PHOTO PHOTO: British Health Secretary Matt Hancock arrives at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), ahead of a cabinet meeting being held at the FCO, for the first time since the COVID-19 lockdown in London, Britain July 21, 2020. Stefan Rousseau / Pool fia REUTERS
(Reuters) – British Health Secretary Matt Hancock will announce that Public Health England (PHE) will be lifted and replaced by a new body specifically designed to protect the country from a pandemic by early next month, the Telegraph reported.
Hancock will announce a merger of PHE’s pandemic response work with the National Health Service’s (NHS) Test and Trace into a new body called the National Institutes of Health, the newspaper said. (bit.ly/3fZLmE6)
The move is intended to bring together the scientific expertise at PHE and scale of the NHS Test and Trace operation into one new body, so that the country may be ready to stop a second coronavirus spike this fall, according to the Telegraph.
“The goal of the National Institute for Health Protection will be simple: to make Britain one of the best-off countries in the world to fight the pandemic,” a senior minister told the Telegraph.
The newspaper admitted that the change will be “effective” in the next month, but it will take until the spring to formally complete the organizational change.
The new institute will be modeled on the Robert Koch Institute, the public health agency in Germany, which played a pivotal role in responding to the pandemic, according to the newspaper.
PHE has come under increasing control in Britain for its handling of the COVID-19 crisis. The government adopted a new way of counting tattoos after concerns were raised that the old method, followed by PHE, would make them too big.
Report of Bhargav Acharya in Bengaluru; Edited by Daniel Wallis
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