Matt Hancock has admitted that planning for a no-deal Brexit was prioritised over planning for a pandemic during the Covid Inquiry.
The former health secretary said officials were left scrambling to source protective equipment as the disease spread because UK planning attitude was entirely “geared towards how to clear up after a disaster, not prevent it.”
“The doctrine of the UK was to plan for the consequences of a disaster — can we buy enough body bags? Where are we going to bury the dead?” Hancock said.
“Large-scale testing did not exist and large-scale contact tracing did not exist because it was assumed that as soon as there was community transmission, it wouldn’t be possible to stop the spread, and therefore, what’s the point in contact tracing?” he added. “That was completely wrong.”
Hancock acknowledged that a decade-old government document on preparing for a pandemic was never updated, and that an official pandemic preparedness board paused its work in 2018 to 2019 because resources were moved away to focus instead on the threat of a “disorganised Brexit.”
Earlier this year, in an interview with fellow Tory MP Nadine Dorries, Boris Johnson said: “It is absolutely the case that had it not been for our ability to do our own regulation, had it not been for the fact that we’d come out of the European Medicines Agency, the MHRA, the medical health regulation agency, was now totally free to decide how fast to approve the vaccine – we wouldn’t have been able to do that vaccine rollout so fast.
“And you know, it is literally true that Brexit helped save lives.
“And people’s eyes bulge a bit when you say that, but it happens to be true…I’m proud of that. I’m proud of all the work that those people did.”
Turns out it did precisely the opposite.
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