Civil Service “groupthink”, Brexit and planning for flu rather than a coronavirus led Britain to be unprepared for the pandemic, the Covid Inquiry has found. The Telegraph has more.
Baroness Hallett, the inquiry’s Chairman, said Ministers “failed their citizens” by preparing for the wrong pandemic, which led more people to die from Covid,
The Government’s flawed planning was hampered by “groupthink” and bureaucracy, which Health Secretaries such as Jeremy Hunt failed to challenge, the inquiry’s first report said.
Lady Hallett said that the failure to plan properly led to more deaths and a greater cost to the economy.
She said the country suffered from a “lack of adequate leadership” in the run up to Covid and the country was “ill prepared for dealing with a catastrophic emergency, let alone the coronavirus pandemic that actually struck”.
“Had the U.K. been better prepared for and more resilient to the pandemic, some of that financial and human cost may have been avoided,” the report said.
The report also found that some recommendations to improve the Government’s response to a potential pandemic had not been implemented because the Government was focused on preparing for a no-deal Brexit.
It added that preparedness for a civil emergency must be treated in “much the same way as we treat a hostile state”.
More than 235,000 people died from illnesses involving COVID-19 up to the end of 2023, while the inquiry also recognised the terrible damage done by the pandemic to the economy, children’s education and mental health and to the NHS.
In the foreword of the 217-page report, the first since the inquiry was launched two years ago, Lady Hallett added: “There must be radical reform. Never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering.”
Identifying what she described as “significant flaws” in planning for Covid, Lady Hallett, whose inquiry has already cost £100 million, said “the U.K. had prepared for the wrong pandemic” and plans to deal with a flu outbreak were “inadequate for a global pandemic of the kind that struck”.
The report said that there was a “lack of adequate leadership, coordination and oversight” from Ministers who were not presented with enough options and “failed to challenge sufficiently” the advice they did receive from officials and advisers. …
She said there were “fatal strategic flaws” in assessing the risks and a sole pandemic strategy dating back to 2011 and based on influenza was “outdated and lacked adaptability”.
“It was virtually abandoned on its first encounter with the pandemic,” the report said. “It focused on only one type of pandemic, failed adequately to consider prevention or proportionality of response, and paid insufficient attention to the economic and social consequences of pandemic response.”
The 2011 strategy had not been updated to investigate the dangers posed by coronaviruses that had already struck in Asia including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
Summing up her findings, Lady Hallett said: “The Inquiry has no hesitation in concluding that the processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures within the U.K. Government and devolved administrations and civil services failed their citizens.”
Lady Hallett said the 2011 strategy was “beset by major flaws, which were there for everyone to see” and criticised Mr. Hancock for abandoning the strategy.
There was also a “damaging absence of focus on the measures, interventions and infrastructure required in the event of a pandemic” and planning was hampered by bureaucracy.
“Despite reams of documentation, planning guidance was insufficiently robust and flexible, and policy documentation was outdated, unnecessarily bureaucratic and infected by jargon,” the report said.
The report concluded: “The Secretaries of State for Health… who adhered to the strategy, the experts and officials who advised them to do so, and the governments of the devolved nations that adopted it, all bear responsibility for failing to have these flaws examined and rectified. This includes Mr. Hancock, who abandoned the strategy when the pandemic struck, by which time it was too late to have any effect on preparedness and resilience.”
The report also raises serious concerns about the use of lockdowns, which Lady Hallett said “should be a measure of last resort”, and accused ministers of a “failure adequately to consider proportionality of response” in imposing lockdowns.
The inquiry, which will look at the effect of lockdowns in later modules, said: “For as long as they remain a possibility, lockdowns should be considered properly in advance of a novel infectious disease outbreak.”
Making 10 recommendations, the report said that that the “potential disruption to social and economic life, and the cost as the result of a false alarm, may be disproportionate to the burden of an actual pandemic”, but it was critical for a Government “to steer a course between complacency and overreaction”.
Worth reading in full.
This sounds like it’s trying to have it both ways. Criticising Hancock for abandoning the 2011 plan while slamming the plan as inadequate. Saying we didn’t do enough, but then hedging on lockdowns and implying maybe we shouldn’t do them and they’re not really worth it (to be honest, we should be grateful there is any sense of that at all given how the hearings went).
The implication seems to be that had the plan been better for coronaviruses (as though SARS-2, an airborne respiratory virus, behaves so very differently from influenza, an airborne respiratory virus), then it wouldn’t have needed to be abandoned and lockdowns imposed because we would have happily followed the coronavirus pandemic plan. But this assumes there was something wrong with the plan, and that Covid is so very different from influenza.
