AS the Covid inquiry progresses, we are finally hearing much of the truth that was hidden behind government and right wing media lies and misinformation.

It is now evident that right through the pandemic the government got every big call disastrously wrong, leading to one of the highest death rates per head of population in the world and the highest death rate for front line NHS staff in the world.

Previous Prime Minister David Cameron and his Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt presided over a pandemic preparation exercise that was never put into place. The NHS was ill prepared and vulnerable because of funding cuts and low morale. We had the lowest number of acute medical beds and intensive care beds in Europe, and huge shortages of staff because of trained foreign staff being forced out of the country by Brexit.

Yet we rose to the challenge and did the best we could, leaving many staff demoralised, broken, exhausted and burnt-out, and more than 225,000 of our patients and colleagues dead.

We have now heard of delays to the imposition of both lockdowns due to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s initial denial of the seriousness of the pandemic and then because he failed to accept the second variant.

There was £37bn wasted on a useless “track and trace” service, which was headed by Dido Harding, the wife of a Tory MP; there was a “VIP fast lane” which awarded contracts to people with Tory connections for personal protective equipment for the NHS, much of which (£9.7bn worth) was substandard and ultimately destroyed. Then there was the thousands of care home residents who died after some patients were discharged from hospitals with Covid on the instructions of Matt Hancock who then claimed he was “throwing a protective ring around care homes”.

Plus there was the disastrous “eat out to help out” in which the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak appeared on TV serving food without a mask, and so must have accelerated the spread of the virus.

There was no protection of children and teachers who were sent back to schools with poor ventilation, no masks and cramped classrooms; money was wasted building Nightingale hospitals that were never going to have the staff or facilities to manage Covid patients.

The Government even said that the vaccine programme stating only happened because we had “left” the EU, when in fact we were still under European Medicines Agency rules and so Brexit had made no difference whatsoever.

Politicians clapped for NHS staff but as soon as the nurses asked for fair pay, they took them to court.

And, of course, Downing Street staff partied, ignoring the regulations, while others stuck to the rules, unable to see close relatives as they died in hospital or care homes. Even the Queen mourned alone the death of her husband.

Boris Johnson was never fit to be an MP, let alone the PM, and he presided over the most irresponsible government this country has ever had, and our local MPs who supported him at every turn need to be held to account.

I will never forgive or forget his government’s actions.

  • Professor Ahmet Fuat was a GP in Darlington for 37 years and is a specialist in cardiology care. He writes in a personal capacity

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