The UK pandemic plan was: ‘Keep calm and carry on’
Ministers focused on mitigating the effects of any outbreak instead of stopping it in its tracks
THERE is a great untruth lurking at the heart of last week’s cross-party parliamentary report on the UK’s response to the pandemic. It goes like this: the UK prepared diligently for a pandemic but was hit by the wrong bug. Had it been flu rather than Covid, all would have been well. We were ready for that. It was just a terrible stroke of bad luck.
This narrative frames last week’s 150page parliamentary report Coronavirus: Lessons learned to date. It has the function of allowing a little surface criticism (the PM might have locked down a day or so earlier in March 2020, don’t you know) while deflecting from what is much closer to the truth: that the UK suffered a full-blown failure of state.
“The UK’s pandemic planning was too narrowly and inflexibly based on a flu model,” says the report in its very first bullet point. “The result was that while our pandemic planning had been globally acclaimed, it performed less well”.
But here’s the thing. There was not a pandemic plan in the world which was not based around what was and remains the number one pandemic risk: a new strain of influenza. What separated the best plans from the worst was not the bug they focused on, but whether they intended to stop it or not.
So while the UK pandemic plan talks only of “mitigating” the impact of a new flu virus, The New Zealand Influenza Pandemic Plan: A Framework for Action has a policy of “suppression” at its heart. “Plan for it, keep it out, stamp it out” are the first three planks of its six-point strategy. It is an approach that has served the Pacific nation, and several others in east Asia, remarkably well.
New Zealand has recorded just five Covid cases per million – a figure 400 times lower than our own. Its economy fared better because, having suppressed the virus, it spent far fewer days in lockdown. And now that more than 70 per cent of its population has received one dose of vaccine, it is learning to live with the virus.
Why didn’t the UK plan to stop a new virus, flu or otherwise? It is an important question, not least because it is one on which the British state and its medical establishment has form. During the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, Sir Arthur Newsholme, Britain’s senior medical officer, drafted a memo advising Britons to isolate themselves at home if they were sick and avoid any public gatherings – but it was never sent.
Instead, he told the Royal Society of Medicine that Britain’s “major duty” was to “carry on” as normal, “even when risk to health and life is involved”. In startlingly honest language, Sir Arthur told a conference: “The relentless needs of warfare justify the risks of spreading infection and the associated creation of a more virulent type of disease.”
The man responsible for the UK’s “acclaimed” pandemic planning between 2012 and 2018 was the parliamentary report’s co-author, the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt. “The person leading the investigation of our preparedness, is the same person who failed to prepare us”, noted Dr Moosa Qureshi, whose legal actions have forced the disclosure of pandemic planning exercises that ministers, including Mr Hunt, had kept under wraps.
“Jeremy Hunt commissioned pandemic exercises for lots of different viruses, so I don’t buy his argument that 150,000 British lives were lost because the Western world was obsessed with flu,” said Dr Qureshi. “People would have died the same in a flu or any other pandemic, because political leaders didn’t listen to their own experts who said we needed contact tracing, PPE and more NHS beds.”
It is not mentioned in last week’s parliamentary report, but the idea the UK should follow a New Zealand-style “keep it out, stamp it out” strategy was considered in a Cabinet Office review of Britain’s pandemic strategy in 2010. It was rejected. “Overall the scientific evidence base for developing policy and/or guidance on social [suppression] measures is limited. Even more limited is the evidence on the cost impacts of these measures”, the authors said.
Like coronaviruses, influenza comes in 101 different forms – some deadly. The danger of pretending all would have been well had we been hit by flu instead is that it leaves the door open to the same thing happening again.
The British epidemiologist Prof Neil Ferguson is more optimistic and believes most western pandemic plans will major on suppression in future. As he told a recent gathering of journalists and academics, the lesson of the past two years is “politicians around the world decided that it wasn’t acceptable to let a lethal pandemic like this run through the population” as they had in the past.