A perfect example of your posting here.
Chippy
It's going around in circles because the government won't admit their errors and therefore information is coming to light from investigation. If they said we f**ked up and this is what we're going to do to fix it then this would stop.
I posted this reply and you never answered
Gove says scientific advisers determined what was held in PPE pandemic stockpile
In the House of Commons, in response to a question from the SNP’s
Pete Wishart, the Cabinet Office minister
Michael Gove suggested that the government’s scientific advisers bore some responsibility for the shortage of PPE (personal protective equipment).
Asked by Wishart to acknowledge that the government had not stockpiled enough in advance, Gove said:
The stockpile that we had before this pandemic was explicitly designed in accordance with the advice from the scientific advisers the government has - Nervtag (the new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group) - and of course it was specifically for a flu pandemic.
The nature of coronavirus is different from a flu pandemic as we all know and we, like every government across the world, have had to respond to this new virus by assuring not just with personal protective equipment, but in every respect, that we are in a position to retool, refit and to upgrade our response.
This exchange can be viewed as an early dry run for the debate that is going to be central to what is now seen as the inevitable public inquiry that will take place into how the government handled the pandemic.
Gove admits he only read key Exercise Cygnus pandemic planning report last week
Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, has admitted that it was only last week that he read a confidential government report on the lessons learnt from a three-day exercise in 2016 modelling what would happen in a pandemic.
Giving evidence to the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee, Gove said that he read the report from Exercise Cygnus last week - although he said he had read recommendations prompted by the report earlier.
His admission is surprising because it has been claimed that Exercise Cygnus gave a prescient insight into the problems the UK is facing now with coronavirus - challenges for which the government has not seemed well prepared. Gove is one of the ministers who attends the daily C-19 meeting in Downing Street, which is referred to by insiders as the coronavirus “war cabinet”, and he chairs
a coronavirus implementation committee in charge of “preparedness” across much of the public sector and critical national infrastructure, excluding the NHS.
In an
exclusive report on Exercise Cygnus published at the end of March, the Sunday Telegraph said:
The NHS failed a major cross-government test of its ability to handle a severe pandemic but the “terrifying” results were kept secret from the public.
Ministers were informed three years ago that Britain would be quickly overwhelmed by a severe outbreak amid a shortage of critical care beds, morgue capacity and personal protective equipment (PPE), an investigation has discovered ...
Despite the failings exposed by Cygnus, the government never changed its strategic roadmap for a future pandemic, with the last update carried out in 2014.
Summarising
the conclusions from the exercise in the Sunday Telegraph,
Paul Nuki and
Bill Gardner said:
But it was not the pandemic itself that was causing those gathered in Whitehall to grimace but the nation’s woeful preparation. The peak of the epidemic had not yet arrived but local resilience forums, hospitals and mortuaries across the country were already being overwhelmed.
There was not enough personal protective equipment (PPE) for the nation’s doctors and nurses. The NHS was about to “fall over” due to a shortage of ventilators and critical care beds. Morgues were set to overflow, and it had become terrifyingly evident that the government’s emergency messaging was not getting traction with the public.
Gove told the committee he had read the report. But, when pressed by the committee’s chairman
William Wragg as to when he had read it, he said last week.
When Wragg expressed surprise about this, Gove said: “Some of the product that flowed from that report I had read beforehand.” Asked what he was referring to, Gove said he was referring to recommendations relating to the need for emergency legislation, to the risk of the NHS being overwhelmed and to the need to de-prioritise non-urgent operations.
Gove said the report had led to the development of an influenza pandemic stockpile. But Exercise Cygnus specifically covered a flu pandemic, and Gove said the fact that coronavirus was a different sort of virus meant that there was a need for “a recalibration of our approach towards PPE [personal protective equipment]”. Echoing
what he told the Commons yesterday, Gove said that Nervtag (the new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group) was responsible for advising on this.
Asked if he would be willing to publish the Exercise Cygnus report, Gove claimed that he had a “general disposition to share as much as possible” but that he would have to consult with colleagues on this, and that it might not be possible to publish it, to protect the interests of the civil servants who wrote it. He said:
I would have to ask the propriety and ethics team here in the Cabinet Office, because sometimes I’m anxious to share things, but the point is made to me that this is advice that has been offered in confidence, by civil servants, and we have to respect their duty of candour and the safe space in which advice is offered.
I think there should be some mechanism to turn up at base as required for the wellbeing of those less comfortable with their own company.
