A full-blown indictment of the initial handling of the Covid emergency in the United Kingdom, which calls into question both the conservative government of Boris Johnson and some of his renowned scientific advisors.
All pointed out for having contributed, through choices or delays that proved fatal, to burdening the toll of the pandemic on the island with thousands of additional potential victims: in the meantime it reached a total of about 150,000 deaths, first place in Europe in absolute numbers.
This is the substantial content of a bipartisan parliamentary report, born by majority and opposition deputies of the Health and Science and Technology Commission of the House of Commons, released more than a year and a half after the outbreak of the coronavirus alarm in the world. A report that offers some alibis to BoJo, and does not fail to grant the executive credit for the subsequent stages of the challenge, starting with the recognized success of the vaccination campaign; but that does not discount the initial attitudes attributed to the prime minister and his entourage, the cause of one of the "worst failures ever recorded" - is the verdict - on the national public health front.
According to the conclusions of the deputies, the cabinet - ill advised at first by some of its leading scientists, but nevertheless deaf to the doubts of many other experts - was guilty in the face of the first clear signs of the threat of having cultivated the illusion of being able to "manage the contagion", perhaps to try to stimulate an elusive anticipated herd immunity. An accusation already widely circulated, despite the government's denials, and which the document now certifies. Not without underlining how this "fatalistic" approach can be traced back to the delay of at least a couple of weeks in the adoption of the lockdown line, compared to the indications given by the World Health Organization on the basis of the experience of countries already affected by the infection. Like Italy.Delay paid in extra human lives lost, with a "significantly worse" scenario than other nations, and sealed by episodes such as the Liverpool-Atletico Madrid match: authorized again in mid-March 2020, as a mega cluster of 50,000 people , just on the day when the WHO proclaimed Covid-19 as a global pandemic.
Not only. The 150-page report also highlights the initial underestimation of the impact of the virus on nursing homes, which in many cases became deadly foci of infection with inevitably fatal outcomes for thousands of elderly and vulnerable people. And the initial shortcomings of the health service (NHS) are also denounced, the delays in the first supplies of protective material for doctors and nurses, those on the creation of an effective test and tracing system, with a lot of "wasted" advantage from the country on the front. of preventive checks despite the British research having been among the first to develop an ad hoc swab since January 2020.
The presidents of the two commissions involved in the investigation, former Tory ministers Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, did not fail to soften the criticism, recognizing that the pandemic was "the greatest challenge" faced by the island (and the world) in peacetime. Nor to credit the Johnson government with "great results" in subsequent responses to the emergency: first of all in the field of vaccine development and administration, where London has become a pioneer at a global level by creating "one of the most effective initiatives in the history of the United Kingdom". But these are results that do not cancel out the criticisms of the rest, despite Downing Street's attempt to insist on the claim that it has always considered "the protection of the health system and the defense of human lives "as priorities.
A self-defense that does not convince various specialists, exponents of the hospital world and relatives of the victims, also irritated by the confirmation of the decision announced months ago by the prime minister to postpone the promised independent public inquiry into the incident until mid-2022. Labor Opposition by Keir Starmer Today's report is enough and advances to represent "a condemnation" without appeal of the "monumental errors" attributed by the shadow Minister of Health, Jon Asworth, to BoJo and his followers.
