Failures of State by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott review – how Britain became 'Plague Island'
I
n this meticulous, damning investigation, two journalists reveal how the government squandered a legacy of pandemic planning and led Britain into a dead end.
Alan Johnson is the reviewer.
When I became health secretary in 2007, the chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, took me aside to explain why there was bound to be a pandemic soon. Between 1918 and 1920, the H1N1 virus that became known as Spanish flu was responsible for more deaths than the first world war. There had been a flu pandemic about 30 years before that and another, Asian flu (H2N2), would kill up to 4 million 40 years later.
“It’s running a bit late, but one’s sure to come along any minute,” he told me in his reassuringly soft Teesside accent, as if we were standing in Whitehall waiting for a number 11 bus.
Calvert and Arbuthnott suggest that a combination of austerity and “the government’s one-eyed obsession with Brexit” had eroded our defences. There had been another scaled-down rehearsal in 2016, codenamed Cygnus, after which the official verdict was that Britain’s preparations were by now inadequate for the “extreme demands” of a pandemic. It was a danger signal that seems to have been ignored.
The result is chronicled here in meticulous detail: out-of-date stock that should have been replenished, respirators with an expiry date of 2012, no gowns, visors, swabs, body bags or eye protection. Nurses having to improvise PPE with black bin liners.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/14/failures-of-state-by-jonathan-calvert-and-george-arbuthnott-review-how-britain-became-plague-island