We (Britain) may have totally screwed up our general response to COVID. But at least we’re still pretty good at science. Thanks Oxford for saving the day.
When the government announced they were shutting down PHE, in an attempt to copy the RKI (forgetting that PHE is far more than disease control, of course), the RKI wrote a letter to all senior management at PHE. This was quite a confused letter - the RKI didn’t understand why the UK gov were making this decision, when the RKI modelled their processes on PHE. I’ve read the letter.
Add to this, daily squabbles between cabinet office and other branches of government. If there was good news, you’d hear back immediately and you’d be blocked from sharing it. Bad news, cabinet would stall sometimes for weeks.
But ultimately all the guidance was irrelevant because the UK government are not interested in listening to it. When an adviser egregiously broke the rules, a story which dominated the headlines for weeks, they changed the rules. You see it now - the UK isn’t even on the downslope of wave 2, but apparently in 2 weeks we’ll have fans at football games and business as usual.
People are going to look back at this pandemic with amazement at the work the world scientists did to create a vaccine in record time, but with shame and embarrassment at the loss of life in countries that are considered world powers due to politics, ignorance, and stubbornness.
This isn’t safe to argue at all. In fact, it’s completely wrong. We know that the poor UK response is almost exclusively due to politicking and government corruption. The scientific advisory panel of the government (SAGE) hasn’t always been right in their assessment but they very quickly produced rigorous working models and solid recommendations, most of which have mirrored (and continue to mirror) the international consensus. Furthermore, public research in the UK has, sometimes against the active opposition of the government, done stellar work to ramp up testing and genetic sequencing.
For instance, several institutes (incl. the Crick Institute in London and the University of Cambridge) had extensive testing capabilities set up in record time, but their offers to official channels were ignored for weeks, if not months (the Crick in particular simply ignored this and already provided testing internally and externally, at a time when basically no country had widespread testing yet).
Likewise, a collaboration of different institutes quickly set up genome sequencing pipelines for COVID-19 samples, and as far as I know the Sanger Institute is sequencing more COVID-19 samples than any other individual entity in the world: https://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/who-we-are/sanger-institute/t...
That's not logical at all. It's a reasonable argument that poor general response to COVID is an indicator that you aren't currently doing a good job of governance, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.