Almost £10 billion – two thirds of the total spend – was wasted on useless PPE safety equipment for NHS staff in the pandemic, the Covid inquiry has found. The Telegraph has more.
About two thirds of the £14.9 billion of taxpayer money spent on personal protective equipment went towards masks, gloves, gowns that were inadequate and unusable.
Baroness Hallet, the Chairman of the inquiry, said the “waste of taxpayer money was vast” as she highlighted “several major flaws” in how equipment was stocked and bought.
This included the creation of a VIP or high priority lane that prioritised certain suppliers for NHS PPE, which she concluded “embedded unfairness in the emergency procurement system”.
Failures began before the pandemic hit, with a lack of equipment stockpiled and inadequate plans to deal with an emergency, the report found.
In England, about two thirds of the 3.8 million FFP3 masks stockpiled in January 2020 had expired, and stocks of aprons and gloves were a quarter of what they should have been.
Overall, there was evidence of “favourable treatment” to some suppliers as the VIP lane was “inherently biased towards those with connections to the UK government”. The report concluded that this “heightened the risk of abuse” and should “never be repeated”.
Despite this, the inquiry “found no evidence of cronyism or corruption on the part of ministers or officials in the final decision of whether to award or reject a contract”.
However, the allegations and lack of transparency did “damage the reputation of those involved in procurement during the pandemic and undermined public trust”.
One of the most high profile cases of VIP contracts was PPE Medpro Ltd – linked to the Tory peer Baroness Michelle Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman – which was ordered to repay £122 million plus interest to the government for providing faulty gear at the height of the pandemic.
A chapter dedicated to the firm as part of this latest report is not being published yet because of a ‘restriction order’ while criminal investigations are ongoing.
The inquiry also concluded that the UK’s supplier base was “too concentrated in China”, and that it was unprepared to use its domestic manufacturers.
The UK was more reliant on Asia – and China in particular – for basic PPE than other Western countries such as France and Germany. The inquiry said that reliance on China “remains a major risk”.
When the pandemic hit, the price of sourcing such equipment from China increased by up to 1,252% [around 13-fold], leaving officials with the choice of “buying at the inflated price or not buying at all”.
In a statement after the report was published, Baroness Hallet said that the lives of doctors, nurses and other staff “were put at risk” by the failures.
She said more than £42 billion had been spent on PPE, testing and ventilators between January 2020 and June 2022, and it was “a stark fact” that £10 billion had been wasted on PPE alone.
Worth reading in full.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to the Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
We currently have the “Hillsborough Law” being debated in Parliament. If this is passed, then officials have a duty of candour to the public. This should apply to the Covid enquiry/ Baroness Hallet. Even debating this means we recognise there has NOT been a duty of candour before (Hillsborough, Grenfell, Stockport, Rotherham plus many others), and the officials involved need to be held to account.
Those in the medical supply industry knew this (but ££££), medical staff knew this (but everyone likes dressing up), and all Pantomimes need costumes; the CoVid Pantomime being no exception.
Where’s the virus? Behind you!
Seeing as the tests gave positives for coca cola, the masks where useless, the chance of surface transfer was determined to be near zero, short of being in a clean room enviro suit there was nothing that worked to stop the bloody sniffle. The whole thing was a scam I dont know a single person who died of covid, I know several who died of cancer though so what was the real killer.
A paramedic told told me they cleared up a motorbike crash, guess what his cause of death was listed as….
At the height of the second “wave” what was supposed to be the worst, the local hospital serving 250,000 people, had a total of 2 “with” covid patients in the ICU as shown on the ONS website.
The obscene twisting of statistics regarding cause of death, so that everyone dying with COVID was recorded as dying of COVID, is but a part of the shameful response of government.
Indeed – in particular family members with end of life cancer being marked down as a Covid death alongside road traffic accident victims – shocking bending of the stats
Meanwhile the vaxxes which appear to have caused enormous harm, remain untouched by the inquiry🥲🥲🥲 why?
Because it was a scamdemic and it’s far too soon for the truth to come out. This is why the inquiry hasn’t questioned all the dodgy computer models, looked into narural immunity, accepted that Covid was only a serious risk to very old people with co-morbidities, examined the cost and massive harm of lockdown etc. The inquiry is was far more interested in Whatsapp messages between ministers and advisors and who slagged of who.
It was obvious before the inquiry began that the main conclusion would be that the country should of locked down sooner and harder.
The whole plandemic was a scam. £millions transferred from “the peasants” to the self-selecting Gobal Elite ….. then, now and in the future via debt repayment.
And that’s BEFORE we get onto the medical-murders (midazolam and the jabs) and millions of ruined lives.
The other side of this particular equation is the way in which so many low status public-facing staff were mandated to wear this useless and impractical PPE.
