Dame Sally Davies has been accused of trying to worm her way out of blame for Public Health England’s shambolic role in Covid-19 pandemic
Dame Sally Davies was today accused of trying to worm her way out of blame for Public Health England’s shambolic role in Covid-19 pandemic.
England’s former chief medical officer launched a scathing attack on the body, saying the UK was ‘not as well prepared as we should have been’ and claiming official had not recognised coronavirus as a potential threat.
Dame Sally, nicknamed ‘nanny-in-chief’ for her bold interventions, said PHE told her a coronavirus from Asia would ‘never travel this far’.
She alleged the agency, which is already set to be abolished and replaced over its lacklustre role in the pandemic, ignored her calls to carry out a rehearsal to an outbreak of a coronavirus in 2015.
Professor John Ashton, former director of public health in the North West, slammed Dame Sally for only speaking up now, several years later.
He said she, along with several other high up figures, were now trying to ‘gloss over’ their part ‘in this Shakespearean tragedy’ and accused her of ‘re-writing her own part in this disaster’.
Professor Ashton told MailOnline: ‘In a nutshell I agree with what she said, but I think she is disingenuous in what she is saying now, and she didn’t say it earlier.’ He added ‘she didn’t speak up for public health’ at the time.
Professor John Ashton, the former director of public health in the North West, slammed Dame Sally for only speaking up about PHE’s failings to prepare for a coronavirus pandemic now, several years after she first raised concerns with the agency in 2015
Dame Sally, 70, is expected to accuse PHE of misleading the Government into practising for the ‘wrong pandemic’ at an independent public inquiry into Covid-19, ordered by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Instead of running a dummy pandemic of a coronavirus, as she called for in 2015, PHE decided to focus on influenza.
A spokesman for PHE said today planning for an influenza pandemic was the focus as it was top of the National Risk Assessment.
Dame Sally told The Daily Telegraph: ‘We didn’t practise how to stop a coronavirus spreading because we were told by PHE that the next big one would be influenza, and they didn’t believe it could be stopped.
‘One day we will certainly get another flu pandemic, so we prepared for that, and I think we prepared well. But none of the experts seemed to think a coronavirus would be relevant.
‘I did ask during a conversation in my office in around 2015, should we do Sars? But I was told no, because it wouldn’t reach us properly. They said it would die out and would never travel this far.
‘So I did ask, but it was the Public Health England people who said we didn’t need to do it, and I’ll say that to Parliament.
‘That advice meant we never seriously sat down and said: “Will we have a massive pandemic of something else?”‘
Professor Ashton, who worked as a director in the North West for almost two decades, echoed Dame Sally’s grievances with PHE’s handling of the coronavirus.
But he questioned why she has stayed silent on the topic for several months of the pandemic – and years after initially airing her concerns in 2015.
Professor Ashton said: ‘I agree wholeheartedly with what she said. But why not commented on this earlier this year?
‘When I was commenting in February and March, it would’ve been helpful to have the former CMO to support what I was saying. But I was left out there on my own.’
Dame Sally was involved in the practise flu outbreak simulation codenamed ‘Exercise Cygnus’ in 2015.
The existence of Exercise Cygnus only became apparent earlier this year after being kept secret for years.
The secret Whitehall document condemning the UK’s ‘insufficient’ preparedness for a health pandemic such as the coronavirus outbreak was finally published in May.
Professor Ashton said: ‘She was fully in the picture of that exercise and said it was really quite shocking what they found.
‘Apart from making some comment at the time, she didn’t put weight as the CMO for publishing that report in 2016. She could have insisted that saw that light and was acted on. But she didn’t.
‘She’s not alone in now re-writing her own part in this disaster. Sir Patrick Vallance has been re-writing his part in this, in as much denying that he supported herd immunity… And the modellers have been re-writing what they said in the early months.
‘They are all trying to put their own gloss on their part in this Shakespearean tragedy.’
Dame Sally Davies denied to comment on the allegations when contacted through Trinity College, Cambridge, for where she works.
Professors Ashton has written a book he hopes will also become reference to the inquiry – Blinded by Corona: How the Pandemic Ruined Britain’s Health and Wealth.
In his scathing critique he attacks the UK Government’s for being unprepared. He told MailOnline: ‘This is about the weakness of public health in this country.
‘The mentality that we are an island and therefore we are okay. But the World Health Organization has been very clear for over 20 years we all need to be prepared for a pandemic.’
Exercise Cygnus, in which officials responded to a fake pandemic in real time, was set seven weeks into a flu pandemic, to practise how to cope with overwhelmed hospitals, for example.
Ministers and other officials, however, did not rehearse what to do to actually stop a highly contagious disease spreading in the first place.
As a result, there were no plans in place to scale up mass testing or build a robust contact tracing system – unlike other countries, particularly in Asia, who managed to keep Covid-19 largely under control.
PHE was at the forefront of testing when cases of Covid-19 arrived on British soil.
But it stopped doing this on 12 March because the coronavirus had become too widespread to control. Instead, PHE shifted testing to prioritise the sickest patients leaving millions with mild symptoms untested.
When it finally ramped up testing to reach all people with symptoms on May 18, it involved private companies Deloitte and Serco setting up testing sites – which Professor Ashton said was a ‘complete failure’.
The expertise of regional and local public health teams – which have been doing testing and tracing work for some 100 years – were neglected.
It came after local health teams being run down for years by a ‘centralised, London-centric’ PHE, Professor Ashton said.
He added: ‘Because it’s been allowed to run down it didn’t have the capacity, and that gave the Government the excuse to privatise it with Serco, Sitel and Deloitte.
‘Sally Davies didn’t speak up for public health as the chief medical officer. Duncan Selbie didn’t speak up for local and regional public health as chief executive of PHE.
‘We are seeing the consequences of that now.’
In response to Dame Sally’s claims, a PHE spokesperson said: ‘The claim that PHE ignored threats other than flu is wrong.
‘Dame Sally Davies participated in exercises which planned specifically for a coronavirus scenario in the UK, among other health threats.
‘In all of our time working with Dame Sally Davies we agreed that the country should prepare for all health protection threats including infections caused by different organisms such as coronaviruses.’
A government spokesperson said: ‘This is an unprecedented pandemic and we have taken the right steps at the right time to combat it, guided at all times by the best scientific advice, to protect the NHS and save lives.
‘There is a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes, all of which would not be possible without the years of preparation undertaken for a pandemic, including flu and other infectious diseases like MERS, SARS and Ebola.’