The UK government has axed Public Health England (PHE) – the agency behind the response to England’s pandemic – to replace it with a new National Institutes of Health.
The agency will be named the National Institutes of Health (NIHP) and will be led by conservative peer Dido Harding, who has widely criticized England’s National Health Service (NHS) Test and Trace.
British media reports have compared it to Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, a federal government agency and research institute responsible for disease control and prevention, which deals with the response to the country’s coronavirus. The UK recorded 41,454 coronavirus deaths – with the majority in England – while Germany recorded 9,240, according to the John Hopkins University map.
NIHP will formalize and work from spring 2021, but its work will begin immediately “with a single command structure to facilitate the country’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” according to the UK Government’s website.
“As of today [Tuesday] it will bring together Public Health England (PHE) and NHS Test and Trace, as well as the analytical capacity of the Joint Biosecurity Center (JBC) under one leadership team. “This is the first step towards becoming one organization, focused on tackling Covid-19 and protecting the nation’s health,” the government said in a statement.
Some background: PHE has come under repeated fire for its handling of the pandemic, including testing issues and issues with procurement of personal protective equipment. Ultimately, however, it is a government agency that reports to Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
Hancock announced the axing of PHE, saying the new National Institute for Health Protection “will have a single and unrestricted mission: to protect people from external threats to the health of this country.”
This includes biological weapons, pandemics and of course infectious diseases of all kinds, he said.
“It will combine our world-class talent and scientific infrastructure with the growing response capacity of NHS testing and tracking and the apparent analytical capacity we are building in the Common Center for Biosafety,” Hancock added.
He said the changes would strengthen the UK’s response to the pandemic in a coherent response, adding that “we have not gone into this crisis with the capacity to respond to a once-in-a-century event. “
Hancock said the institute would also work closely with the divergent administrations of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales to “take over existing responsibilities in the UK and support all four.”
“My single biggest fear is a new flu, like another major health alarm, that is hitting us right now in the middle of this fight against coronavirus. Even once this crisis is over, and it will go away, we have an infrastructure for disease management needs that gives us the permanent, standing capacity to respond as a nation and the ability to scale at a pace, ”Hancock said.
The NHS coronavirus tracing app Dido Spearheaded was set to play a key role in helping the country out of lockdown, and government officials had said it would be rolled out nationwide in mid-May. However, it was never launched nationally and was scrapped in a government U-turn in favor of a system jointly developed by Google and Apple in June. It is still in the experimental stage.
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