At the hospital where my wife worked (in a non-clinical role), the trust management agreed to allow everyone (including clinical staff) who could WFH wherever possible. This meant that the mandate to wear this crappy, uncomfortable, and useless PPE fell on the few junior staff who were still obliged to attend in person.
In my wife’s case, this meant working her entire shifts wearing goggles and a face mask, even when she was working alone in her office. (Working alone in a largely-empty hospital was a serious issue in itself, without the additional discomfort of the useless and performative PPE nonsense.)
Despite all this, she (we) contracted Covid in November 2020 when the adjacent Spinal Injuries Ward became a “Covid hot-spot”, but no-one bothered to mention it to the other staff!
And what about the hundreds of millions of useless vaccines purchased that are still being imposed on the population today, even though it’s proven that they can cause permanent and serious damage to the body.
This is the worst scandal but you can be sure the Hallett enquiry won’t report on that.
I remember being amazed about all the do-gooders suddenly not giving a toss about mountains of single use plastic consumption in tests, masks, injections etc – a month or two before they were saying if we didn’t ditch plastic straws a 1000 dolphins would die a day or some such bollocks… once they felt impacted, the morals vanished…
Ah ok, the PPE was useless but making everyone wear homemade cloth masks and cosplay surgeons masks was justified. Wasn’t all the PPE useless? Surely the only thing that would not have been useless during the “deadliest pandemic ever” was whatever they were wearing in the lab they made it in, or are supposed to have made it in, depending on who you believe?
No. That stuff was no good either. It does not matter whether they ‘made’ it (I think so) or were ‘just’ researching it – it got out.
And in other news, the pope etc etc bears in woods etc etc
£400+ billion wasted on this country’s response to a fake panic.
Untold damage.
I’m still angry, but I had to let the rage subside as it was eating me up.
Same here – the rage has subsided. But I will never forget and never forgive them.
And that’s one of the main reasons we have prices at the level they are now – rampant money printing has to be paid for in inflationary effects… increase the money supply, and value goes down – it’s a principle as old as time, but people don’t seem to get it or don’t want to understand how our governments are continually shafting us all…
That was just the PPE that was rubbish. Its hard to justify why we all needed so much PPE in the first place. It was a nasty flu, not bubonic plague.
If NHS staff with nothing to do because all routine surgery was cancelled didn’t have loads of PPE to dress up in their TikTok videos wouldn’t of looked as good.
More importantly, from the point of view of TPTB, seeing medics in loads of PPE on the news every night helped to convince the gullible that Covid was far more serious than it actually was so it was worth spending taxpayers money on it as part of operation fear.
It’s true that medics didn’t die disproportionately to other professions. For some odd reason, security guards appeared to be hit hardest.
Still, it looks like PPE made no difference.
Have these people never heard of stock rotation?
Hmm. Out of date mask or no mask? Which is better? (cue Harry Hill: ‘Fight!’). I already know which is necessary for Covid…
I find it difficult to believe that the pre-2020 pandemic plan did not encompass acquiring PPE and having diverse suppliers. As for being too reliant on China… who’d have thought?
Plus paying to import it by air-freight. Thanks Dom.
Only today, I was recalling how our local shopping mall had to make customers dance about in one-way footprints and avoid any physical contact with others. Did the regime find these humiliations amusing? Now it feels like one of those stage shows displaying people doing ridiculous things under hypnosis. Never, ever again.
I always deliberately went the wrong way round supermarket’s one way systems, while not wearing a face nappy, just to prove a point.
For sheer ridiculousness this example is hard to beat. Near where I live there’s what looks like it was once a road but over a decade ago it was converted into a footpath/cycle route and had barriers at each end to prevent vehicle access. Because it hadn’t been used as a road for a long time the sides had started to become overgrown with vegetation. Highland council paid for a contractor to the remove the barriers and clear all the vegetation then put up signs saying it was a Covid priority route. This was because there was a hospital close to one end of it and someone had decided that emergency access to hospitals should be improved, as if a 2-3 minute shorter journey is going to make any difference even if it was a very frail elderly person with severe Covid symptoms. What makes the whole thing beyond farcical is that the hospital is a psychiatric hospital so wouldn’t be receiving covid patients.
And those con men were the big ones. I seem to remember that there was no shortage of junk on sale, even in supermarkets back in 2020.
Any PPE scam was just a tiny part of the COVID scam.
Six yrs on, our Devon dentist requires his customers perform a covid PCR test prior to their appt with him. The fear lives on.
How is he still in business?
Doesn’t deserve to be with that insane attitude.
I suspect that the only reason that he is still in business is thanks to the scarcity of dentists. We were on a waiting list to join our private dentist’s practice, here in Devon, for over a year.
What scarcity? I thought all the migrants were highly qualified doctors and dentists?
I would vote with my feet. This is completely unreasonable.
Something else that is a monumental waste of time and effort – this whitewash inquiry.