Thread by @SarahLudford

“Last week, a senior adviser to Downing Street broke ranks and blamed the weeks of complacency on a failure of leadership in cabinet. In particular, the prime minister was singled out.”

Name this ‘senior adviser’!
thetimes.co.uk/article/corona…

“The training to prepare key workers for a pandemic had been put on hold for two years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal Brexit.”

“@devisridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University, had predicted in a talk two years earlier that a virus might jump species from an animal in China and spread quickly to become a human pandemic. So the news from Wuhan set her on high alert.”

“The growing alarm among scientists appears not to have been heard or heeded by policy-makers. After the January 25 Cobra meeting, the chorus of reassurance was not just from Hancock and the prime minister’s spokesman: Whitty was confident too.”

“On January 31 — or Brexit day as it had become known — there was a rousing 11pm speech by the prime minister promising that the withdrawal from the European Union would be the dawn of a new era unleashing the British people who would ‘grow in confidence’ month by month.”

“While a possible pandemic had been listed as the No 1 threat to the nation for many years, the source says that in reality it had long since stopped being treated as such.”

“The last rehearsal for a pandemic was a 2016 exercise codenamed Cygnus which predicted the health service would collapse...preparations for a no-deal Brexit ‘sucked all the blood out of pandemic planning’ in the following years.”

“The Department of Health firmly denies that ‘herd immunity’ was ever its aim and rejects suggestions that Whitty supported it. Cummings also denies backing the concept.”

Well, I know that I heard Vallance on #r4today on Thursday March 12th clearly assert that objective

“A senior @DHSCgovuk insider described sense of drift witnessed during crucial weeks in Feb:
‘We missed the boat on testing & PPE...when it came we just slowly watched. We could have been Germany but instead we were doomed by our incompetence, our hubris & our austerity’.”