The UK government failed to contain the spread of the Chinese coronavirus through a series of missteps and inaction, disputed claims in a British newspaper state.
An anonymous senior adviser is alleged to have told The Sunday Times that Mr Johnson “didn’t chair any meetings” and “didn’t work weekends” as the COVID-19 virus was spreading from China to the rest of the world. The government has strongly denied the claims, stating the article contains “a series of falsehoods and errors and actively misrepresents” the work the government has done since “the earliest stages of the Coronavirus outbreak”
On the 24th of January, the government convened the national emergency council, COBRA, in order to discuss the virus in Wuhan. The prime minister declined to attend the meeting, despite finding the time later that day to attend a Chinese New Year celebration at Downing Street with the ambassador from the communist regime.
Mr Johnson would go on to miss four more COBRA meetings on coronavirus over the next few weeks, according to the newspaper. The sessions, which are attended by government ministers, intelligence officials, and military generals during times of national crisis, are typically chaired by the prime minister.
Mr Johnson did not attend a COBRA meeting on the virus until the 2nd of March, which the senior advisor claims led to the government’s slow response to the pandemic.
“There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there,” the unnamed Downing Street source said.
“And what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be,” the advisor added.
The failure to lock down the country, or at least restrict travel from China and other hotspots for the virus, came as the prime minister was spending time vacationing with his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, and reaching a divorce settlement with his estranged wife, Marina Wheeler, according to the report.
Hitting back at the claims on Sunday, the government published a considerable rebuttal of the article on the official health blog website, stating the claim in the newspaper article that it was unusual for the Prime Minister to miss a COBRA meeting was unusual was “wrong”. The government claimed: “It is entirely normal and proper for COBR to be chaired by the relevant Secretary of State.
“Then Health Secretary Alan Johnson chaired COBR in 2009 during H1N1. Michael Gove chaired COBR as part of No Deal planning. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps chaired COBR during the collapse of Thomas Cook. Mr Hancock was in constant communication with the PM throughout this period.”
The government also denied the suggestions they had “played down” the threat, and displayed a “nonchalant attitude”, replying: “Extensive and detailed work was going on in government because of Coronavirus… This virus has hit countries across the world. It is ridiculous to suggest that coronavirus only reached the UK because the Health Secretary and not the PM chaired a COBR meeting.”
Although the United Kingdom had an early lead in testing for the virus, with Oxford University developing rapid response test kits in February, the government decided to forgo widespread testing and contact tracing in favour of a “herd immunity” strategy usually adopted in the case of flu viruses.
“I had conversations with Chris Whitty at the end of January, and they were absolutely focused on herd immunity. The reason is that with flu, herd immunity is the right response if you haven’t got a vaccine,” a senior politician — again unnamed — told The Sunday Times.
In the early days of the outbreak, the government also failed to order enough test kits from laboratories across the country, the Downing Street source lamented.
“We should have communicated with every commercial testing laboratory that might volunteer to become part of the government’s testing regime, but that didn’t happen,” said the source.
The chief executive of the British In Vitro Diagnostics Association, Doris-Ann Williams, confirmed the claim, saying that her association, which represents 110 companies in the country’s medical testing sector, had not been approached by the government until the 1st of April — just one day before health secretary Matt Hancock announced the goal of testing 100,000 people per day by the end of the month.
Another major shortcoming of the British government was in securing the necessary amount of personal protective equipment (PPE) needed for frontline healthcare workers.
The amount of usable PPE was already in short supply before the outbreak of coronavirus, yet the government decided to ship 279,000 items of the equipment to the Chinese state.
“We missed the boat on testing and PPE… I remember being called into some of the meetings about this in February and thinking, ‘Well, it’s a good thing this isn’t the big one’,” a senior Department of Health insider said. Again, the government hit back in their rebuttal to the newspaper’s claims, stating the equipment given to China was not from Britain’s pandemic stockpile and that, in any case, “China has since reciprocated our donation many times over. Between April 2-April 15 we have received over 12 million pieces of PPE in the UK from China.”
The Sunday Times’ source added: “I had watched Wuhan, but I assumed we must have not been worried because we did nothing. We just watched. A pandemic was always at the top of our national risk register — always — but when it came we just slowly watched. We could have been Germany, but instead, we were doomed by our incompetence, our hubris and our austerity”.
On Sunday, Minister for the Cabinet Office Michael Gove admitted to the veracity of the report that the government shipped PPE to China. But he defended the prime minister, saying that it was false to claim that Mr Johsnon was “anything other than energetic, focused, determined and strong in his leadership against this virus”.
Follow Kurt on Twitter at @KurtZindulka
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