A full-blown indictment of the initial handling of the Covid emergency in the UK, which calls into question the conservative government of Boris Johnson and some of his well-known scientific advisors.
Delays or wrong choices that have contributed to burdening the toll of the pandemic on the island with thousands of more victims, which has reached about 150 thousand deaths, in absolute terms the highest figure in Europe.
This is the content of a bipartisan parliamentary report, drawn up by majority and opposition deputies of the Health and Science and Technology commissions of the House of Commons, released today in Great Britain.
The report grants BoJo some alibis and acknowledges him for the later stages of the challenge, starting with the success of the vaccination campaign. But he does not discount the initial errors attributed to the premier and his entourage, the cause of "one of the worst failures ever recorded on the national public health front".
The government, ill advised by some leading scientists but also deaf to the doubts of many other experts, was guilty in front of the first clear signs of the threat of having cultivated the illusion of being able to "manage the contagion" and stimulate an elusive herd immunity anticipated.
This approach is due to the delay of "at least a couple of weeks" in the adoption of the lockdown on the basis of the indications of the OS and the experience of other countries already affected such as Italy.
A delay that the Kingdom has paid in terms of "lost human lives", with a "significantly worse" scenario than other nations and sealed by episodes such as the Liverpool-Atletico Madrid match, authorized in mid-March 2020 and which caused a mega outbreak of 50 thousand people.
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 reported, the delays in the first supplies of protective material for doctors and nurses, those on the creation of an effective test and tracing system.
The presidents of the two commissions involved in the investigation, former Tory ministers Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, softened the criticism by acknowledging that the pandemic was "the greatest challenge" ever faced in peacetime. But it remains a heavy bipartisan indictment of the Conservative government.
(Unioneonline / L)
