service. (It was the same with “vaccine” procurement, where he told Kate Bingham to “just get it sorted”.) The horrendous consequences of his various interventions are now coming home to roost.
“That was absolutely the right thing to do at the time,” . No it wasn’t. How did PPE stop the airborne ‘Covid’ (aka the flu) spreading? How do plastic aprons stop it spreading, how do ridiculous virtue signalling masks stop the spread? The short answer is they don’t. She meant to say “it felt good spending lots of taxpayers money as it gave the impression we knew what we were doing”.
The best defence BY FAR was an individual’s healthy immune system, something the Govt never promoted – as there was no profit for their local landlords ….
Yup the only credible use for masks is in the Operation Theatre. And there was no mass demand for them. Just an excuse to get rich on taxpayers money that’s why expect another ’emergency’ soon. That goes for Ukraine too. Nothing to do with us mate!
I agree with your use of the term “Operation Theatre”. That’s what it was all about. In the NHS Trust hospital where my wife worked, most of the clinicians and management immediately took the opportunity to work from home, so they were never going to need this PPE.
Instead, my wife, who was still expected to attend the hospital in her role as a departmental secretary, was expected to work full-time wearing a face mask mask and goggles.
As a result, the few people who actually needed to vist the hospital in person during this period were confronted by an apolcalyptic scene which seemed to reinforce all the news stories of the “killer virus”. It was pure theatre…
That is an awful lot of house insulation that has been dumped. Whatever happened to lateral thinking?
To think laterally requires thinking in the first place.
The Government machine is a thought-free zone.
What of the Green party- I seem to remember some of them pushing for masks? I wonder how it will be disposed off? Burning? Not terribly environmentally friendly!
The figure includes some 749 million items that have already been burned or destroyed, “including by energy from waste”, and a further 825 million that are classified as excess stock “where disposal and recycling are possible outcomes”. in the BBS article.
‘including by energy from waste’ and recycling is among ‘possible outcomes’ are incredibly tepid statements! If I drop a Red Bull can in the street recycling is a ‘possible outcome’ because someone might pick it up and put it in the recycling bin – but it seems unlikely!
“The Labour Party described the contract as a “staggering waste” while the Liberal Democrats said it was a “colossal misuse of public funds”.
Had they been in charge they would have done it bigger and better.
Well in the past they would’ve been strung up for this misuse of public funds on an epic scale. Wake up public they’re shafting us over a barrel.
“the whole country wanted us to get the PPE that our front-line staff needed both in healthcare and in social care, and we managed to procure billions of pieces of PPE equipment”.
“That was absolutely the right thing to do at the time,” she added.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
First of all I am not aware that ‘the whole country’ wanted government to do anything. I certainly didn’t.
Secondly, could Ms Atkins produce the schedules showing that we needed ‘billions of pieces of PPE equipment.’ Exactly how much PPE was the country using on a weekly basis.
Next, why are these items now unusable?
Given that the NHS was simply dealing with a re-branded ‘flu, and most staff knew or should have known this, why did we have to buy so much? It’s not as if the hospitals were busy because actual deaths from the C1984 were 0.2% with an average age of 83 and most of the deaths were the result of euthanasia initiated by Midazolam Mat. And all this assumes that the PCR testing was valid and accurate, which it wasn’t.
To sum up, Victoria Atkins is an out and out liar.
I seem to recall that Prof Fergusons ‘world renowned’ computer model said that the bodies would be stacked 10 high in every hospital car park or something. Obviously with hindsight, we can say that the model wasn’t really as accurate as it could have been. Seeing as it had been tried twice in real life scenarios and found wanting by orders of magnitude, the real question is why anyone listened to the Imperial College London expert (sponsored by Bill and Melinda Gates), in the first place..? Any ideas.?
To answer your last question – it was a Scamdemic as most here on DS know.
Plus his record that is a catalogue of apocalypse.
About 3% accurate. But what made that % accurate who knows.
Thanks
What will be staggering is the quantity, on a global scale, of those pointless disposable face masks now in landfill or polluting the oceans.
Whenever politicians use the words ‘absolutely’ or ‘clearly’ you immediately know they’re lying.
I’ve just seen this in the Telegraph. A push for RSV vaxx by Pfizer to pregnant and elderly.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/25/pregnant-women-elderly-rsv-jab-nhs/
I’ve not yet read into this, but I plan to later. It’s Pfizer, so my Spidey sense is tingling. mRNA perhaps?
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2213836
My Spidey sense was correct. The more recent NEJM article from Dec 2023 mentions mRNA in the title.
It’s mainstream already folks. The EUA did the trick.
They’ve barrelled through all objections, cancelling the objectors – it’s now far too profitable a technology for them to ever own up to the truth of the last five years.
Let me guess, the same company is charging the taxpayer for storage.
This was a part of the feeding frenzy of corporate greed taking advantage of the Covid idiocy. Michelle Mone was just a side show.
The outgoing Chief Secretary to the Treasury was a member of the Health and Social Care Select Committee when this order was placed. Vote Reform.
Posted my Reform vote yesterday