Read this investigation and understand that Boris Johnson didn't 'take one for the team'. He took a gun and played Russian roulette with his own life and the lives of many thousands of others. He had a choice – they didn't
(Thread below) archive.is/20200418182037…
(Thread below) archive.is/20200418182037…
1) UK governments had known for nearly two decades that pandemic was the No 1 threat facing the country. But Tory austerity policies progressively undercut the resources needed to cope
2) Even plans the UK still had in place were not activated when the pandemic threat became real in early February. ‘Almost every government department has failed to properly implement their own pandemic plans,’ a Downing Street source told the Sunday Times
3) Boris Johnson took a back seat. Spending time in the countryside with Carrie Symonds, he missed five weeks of Cobra emergency meetings that had been called to discuss how to avert the threat heading the UK’s way
4) The government failed to introduce mass testing at an early stage to prevent the spread of Covid-19, instead favouring a ‘herd immunity’ model that had been designed to deal with ordinary flu
5) Johnson's government also didn’t ask firms to start producing testing kits until very late in the day. The association representing 110 companies in the UK’s testing sector say they were first approached by the government on April 1
6) The government had allowed emergency stockpiles of protective gear (PPE) to dwindle to almost nothing. Much of the rest had been sent to China to help with the outbreak of the virus there
7) Suppliers who could have made up the shortfall of protective gear were mostly in China. By the time the UK approached them they were already struggling to deal with China’s urgent need for more PPE. Offers from UK firms to supply PPE were ignored by the government till April 1
8) A Health Department insider: ‘A pandemic was always at the top of our national risk register – always – but when it came we just slowly watched. We could have been Germany but instead we were doomed by our incompetence, our hubris and our austerity’
9) Singapore based its own very successful response to Covid-19 on the UK’s plan. A health expert: ‘I’ve worked with Singapore in 2003 and 2009 and basically they copied the UK pandemic preparedness plan. But the difference is they actually implemented it’
