PM denies giving England priority
BORIS Johnson has said is is not true the UK Government ordered a pharmaceutical company to reserve additional Covid tests for England last year.
Earlier this week it was reported Public Health Wales emails claimed that the UK Government had torpedoed Wales’s deal to secure 5,000 tests a day from pharmaceutical company Roche.
The collapse of the alleged deal meant that Wales fell well short of its Covid testing target at the height of the first wave of the pandemic.
In Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons yesterday, Plaid Cymru MP Hywel Williams challenged the Prime Minister on the incident.
He said: “In March last year this United Kingdom Conservative government intercepted a deal between Wales and the Roche pharmaceutical company for 5,000 daily Covid tests instructing the company to ‘reserve all additional Covid tests’ to England.
“Those tests would have been crucial to saving thousands of lives in Wales. So as we go to the polls next week, will the Prime Minister tell us why Welsh lives meant so little to him?”
Boris Johnson said: “The right honourable gentleman is completely wrong in what he says about tests”.
Roche said they “did not have a separate contract or agreement with Wales” to supply tests. They claim their only communication was for the setting up of equipment.
Just before the first lockdown on March 21, 2020, the Welsh Government set a target of 6,000 tests a day by April 1, 8,000 by April 7, and a target of 9,000 by the end of the month.
A big part of their confidence in hitting this was the fact they had (or thought they had) an agreement with Roche to provide 5,000 tests per day.
The deal fell through, meaning Wales missed its target. This was confirmed via internal Public Health Wales (PHW) emails secured through a Freedom of Information
request by Channel 4.
The emails show both that PHW felt they had been treated badly by the UK Government and that they did not manage to secure a written agreement.
The bulk of the emails involve PHW chief executive Tracey Cooper. Within it, she lists the PHW version of events after the deal collapsed. These include:
Negotiations started with Roche on March 2;
PHW “found it hard to pin Roche down to a written agreement”;
PHW “understands” that the UK Government “instructed” the company to “reserve all additional Covid tests” to be used in England;
PHW believed they had agreed that a team from Roche would configure some machinery to make it able to handle Covid tests as well as supplying the tests themselves.
However, in an email summarising what happened, Ms Cooper said: “It is clear that they [Roche] have no plan to come to Wales...and that they are being instructed by DHSC [Department for Health and Social Care] and following those instructions”.
In an email to several high-ranking Welsh health officials, Ms Cooper said “it is clear the situation is rather chaotic” and that “agreements that have been made are not being honoured”.
She concludes that “the UK Government has clearly prioritised the use of a company’s testing for the purposes of England’s allocation despite having had advanced discussions with Roche and an email confirmation”.
A spokesman for the DHSC told Channel 4: “It is untrue that testing resources were unfairly allocated at the beginning of the pandemic or that England’s testing needs were prioritised over any other nation.”
Roche says they “did not have a separate contract or agreement with Wales” to supply tests.
They claim their only communication was for the setting up of equipment.