O/T. The Government's handling of Covid

[MadAmster]

Far be it from me to offer a balanced view, but I will anyway.

MA is right on all counts, the only one I'd take slight issue with would be PPE because HMG were genuinely living with a new beast at the time and few countries covered themselves in glory

My comments on the PPE were aimed at the fact that they have now given PPE contracts to a number of firms owned by friends, family and donors to the party who had no PPE experience and have cocked up the whole PPE issue costing the UK in excess of £100M. The government cock up was not putting out tenders for the contracts, choosing, instead, to put money into the back pockets of F & & donrs rather than giving the contracts to companies with a track record in supplying PPE.

Pandemic or not, the firms that got those contracts got them through varying degrees of nepotism. Totally unacceptable.

[Andy_Faber]

My comments on the PPE were aimed at the fact that they have now given PPE contracts to a number of firms owned by friends, family and donors to the party who had no PPE experience and have cocked up the whole PPE issue costing the UK in excess of £100M. The government cock up was not putting out tenders for the contracts, choosing, instead, to put money into the back pockets of F & & donrs rather than giving the contracts to companies with a track record in supplying PPE.

Pandemic or not, the firms that got those contracts got them through varying degrees of nepotism. Totally unacceptable.

Agreed but you covered that in another point - IMO if they’d gone to their mates and made as good a job as has been made of the vaccines I think most folk would have been less critical

[Ram59]

My comments on the PPE were aimed at the fact that they have now given PPE contracts to a number of firms owned by friends, family and donors to the party who had no PPE experience and have cocked up the whole PPE issue costing the UK in excess of £100M. The government cock up was not putting out tenders for the contracts, choosing, instead, to put money into the back pockets of F & & donrs rather than giving the contracts to companies with a track record in supplying PPE.

Pandemic or not, the firms that got those contracts got them through varying degrees of nepotism. Totally unacceptable.

That may have worked in a perfect world MA, but at the time everyone in the world was trying to buy PPE, it wasn't a case of putting it out for tender, like the EU have found out with the vaccines. Established PPE companies entire production schedules were quickly taken up, so then you fall back on your 'contacts'. Many companies with no previous PPE experience have turned their hand to quickly setting up production, whether you select one of these successful companies would have partially been down to luck. Naturally your 'contacts' will be friends, friends of friends, family, friends of family, suppliers of other items etc, etc. There was no time for a proper procurement procedure, corners were cut and unfortunately it wasn't the same level of success as the vaccination programme.

How much was the PPE a failure in terms of actual supply, we had plenty of examples of individual medics complaining of shortages, but were these isolated incidents caused by isolated local supply issues? I know for a fact that my friend, a manager in a clerical NHS department with no physical connection to the covid operation, was appalled by the general behaviour of her staff, including helping themselves to PPE intended for the front line staff. I doubt that this was an isolated incidence, then you will have failures on a local level when distributing supplies. How many of these well publicised incidences of shortages occurred when the 'victim's' first phone call, was not to the next person in the supply chain, but to the media, for whatever reason? It's still happening now, people who have slipped through the vaccination net are preferring to contact the media, rather than a simple phone call to their GP.

The one thing that points to the PPE supply not being the total failure that it appears, is that throughout the pandemic, official ONS figures have shown that NHS staff, including front line, are no more likely to die from covid than any other occupation. If we are to believe that staff were without PPE, then surely these death figures would have been much higher?