Mea Culpa? UK’s David Cameron Admits To ‘Mistake’ In Pandemic Readiness

Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron admitted last week that his government made a “mistake” by failing to adequately prepare for a coronavirus pandemic, and instead focused on scenarios involving influenza and other respiratory diseases.

“The failing was not to ask more questions about asymptomatic transmission and what turned out to be the pandemic we had,” said Cameron, who served as premier from 2010 to 2016, while giving testimony to the UK’s Covid-19 inquiry panel. “So much time was spent on a pandemic influenza and that was seen as the greatest danger. But why wasn’t more time and more questions asked about what turned out to be the pandemic that we faced?”

Cameron is the first politician to give evidence under oath at the long-awaited inquiry, which began last week and seeks to lay bare mistakes made and lessons to be learned from Britain’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 227,000 deaths have been logged in Britain with Covid-19 on the certificate since the virus was first recorded there in early 2020.

Critics of the government including the British Medical Association, which represents doctors, say senior Conservatives must be held to account for their decision to make deep cuts to public spending in the 2010s. The BMA said in a statement that the so-called austerity policies left the National Health Service “severely on the back foot” in the run-up and during the outbreak. -Bloomberg

Cameron defended government cuts to public health spending, saying they were “absolutely essential” in order to tame the UK’s finances, adding that there were “real term increases” each year in regards to healthcare.

“If you lose control of your debt and you lose control of your deficit and you lose control of your economy, you end up cutting health services — that’s what happened in Greece,” said Cameron, adding that the “real problem” of preparing for potential pandemics is not to assume it will be one type of virus.

“I think it was a mistake not to look more at the range of different types of pandemic,” he said. “How do we make sure that you’re not subject to group-think, that you don’t plan for one type of pandemic because it’s very current, it’s very risky, it’s very dangerous? You need to have teams going in to question the assumptions.”

According to Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, Cameron is “in denial about the huge damage caused by his austerity policies,” adding that the spending cuts “massively damaged the readiness and resilience of our public services.”