In fact, of course, the 2011 plan was based on a review of evidence for non-pharmaceutical interventions such as gathering and travel restrictions which showed that most of them were insufficiently effective to be worthwhile and could even be counterproductive.
The problem wasn’t the plan, as Sweden showed by following it and having better outcomes. The problem was that it was ditched. Plus many of the panicked measures and protocols that were implemented were deadly for vulnerable people deprived of adequate and timely care. I suppose it would have been too much to expect Baroness Hallett to point this out.
Stop Press: A new report from the Taxpayers’ Alliance says the U.K. spent more than almost every other OECD country on trying to mitigate the impact of the pandemic as a percentage of GDP.
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All six Prime Ministers this century have done huge damage to this country.
However all MPs are worried about are events on a different continent.
Tony Blair was responsible for the murder of 600.000 Iraqis with WMD lie. Mrs T shut a few mines and dealt with unions infested with communists. Who gets more grief from MSM and is labelled extreme?
The panic amongst the MP class is that their gravy train, truffle hunting and downright thievery is going to come to an end.
Squeaky bottom time for many of the 600 as they face the ride in to the valley of death.
I quite like that vision.
Thank you ellie.
Tory MPs I presume?
”If Israel was not a Jewish nation the world would not care at all about the ”Palestinians”. Meme.
Palestinians seem to always be taking precedence over the many people across the world who are legitimately facing persecution and genocide, be they Muslim, Christians, Yazidis, Uyghurs etc…for years this has been happening and nobody takes to the streets to bring attention to their plight, but as soon as there’s Jew involvement and another Middle East conflict kicks off involving those nations the Palestinians get the world’s sympathy while the state of Israel gets the world’s hate. Antisemitism dressed up as social justice with hypocrisy and selective outrage off the charts. So many people outing themselves as deeply unpleasant individuals who are worthy of our contempt. And it’s not hard. Just don’t be on the side of the terrorists, irrespective of how you feel about Israel’s handling of things!
Not possible for the George Galloway/Jeremy Corbyn/Hamas/Houthi/Hezbollah/Jihad Fanclubs though. They’re hardwired to hate because they’re all ‘useful idiots’ and traitors to the West. You’ll all bend over for Islam when the time comes, won’t you??
Wipe your chin, you seem to be drooling.
Out of order.
Surely the article you are commenting on contradicts exactly what you are saying? Palestinians taking precedence … but the article reports that Labour is taking action against its MPs because of their supposed anti-semitism. In other words, any criticism of anything Israel does is classified as anti-semitism and is to be punished.
Why? What is so special about Israel that does not apply to other countries? Does Israel have a special right to commit genocide? No, of course not.
You are right to condemn terrorism but one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and one should at least question why there has been a ‘Middle-East Problem’ ever since the British assumed responsibility for the area in 1918. Only 130 years ago there were hardly any Jews in Palestine at all, but in less than 50 years the Zionist cause very successfully managed to displace and subjugate the Palestinians who had owned and worked the land for the previous 2,000 years – and the Zionist cause and its effects continue to this day.
The result is understandable: strife, discontent and millions of refugees. Now place the remaining Palestinians in their own country in ‘open-air prisons’ and you have succeeded in creating a nicely explosive situation.
If you want to read some alternative sources of information regarding the alleged crimes of rape, decapitations and whatever, performed by Hamas, and the recent allegations against the UNRWA then I recommend:
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report/
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/18/israeli-army-gassed-auschwitz-soldier/
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/11/beheaded-israeli-babies-settler-wipe-out-palestinian/
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/12/06/scandal-israeli-october-7-fabrications/
https://expose-news.com/2024/02/12/absence-of-evidence-israels-case-against-unrwa/
But maybe it is all just plain anti-semitism …
What a shame he did not support the working class or the people who pay the tax to keep the whole show on the road.
Will be interesting watching the various Muslim factions forming and running their own political parties.
No time for the man. Wasn’t he also one of the ones who couldn’t say if a woman can have a penis and that he’d rather be at Davos than Westminster?
Kneel is identical to Fishy only dressed nominally in a different coloured flag. They are both fully paid up members of the WEF fan club. And that is all they will ever be – fan boys. They seem to believe that for doing Klaus’s bidding they will eventually gain access to his Round Table but the reality is that they will be discarded when deemed of no further use. Fishy may be allowed to cling on a little longer because of his father-in-law but he will be discarded eventually.
Kneel has no interest in this country and is about as trustworthy as a Democrat CIA operative. He is so dishonest he doesn’t even know if his progeny are male or female and yes he did say that he would prefer to work in Davos rather than Westminster – “every time.” A statement which confirms how bloody thick he really is.
