What have we learnt from the covid-19 inquiry so far?

The covid-19 inquiry is currently focusing on core UK decision making and governance. Recent witnesses have described how decision making was centred on Boris Johnson as prime minister who was slow to understand the significance of covid-19, dismissive of its likely impact, and largely absent from discussion of its implications in the first weeks of 2020. Johnson’s vacillating stance on how best to respond to covid-19 was a source of immense frustration for the advisers and civil servants working with him and had measurable consequences for the public’s health.1 The civil service through the Cabinet Office and Department of Health and Social Care was also ill-prepared for the biggest crisis facing the British state in decades.So far so familiar in validating the findings of inquiries by parliamentary committees and accounts by scientists and journalists who have reported on these issues.234 The picture of highly centralised decision making, weak institutions in…
Read Original Article: What have we learnt from the covid-19 inquiry so far? »