The former health secretaries Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock have been criticised for their failure to better prepare the UK for the pandemic in a damning first report from the Covid inquiry that calls for a major overhaul in how the government prepares for civil emergencies.

Hunt, who was the health secretary from 2012-18, and Hancock, who took over until 2021, were named by the chair to the inquiry, Heather Hallett, for failing to rectify flaws in contingency planning ahead of the pandemic, which claimed more than 230,000 lives in the UK.

The government had focused largely on the threat of an influenza outbreak despite the fact that coronaviruses in Asia and the Middle East in the preceding years meant “another coronavirus outbreak at a pandemic scale was foreseeable” and to overlook that was “a fundamental error”.

“It was not a black swan event,” Lady Hallett said in a 240-page report that concluded: “The processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures within the UK government and devolved administrations and civil services failed their citizens.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/18/hancock-and-hunt-failed-to-prepare-uk-for-pandemic-covid-inquiry-finds