A dangerous, treasonous P O S who is clearly still being coached by Traitor Number One – T. Bliar.
The Working Class has only ever been a useful tool to advance its Socialist ideology. And the Working Class its useful idiots.
Can’t we at least have a new pre-election smear tactic every now and then? And maybe just let people in the middle-east kill each other in whichever ways they see fit and worry about real problems closer to home instead?
Assuming I had a right to vote, I’d be interested in political issues affecting the UK, like, say, why is tendencially every existing building been torn town and replaced with another tower block of empty flats, and what opinons party leaders and prospective MPs have about them. I really don’t care for their opinons about either Israel or Palestine.
Part of the problem may be redefinition of what anti-semitism means. It’s not obvious that criticism of the Israeli military is automatic anti-semitism, or even criticism of the local government being conflated with anti-semitism.
I’m sure some people hate Jews but the term isn’t helpful. I think it’s better to talk about what people’s views are on what the UK should be doing wrt Gaza etc, and what the other sides should be doing, whether there should be a Jewish state etc etc – actual concrete proposals or opinions on specific matters.
A Jewish state exists (again) because the people who wanted and want to have one had and have the military muscle to ensure its existence. The question whether or not it should exist is entirely immaterial.
I would have thought it is highly relevant as what shape some future Jewish state might have would influence choices made now. In what direction should we be working?
That’s one of these completely bizarre human statements I absolutely cannot understand …
Do you believe that the Jews are the rightful owners of this country because God awarded it to them? If so, Israel should obviously exist because such is the will of God! However, what happened to Gods will during the time between 70AD and 1948AD? Did it become his un-will or was it perhaps temporarily suspended? If so, why?
Do you plan to recruit and army of your own or at least send the English army into the region in order to support some kind of outcome? If so, which outcome, if not, what do you mean by working on it?
Singing the songs of one side of the other side in the UK is nothing but local noise.
Of what interest is the existence or non-existence of Israel to anyone who isn’t living in the area and also not planning to conquer it?
This is a political game. Anti-semitism is one of the few sticks the Conservatives have to hit Labour over the head with.
And as always the useful idiots will buy into the game and will be outraged by the “anti-semitism” which in some cases might be real, in some cases might just be sympathy for Palestinians expressed in a way that can be exploited as “anti-semitism”.
What I am pretty sure is that the people driving this care about actual anti-semitism as much as they care about anything else. It goes as far and only as far as it’s politically expedient for them to care.
So for example caring about the jab injured isn’t at all politically beneficial so… they don’t give a sh*t.
Being outraged about “anti-semitism” yields political capital, so they care deeply.
Nail on head.
Graham Jones suspended?
He should have been arrested for inciting racism!
Don’t you mean “arrested for inciting murder or rape”? That’s the only reason for arresting anyone, not for inciting tribalism, for Pete’s sake.
If I were to say ‘F*** Iran’, anybody fighting for Iran should be arrested’, would you say I should be arrested for inciting racism?
I don’t understand how one particular religious group has been given a special protected status everywhere in the world, so that it is an international criminal act to criticise that group. Another religious group has been campaigning at the UN to give themselves a similar protected status, declaring any criticism of them to be a “hate crime”.
You never hear of people having to be investigated for “Anti-Christianism”, do you?
Let’s just drop all this nonsense.
Such a shame, my heart bleeds for him! Poor old kneel.
Labour Party – antisemitism, a feature not a flaw.
Antisemitism is actually written as ‘anti-Semitism’. The contraction makes no sense in logical terms. I know it sound weird but the notion of ‘Semitism’ isn’t that clear. If you look at the Semitic tribes there are certainly cultural tendencies but these are above this level of scrutiny. Therw were certain tribes possessing a certain language group that moved westward. I don’t mean to sound pedantic but frankly this level of discourse is kindergarten or retard level. I am not insulting you personally I am just letting you know.
The excuse being trotted out for Starmer initially supporting anti-Semitic Ali to remain the Labour candidate in Rochdale, is that if Labour didn’t field a candidate which the very large Muslim community there will approve of (ie an anti-Semite), then George Galloway (boo, hiss) might win.
Personally, I see very little difference between anti-Semitic Ali and George Galloway (boo, hiss) except Galloway has been very verbal about Blair’s illegal war in Iraq and also supported leaving the EU.
Labour imported and has assiduously courted “the Muslim vote” and is now reaping what it has sowed. Starmer can only excise anti-Semitism from the Party by removing a very large number of MPs, Candidates, Councillors and Members.
And he isn’t going to do that. He’ll get rid of one or two, mouth platitudes and tell all the other anti-Semites in the Party to keep their mouths shut …… until the crosses are on the ballot paper.