Parliament Report Exposes U.K. COVID Policy of ‘Herd Immunity’ as Overwhelming Failure, but Asia Got It Right

Oct. 13, 2021 (EIRNS)—Great Britain’s House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committee (which consist of lawmakers from the U.K.’s three main political parties), issued a 150-page report earlier this week, which is a scathing criticism of the U.K.’s policy on COVID, calling it “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced.”

“When the Government moved from the ‘contain’ stage to the ‘delay’ stage, that approach involved trying to manage the spread of Covid through the population rather than to stop it spreading altogether,” the report stated. “This amounted in practice to accepting that herd immunity by infection was the inevitable outcome.”

By doing this the U.K., Europe, and North America “made a serious early error in adopting this fatalistic approach and not considering a more emphatic and rigorous approach ... as adopted by many East and South East Asian countries.” The report does not name China, but it is obvious that that is what they are referring to as the more successful approach.

According to CNBC’s coverage, “the report added that the fact that the U.K. approach reflected a consensus between official scientific advisers and the government indicated ‘a degree of groupthink’ which ‘meant we were not as open to approaches being taken elsewhere as we should have been.’ ” The report elaborated: “The delays in establishing an adequate test, trace and isolate system hampered efforts to understand and contain the outbreak and it failed in its stated purpose to avoid lockdowns.... The initial decision to delay a comprehensive lockdown—despite practice elsewhere in the world —reflected a fatalism about the spread of Covid that should have been robustly challenged at the time.”

Among the specific practices that the report denounced, was that “ ‘Do not attempt CPR’ notices were issued inappropriately for some people with learning disabilities, which was completely unacceptable.” The report did praise U.K. efforts on vaccination, and success in achieving a 86% vaccination rate among the over-12 population.