Hunt – we prepared for wrong pandemic

FORMER health secretary Jeremy Hunt has admitted the UK prepared for the wrong pandemic during his tenure by believing the next biggest threat would come from flu.

In an interview with The BMJ, Mr Hunt, who chairs the Commons Health and Social Care Committee, acknowledged that decisions he made while in office could have affected the UK’s ability to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Asked about current mistakes, he said: “We’ve really been on the back foot from the start on test and trace, and in some ways it dates back to the period when I was health secretary.”

In October 2016, the Government carried out Exercise Cygnus to test plans for a future “worst-case-scenario” flu pandemic.

Mr Hunt said: “We did exhaustive pandemic preparations; we were lauded by Johns Hopkins University as being the second best prepared country in the world. But we were sadly also part of a groupthink that said that the primary way that you respond to a pandemic is the flu pandemic playbook (with a focus on areas like vaccination and boosting hospital capacity), rather than the methods that you would use for Sars and Mers (surveillance and containment, community testing, contact tracing and isolation, and stockpiling personal protective equipment, and ventilators).”