Funding cuts to the NHS and a lack of investment in public health are likely to have hampered Britain’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Britain’s top scientists said on the second day of the public inquiry.
Baroness Hallett is overseeing a national inquiry into Covid and its devastating effects, focusing her initial investigations on Britain’s preparations for a pandemic prior to March 2020.
In an opening address, Matthew Hill KC, representing the Government Office for Science and the Sage committee, today said the UK benefited from its strengths in some areas, but was held back into areas of weakness.
“Those scientific areas in which the UK was strong going into the pandemic were those in which it did well,” he told the inquiry.
“The quality and breadth of its science base, expertise in genomic sequencing, expertise in pharmaceuticals and vaccines, and the ability to mount large-scale national clinical trials. Conversely, areas of national weakness led to vulnerability. The absence of a major domestic diagnostic industry, and difficulties in scaling up for manufacturing of diagnostics, the underlying health inqequalities and co-morbidities within the population, the lack of excess capacity in the NHS, even in normal times, and challenges of scaling and operations of a public health infrastructure which raised questions about the investment made in that system in preceding years and whether it had responded effectively to previous pandemic threats.”
Mr Hill also stressed to the inquiry that the Sage committee of independent scientists who advised the government on its pandemic response did not make policy, and was not the only voice of authority.
He said co-chair Sir Patrick Vallance had insisted that Sage meeting minutes and papers were published, giving them “particular prominence in the minds of the media and public in relation to policy”.
But he added: “It was an important input, but it was never the only consideration, nor should it have been.”
The inquiry’s first day of hearings began yesterday with a promise from chair Baroness Hallett that bereaved families “will always be at the heart” of the process she is overseeing.
Some families staged a vigil outside the hearing centre in Paddington, criticising the inquiry for not allowing pen portraits of victims of Covid and refusing to call their chosen witnesses in the first phase.
A video of some of the bereaved was played at the start of today’s hearing, to represent the pain and anger felt by many people.
In his opening speech, counsel to the inquiry Hugo Keith KC said the UK was “taken by surprise” by the impact of the pandemic when it reached this country in January 2020. He said “huge, urgent and complex policy decisions” and imposing lockdowns had not been anticipated. “No country can be perfectly prepared, but it can certainly be underprepared,” he said.
