Britain’s initial response to the Covid-19 pandemic “ranks as one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced,” a parliamentary inquiry has found, blaming the British government for “many thousands of deaths which could have been avoided.”
The government, in effect, pursued an ill-conceived strategy of herd immunity when it failed to carry out widespread testing and delayed imposing lockdowns, social distancing or border controls in the early months of the pandemic, according to a report published on Tuesday by two parliamentary committees.
After the initial stumbles, Britain raced ahead in the spring as one of the world’s leaders in vaccination rates; 78.6 percent of people aged 12 and over have now received two doses of a Covid vaccine, according to the Our World in Data project at Oxford University. But the report — the first major investigation into Britain’s pandemic response — cited numerous missteps by the government since the first coronavirus cases were detected in Britain in January 2020.
That early response, the product of “groupthink” among top officials in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government and its scientific advisers, failed to consider or act on the aggressive containment, testing and tracing strategies successfully employed in Taiwan, Singapore or South Korea at the time, the report said.