1 Covid
Johnson detailed what he meant by “getting the big calls right” in a Commons speech on 19 January. He listed the decision to focus on the booster campaign in December, not opting to use the European Medicines Agency for vaccine procurement, and investing early in lateral flow tests and “cutting-edge drugs”. He also claimed that the UK had the “fastest booster campaign in Europe” and was “first to emerge from the Omicron wave”.
He did not refer to calls which were arguably bigger: the decision to prioritise hospitals instead of care homes in March 2020, the decision not to lock down in September 2020, the failure to procure enough PPE, and the decision to largely abandon public health measures such as contact tracing in March 2020. And other issues remain to be resolved – the NHS and the social care sector have at least 200,000 vacancies between them.
Up to 20,000 people could have died because of the original decision to not lock down in March 2020, according to modelling by Prof Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London. During the second wave, Johnson…
