Cameron defends his austerity program that unions denounced for “dismantling the public health system”
June 20 () –
Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron (2010-2016) admitted on Monday that his government made mistakes in preparing for a pandemic, by not considering different types of diseases to be prepared for the future.
Cameron has stated in the inquiry into the management of the COVID-19 pandemic that “groupthink” meant that his government did not focus enough on pandemics other than flu.
“Much more time was spent on pandemic flu and the dangers of pandemic flu than on possible pandemics of other respiratory diseases, as COVID-19 turned out to be,” he said, while defending that during his tenure he tried to improve country risk planning by changing government structures.
In addition, he has pointed out that it was “wrong to say that (we) were preparing for the wrong pandemic”: “There could still be a pandemic flu, and it is good that we have been prepared for that, but we spend a lot of time preparing for a pandemic that did not happen in instead of the one that did take place”, he asserted.
The Health Minister at the time, the Conservative Jeremy Hunt (2012-2018), who will also be questioned this week, has declared as a witness that they knew that the spread of many different types of viruses could create a pandemic, but the belief they had was “that the most likely scenario was a pandemic flu.”
However, the former British head of government has vigorously defended the austerity program of his mandate, strongly criticized by the unions, which denounced that his measures “destroyed and dismantled public health systems” with cuts that meant that the health service “I had no fighting chance.”
In this sense, he has admitted that he received warnings about pressure from the National Health Service (NHS), but has insisted that the country had the financial capacity to implement measures during the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to your measurements.
Thus, he has indicated that austerity policies were necessary to put public finances in order, since without it they would have lacked money for the NHS. “The health system is as strong as the economy, one pays for the other,” she has declared.
This investigation aims to learn from the lessons after the pandemic by investigating the measures that were taken and their consequences. Therefore, no one responsible will be found guilty or innocent and the recommendations are not binding, so governments do not have to adopt them.
