Sir Chris Whitty has hit back at the Tories and insisted the best way to protect against future pandemics is to invest in the NHS.
England’s Chief Medical Officer appeared at the Covid Inquiry and rejected evidence from Chancellor Jeremy Hunt the previous day which blamed a focus on planning for a flu pandemic, rather than a coronavirus.
When Covid-19 struck the NHS had been through a decade-long funding squeeze while council public health budgets had been decimated by austerity.
Mr Hunt claimed the Government and health officials assumed “we knew best” and could not learn from Asian countries which had previously been hit by the Mers virus, which required mass testing and quarantines.
He said: “Some of the very specific learnings that people raise are, in my view, technically incorrect.
“I've spoken to my colleagues in South Korea about Mers. Their principal problem was in hospital transmission and that's where a large force of the transmission came from.
“What that did though, is it made them think that they had simply under invested in both intellectually and financially in public health. The same was true in Canada…
“What they did they reinvested in public health… It wasn't that ‘this is a coronavirus, and therefore we can learn from a coronavirus’.”
Mr Hunt was the longest serving Health Secretary from 2012 to 2018 and was in post for much of the austerity period under ex-PM David Cameron.
The Cameron government implemented the biggest package of cuts to public services since the Second World War.
Although the NHS was spared from the worst of the Tories’ public sector cuts, it still scaled back the annual increases required to keep pace with new technologies and an ageing population.
The NHS received around 1% real-terms increases to its funding each year until 2015 – far short of the 4% real-terms rises it had averaged annually since it was established and the 6% it had averaged under the previous Labour government.
The consequence was that the NHS had a tiny fraction of the medics and hospital bed capacity that other developed countries had going into the pandemic.
At the start of the pandemic the Government was relying on eight Public Health England labs.
Just as the virus was taking off the Government announced it was stopping testing in the community because the infrastructure was just not there.
The UK lost the ability to track the virus and potentially slow its spread pretty much immediately.
By contrast South Korea was able to put in place a testing system quickly.
Within a month of the first death, South Korea was testing three times the number of people than the UK was.
Prof Whitty said that the “capacity of the state is a political decision”, adding: “That scale up between needs to be possible and that requires investment.
“Now how much investment is a political question. But I think what we need to do is put that to political leaders who absolutely have to make this decision.
“What is the level of risk that you think we should be insuring for? I think we've not necessarily always said that to our political leaders, who speak for society and must have the last word.
“This much additional risk mitigation… will reduce the risk of a future pandemic… but it will cost this much and do you essentially wish to take that insurance?”
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