London Thanasis Gavos

The United Kingdom’s health secretary during the coronavirus pandemic, Matt Hancock, has admitted that fear of the effects of a disorderly Brexit has affected the degree to which the British state is prepared for the possibility of a public health crisis.

“State resources have been moved within the Department of Health to deal with this threat (of a disorderly Brexit), including from pandemic preparedness planning,” Mr Hancock testified this morning before the independent inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic. of the coronavirus.

This was the explanation given by the former minister in response to the question of one of the lawyers of the inquiry about the failure to implement 14 of the 22 recommendations that had emerged from Operation Swan in 2016, which was precisely aimed at better preparation for a pandemic.

Matt Hancock also said that when he took over the Department of Health in 2018 he was given assurances that the UK was among the best prepared countries to respond to a pandemic. “That turned out to be a mistake,” he admitted.

He criticized the approach to a health crisis he said he encountered at the ministry, which did not emphasize prevention: “The UK’s doctrine has been to plan for the consequences of a disaster – we can buy enough body bags, where we will bury the dead – and that was completely wrong. Central to planning for a pandemic should be: how do you stop the disaster from happening?”

Mr Hancock did not hesitate to admit that the planning for the protection of the social care sector, i.e. primarily nursing homes in terms of COVID-19, was “lousy”. But he hastened to add that the legal responsibility for the protection of such structures does not lie with the Ministry of Health but with the Local Government.

More generally Mr Hancock argued that the “doctrine” of preparing Britain and other Western countries against pandemics made his work difficult. He claimed e.g. that he had to reject the initial recommendation not to apply the quarantine measure to arrivals from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus transmission.

In the end he admitted that there was a “serious and significant deficiency” in the preparation of the British state against the coronavirus and that as Minister of Health he bears responsibility for this.

He also warned that “significantly more” funding of the British public health system NHS is needed to adequately deal with similar crises in the future.

The independent investigation will take years. After initially examining the degree of preparedness of the British state apparatus against the pandemic, it will deal with the government’s response and finally with the lessons to be learned.