The idea that ANY PM, be that the laughable fool Boris, or the boring lawyer Starmer, is capable of setting up proper public health precautions is risible and unfair.
What failed us was not Downing Street or Parliament, it was the highly paid squads of people whose sole job is running the public health system and the shockingly bad NHS. Politicians need to stay right out of the day to day decision making of that and of other specialist services like Defence. THEY KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THAT STUFF. None of them do.
There are VERY well paid people at the top of the NHS and the Department of Health who failed miserably and are still in their jobs. Only the mentally retarded think that Boris, or that idiot Hancock could do anything other than ask what the medics needed, and open the money box, and let them take out whatever they needed to do it. THAT is what they did.
Also - for the eminent Lady Hallet to upbraid the government for preparing for the WRONG pandemic is pretty rich. How the fk could they know what new virus was about to emerge from a crooked lab in China?
What if the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been working on ebola, and were sloppy enough to allow a research worker to get infected, and walk out of the door into that crowded city? Even if the Department of Health had prepared for a corona type virus, ebola , or any other escaped experiment, would have needed an entirely different approach. Would Lady Hallet then have been moaning about the wrong pandemic preparations.....?
Here is the key word for this afternoon.... HINDSIGHT
Yes - we all have 20/20 vision after the event. In 2019, influenza preparations were a good bet. The virus is constantly mutating and it affects a large range of domestic animals so new variant influenza can emerge anytime and sometimes (1918) the form of the virus can be devastating.
Like all bets - bets about the most likely pandemic virus don't always come off the way you'd hoped.
One more thing:
The ONLY sensible conclusion that could come out of this enquiry, would have been that the UK government should work determinedly, and full on, to get international agreement right across the world, that so called 'gain of function virus research' must be banned. This is what started that plague and cost us all a lot of money and grief. It could have been much much worse than it was.
Gain of function research is the deliberate meddling with harmless animal viruses to make them capable of infecting human beings. It is a monstrous stupidity to do that, but it is going on , sometimes in badly run, insecure labs right across the world.
I am 100% certain that this is what happened in Wuhan at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
