Thread by @PaulNuki

1/ Gosh, I see tomorrow's Commons spectacular is to be co-chaired by Jeremy Hunt. This is odd because in the field of pandemic planning (which he ran between 2012-2018) he is best styled as not so much as grand inquisitor but *chief defendant* ...

https://twitter.com/PaulNuki/status/1396899870921957383?s=20

2/ Mr Hunt is huge on the "everything-would-have-been fine-if-it-had-been-flu" defence. This after all was the title of our plan - the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011....
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

3/ But this is tosh. It's no defence at all and it is important to understand why.
First, influenza comes in a huge range of different forms. It can be fast or slow, mild or devastating. This is true of seasonal flu but especially so for pandemic varieties ...

4/ Mr Hunt & Co have put it about that influenza is "unstoppable" in order to explain why the UK pandemic plan had no suppression element. But here you can see social distancing measures put in place to stop Covid-19 have also stopped flu worldwide...

5/ Another line being rolled out is that Covid-19 can be passed on by asymptomatic carriers but influenza cannot. I can't see this helps with a defence of the UK pandemic strategy but it's balls in any case. Influenza is also transmitted asymptomatically ....

6/ But what really sinks the great influenza excuse is that several countries had influenza plans which also incorporated suppression measures. NZ's plan of 2017 is a crystal clear example: health.govt.nz/publication/ne…

7/ Singapore is another good example. It is also the country with the best-named pandemic strategy: "Pandemic readiness and response plan for influenza and other acute respiratory diseases [like Covid-19]".
It moved on Jan 2, 2020 to suppress the virus ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

8/ Footnote: Every time I mention Singapore on Twitter someone gets in touch to say did I know that the UK helped draft its pandemic strategy. Having read the strategy, I suspect that if they ever took a call from PHE they were just being polite.