It was a "mistake" for the previous Tory governments to focus too heavily on preparations for combating flu rather than other types of pandemic, David Cameron told the Covid inquiry on Monday.
The former Conservative Prime Minister said it was “very hard” to determine why there was so little focus on other disease epidemics other than influenza when he led the country between 2010 and 2016.
"I think it was a mistake not to look more at the range of different types of pandemic," Mr Cameron said.
He added: "Much more time was spent on pandemic flu and the dangers of pandemic flu rather than on potential pandemics of other, more respiratory diseases, like Covid turned out to be.
"I think this is so important because so many consequences follow from that."
Mr Cameron, the first politician to be questioned by the inquiry, faced questions over the austerity cuts to public services under his leadership.
He said that his government did look at pandemics other than flu, such as Mers and Sars, but conceded there had not been "adequate follow-up to some of the work" .
"I think that wasn't a failing, I think the failing was not to ask more questions about asymptomatic transmission, highly infectious... what turned out to be the pandemic we had," he added.
Ahead of Mr Cameron's appearance at the inquiry, British Medical Association’s (BMA) chairman Professor Philip Banfield claimed austerity was blame for “disastrous” failures during the Covid pandemic.
He accused the ex PM of having “ground down and pulled apart public health systems” in a blog for the BMA.
Mr Cameron was asked whether health inequalities increased during his time in office.
"After 2011 in lots of countries in the world, life expectancy continued to improve but didn't continue to improve so quickly," he said.
"We had some very difficult winters with very bad flu pandemics; I think that had an effect. We had the effect that the improvements in cardiovascular disease, the big benefits that already come through before that period, and that was tailing off.
"And then you've got the evidence from other countries. I mean, Greece and Spain had far more austerity, brutal cuts, and yet their life expectancy went up. So I don't think it follows."
The former prime minister added that child poverty, the number of people, including the number of pensioners, living in poverty all "went down".
"They have got lots of important evidence and I have looked at it very carefully and will think about it very carefully, but I did find that they had leaped to a certain set of conclusions quite quickly, not all of which was backed up by the evidence."
