Abstract
The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.
Some say the King of England is dead; others that he is not dead. For my own part, I believe neither the one nor the other. I tell you this in confidence, but I rely on your discretion.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
An accomplished diplomat, notorious turncoat to serial regimes and florid philanderer, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was commendable for his ability to anticipate the winning side and change strategy accordingly, but also churn out a good non-committal soundbite. In this COVID-19 pandemic, it appears that regrettably, Her Majesty’s Government is playing a game of ‘bad Talleyrand’.
Triplets can be helpful in times of pandemic medicine. Catch it, bin it, kill it. Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives. However, there has been unwillingness of this government to embrace others, such as the World Health Organization’s plea to ‘test, test, test’, or even ‘personal protective equipment’. Rather than delivering on the level of COVID-19 testing needed to understand and control the epidemic (cf. Germany), or ensuring that key healthcare staff can rest in the knowledge that they have enough personal protective equipment to last the weekend, the Government continues to resort to unthinkable doublespeak and unspeakable doublethink.
I am not the only person that feels the daily pang of revulsion induced by questions asking: ‘what steps are being taken to ensure supply of vital PPE’ being answered by: ‘yes, PPE is vital’. Almost as unforgivably nebulous is the constant evasion of questions regarding increased testing capacity, the machinations of which are bedaubed by spin and scuttled away by blasting out phrases such as ‘ramping up’, or ever-increasing targets whose attainability fritters away faster than the counterfeit sincerity of the Home Secretary.
Rather than divulging transparent insight or meaningful responses, it appears to be this government’s modus operandi to espouse barren apophthegms ad nauseam. In the context of over 25,000 British deaths, and ‘Exercise Cygnus’ in 2016 showing that ICU capacity and personal protective equipment supply would be exhausted by a global pandemic of this ilk, evasion and shirking are simply unacceptable. People are scared, and they deserve better.
These responses aren’t just emetogenic, they are farcical, they are abhorrent. Yet, they will be the only thing we get until this ‘all blows over’. As such, the only path to meaningful closure, better future pandemic preparedness and accountability for serious shortcomings is an independent, statutory public inquiry.
Such inquiries need only be justified by the existence of a public concern, can compel testimony, may gain access to classified information and have been convened to pathologically dissect situations such as child abuse scandals and the Grenfell Tower disaster. I believe that several aspects of the government’s response must be scrutinised, given that we knew that a novel ‘disease X’ was an inevitability, that we had war-gamed for this in 2016 and that we’d watched Italy and Spain struggle for weeks before the novel coronavirus verily announced its presence here.
An independent inquiry should seek to analyse all facets of the pandemic response, but especial focus should be to catechise the handling of equipment supply and testing strategies as these are most controllable and have key impact on all stages of pandemic responses. With regard to ‘equipment’, it will be crucial to understand the extent of the pandemic stockpile pre-outbreak in terms of ventilators and personal protective equipment, and how was this maintained after the results from Exercise Cygnus were available to responsible Government ministers. There needs to be an analysis of what was understood or expected by the Government in terms of supply chains for personal protective equipment and machines for respiratory support and threats thereto, not just at the start of the pandemic in Wuhan, but also how this was monitored and managed as the outbreak developed. Furthermore, a clear analysis of any opportunities presented to the Government regarding multi-national collaboration in bulk-purchasing personal protective equipment, ventilators or other equipment is needed, with dissection of who dealt with these, and why the opportunities were declined or even missed.
With the impervious nature of daily press conferences vis-a-vis COVID-19 testing, there should be a robust picking-apart of any and all decision-making processes and strategy behind testing as the pandemic was observed, planned for and then dealt with. It should focus on what factors determined the failure to attain publicly proclaimed targets of per day/per week tests, whether they were logistical in nature, due to reagent shortages, or both; also, any steps discussed or taken to mitigate shortages or logistical difficulties will need threshing out. Specifically, there should be an analysis of decision-making regarding ensuring sufficient bench-space was available, and what processes were put in place to consider and/or utilise laboratory space in academic institutions, private laboratories or other units. Lastly, it will be interesting (not least to the cynic in many of us) to understand the evidence or data that motivated the publishing of these testing targets – was it deemed necessary, politically motivated or genuinely felt to be attainable (or all three?).
The scale of death is a tragedy regardless of how the pandemic was handled, both ‘direct’ and indirect as people stay away from hospitals, and the Dunkirk spirit of many key workers is beyond Thursday-applaudable. I have undying pride and gratitude for members of my family, friends, newly cross-skilled colleagues and all key workers working against this pandemic, but the bitter fact is that we are being failed by a self-protectionist administration that has the galling audacity to apologise only for us ‘feeling’ that the situation is sub-optimal.
Healthcare workers may have died due to lack of personal protective equipment, and the finger seeking to take the pandemic’s pulse via testing has been stubbed by poor prior planning. The public deserve answers, not ersatz pseudo-leadership and meaningless rhetoric.
