The government “disinvested” in the UK’s public health system, leaving the country lacking in “resilience” for a pandemic, England’s former chief medical officer (CMO) admitted today.
Sally Davies, who was CMO under David Cameron and Theresa May between 2010 and 2019, told the official Covid inquiry: “Compared to similar countries, per hundred thousand population, we were at the bottom of the table on the number of doctors, number of nurses, number of beds, number of IT units, number of respirators [and] ventilators.”
It was this lack of healthcare resilience, coupled with the fact that the “government didn’t do the plans”, which left the UK vulnerable to Covid-19, she said.
