Today’s report is most important my Select Committee has done. Taken over a year with lengthy evidence sessions (7 hours in the case of Dominic Cummings) but shows, I hope, parliament at its best as we deliver far reaching conclusions about our pandemic response…
https://twitter.com/commonshealth/status/1447713628447141888
Recommendations significant for 2 reasons: 1. unanimous agreement by 22 x-party MPs - as non-partisan as it’s possible to get. 2. Will be most comprehensive independent study ahead of public inquiry that may not publish for several years.
We conclude that our national response was a curate’s egg of disastrous mistakes and extraordinary genius. The first lockdown was too late & based on flawed scientific advice which should have been challenged earlier.
Had we been humble enough to learn from the approach being taken in places like Taiwan and South Korea, with their experience of SARS and MERS, we could perhaps have avoided lockdowns altogether in the first year.
That delay meant test & trace only got going when infections were at several thousand a day, vastly higher numbers than the successful East Asia T&T systems had to cope with. So it was doomed to fail, & we ended up with 3 lockdowns. Just as across Eur & N.America, many more died.
Another major failure was in ignoring the vulnerabilities of the social care system. Germany quarantined hospital discharges & Hong Kong sealed off its care homes early on. We prioritised emptying hospitals without enough thought to the risks in care homes.
But set against that were the biggest achievements of the British state in our lifetimes. To pre-buy 400 million doses of vaccine before they had been approved was a spectacularly successful gamble that gave us the best vaccine programme in Europe.
The Oxford AZ vaccine was based on research commissioned by Chris Whitty’s UK Vaccines Network in 2016 following the ebola epidemic in West Africa - & resulted in the world’s most commonly used vaccine, made available to developing countries with no intellectual property charge.
It wasn’t just vaccines: 2/3 of Covid treatments were discovered in the UK (dexamethasone has saved a million lives worldwide). The NHS made sure that all patients in need got ventilator & ICU bed - unlike Lombardy & New York (although big costs in disruption to other treatments)
What are the lessons for next time? We need to avoid groupthink about the kind of virus we may face. Too much of our national response, including during the time I was health secretary, was geared around assumption that the most likely pandemic we would face would be a flu one.
We also need more understanding of the pressure points in the social care system and more latent capacity across both the NHS and care system so that other treatments face less interruption next time.
But most of all we need to understand, as we rebuild both systems after their biggest ever challenge, that rather than just do what we have always done more efficiently (and with more money) science and innovation can help us leapfrog the old ways of doing things.
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