The U.K.’s pandemic missteps: insights from the ongoing inquiry

KevinMD July 15, 2024
Susan Levenstein, MD

Since June 2022, the U.K. has been carrying on an inquiry, still ongoing two years later, into the response to and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, hoping to learn lessons that could be useful in the future.

Here are a few of its revelations.

Matt Hancock, health secretary to Boris Johnson, prime minister at the height of the pandemic, blasted his own pandemic response as “completely wrong,” testifying that planning was focused on “the provision of body bags and how to bury the dead, rather than stopping the virus taking hold.”

The inquiry heard from Sir Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific advisor at the time, that Johnson was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting...

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