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Covid: UK start to pandemic worst public health failure ever, MPs say - BBC News
Oct 12, 2021 2 mins, 54 secs

The UK's failure to do more to stop Covid spreading early in the pandemic was one of the worst ever public health failures, a report by MPs says.

The government approach - backed by its scientists - was to try to manage the situation and in effect achieve herd immunity by infection, it said.

The report predominantly focuses on the response to the pandemic in England.

The findings are detailed in the report - Coronavirus: Lessons learned to date - from the Health and Social Care Committee and the Science and Technology Committee, which contain MPs from all parties.

Tory MPs Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, who chair the committees, said the nature of the pandemic meant it was "impossible to get everything right".

Cabinet Office minister Stephen Barclay said scientific advice had been followed and the government had made "difficult judgments" to protect the NHS.

And the group representing families who have lost loved-ones during the pandemic - Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice - criticised the committees for not speaking to any relatives of people who died.

When Covid hit, the government's approach was to manage its spread through the population rather than try to stop it - or herd immunity by infection as the report called it.

The report said this was based on dealing with a flu pandemic, and was done on the advice of its scientific advisers on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).

The result was that too little was done in the early weeks to stop Covid spreading, despite evidence from China and then Italy that it was a virus that was highly infectious, caused severe illness and for which there was no cure.

"The veil of ignorance through which the UK viewed the initial weeks of the pandemic was partly self-inflicted," said the report.

Asked whether herd immunity had been a policy in the early days, Jeremy Hunt, chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, said he did not think there was any desire for the whole population to be infected.

The committees said decisions on lockdowns and social distancing during the early weeks of the pandemic - and the advice that led to them - ranked as "one of the most important public health failures the UK has ever experienced".

The MPs also highlighted how ministers in England rejected scientific advice to have a two-week "circuit-breaker" in the autumn.

The UK was one of the first countries in the world to develop a test for Covid in January 2020, but failed to translate that into an effective test-and-trace system during the first year of the pandemic.

The greatest praise though was reserved for the vaccination programme and the way the government supported the development of a number of vaccines, including the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab.

The development of treatments, such as dexamethasone, for Covid through the UK Recovery Trial was another area where the UK's response was genuinely world-leading, the report said.

The MPs said the pandemic had also exacerbated existing social, economic and health inequalities which would need addressing.

The report highlighted "unacceptably high" death rates in ethnic minority groups and among people with learning disabilities and autism.

The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice campaign group said many people would see the report as a "slap in the face".

Were your family or care home personally affected during the early days of the pandemic.

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