Britain plans to create a pandemic response unit

“The goal of the National Institute for Health Protection will be simple: to make Britain one of the best equipped countries in the world to fight the pandemic,” a senior minister told The Telegraph. “We want to bring science and scale together in a new body so that we can do all we can to stop a second peak of coronavirus this fall.”

The UK was slow to ramp up testing and monitoring capacity at the start of the outbreak and was one of the hardest hit countries in Europe.

PHE has faced strong criticism from ministers for its handling of the coronavirus crisis. The government has adopted a new way of counting deaths from COVID-19 after fears the PHE method overestimates them.

Opposition politicians attacked the movement. Labor shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth called the move a “desperate attempt to shift blame,” telling the Mirror: “PHE could have been better prepared if the Tories hadn’t spent years reducing public health budgets, then outsource much of the testing and tracing response to this pandemic. And where does that leave other important priorities in health prevention, for example on health services? sexual health, drug and alcohol addiction services and obesity in PES? ”

Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Munira Wilson tweeted: “The ministers are trying to shirk responsibility for their shameful management of the pandemic through a bureaucratic reorganization, led [by] their companion who has achieved tremendous success with Test & Trace.