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Matt hancock was charged with a “blatant lie” after insisting that there was “no national disruption” of personal protective equipment (PPE) for NHS personnel during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The health secretary spoke days after the High Court ruled that the government did not illegally release details of billions of pounds in contracts related to the coronavirus.
Hancock has called legal cases about transparency returns “second-rate” to save lives and said his officials had been working long hours to acquire PPE.
In a torrid interview, he also claimed that the NHS was “very close” to running out of PPE, but avoided the worst thanks to his team, despite desperate shortages across the country.
He had said this was a justification for his decision to go ahead with the contracts, which Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan described as a “blatant lie.”
“There were areas where it was a huge challenge and there were areas where there were problems, but we never had a national outage, we were very close to that,” he told Good Morning Britain.
“We never had a national outage because of my team and the work they were doing.”
The government came under widespread criticism at the start of the pandemic last year, with some doctors resorting to using garbage bags instead of aprons and many blaming the deaths of NHS staff on the shortage of PPE.
Hancock has faced calls for greater accountability after a judge said it did not publish contracts drafted in accordance with the transparency policy.
Despite the criticism, he told GMB: “I think we should be on this show thanking my team, they worked so hard.”
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Mr Morgan chided him: “You and your team have presided over a regrettable handling of this pandemic that has led to the worst death toll in Europe, 130,000 deaths.
“So I’m sorry if my first thought when you come here, Secretary of Health, is not to thank you and your team.”
Figures from UK statistical agencies for deaths where Covid-19 has been mentioned on death certificates show that there have been more than 130,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the UK.
The latest government figures show that there have been 120,757 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test.
Facing multiple calls to apologize after the court ruling, Hancock once again refused.
“I will not apologize because apologizing would imply that I would do something different,” he said.
“And, given the options we faced in April and May, when there were very, very serious problems with access to PPE and some people were left without it and the team was working so hard … to have removed part of that team’s work to complete paperwork on time rather than just [being] more than fifteen days late that would have been wrong. ”
