UK poorly prepared for pandemic, says adviser

A FORMER Government adviser has said the Covid-19 outbreak should be a wake-up call to the UK, claiming previous tests proved it was “poorly prepared” for a pandemic.

Professor Sir Ian Boyd was the former chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from 2012 to 2019.

Sir Ian said resilience should be built into the UK on a wide scale to cope with an outbreak of this magnitude – from national Government to individual household level.

Sir Ian, who now works at the University of St Andrews, said mitigation measures must be put in place to counter the issues being seen in the current pandemic.

He said: “This country should understand better where its real vulnerabilities lie and make sure that those vulnerabilities are catered for by, for example, stockpiling certain critical materials.

“We should have certain rules in place that for critical materials we need so many weeks or months of supply to be stocked within the country and at the moment we do not do anything like that.

“The business as usual we’ve had in the past cannot be the business as usual we see in the future.”

Sir Ian claimed a similar crisis “will happen again” and it is important lessons are learned from this one.

He said: “People should not come to the end of this thinking ‘this will never happen again’.

“That is not true, it will happen again. When? No-one can tell. From where? Nobody can tell – but it will happen.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokeswoman said: “The coronavirus outbreak calls for decisive action, at home and abroad, and the UK is one of the most prepared countries in the world for pandemics.”