Quote Originally Posted by Muddy Retriever View Post
Some of those failings are undoubtedly true, but are they all the fault of the Government?

Take Cheltenham and the Liverpool game. At the time Patrick Vallance was not in favour of banning those events. He said it would not have a big effect on transmission rates. So rightly or wrongly the Government was only following the advice of its chief scientific officer.

Testing and PPE provison in the early days were both inadequate but they were the responsibility of Public Health England. For a whole month PHE turned down requests from private and university labs to assist with the testing. It was only when the Government got involved and overruled PHE that this changed.

I said at the time that Cummings made an error of judgement, but ultimately the worst that the police could say about the whole episode was that he might have committed a minor breach of lockdown rules in going to Barnard Castle. Most of the criticism was clearly politically motivated. The most vehement critics of Cummings have turned out to be the people who have cheered on the mass BLM protests, if not actually taken part in them themselves. This has been a much larger breech of lockdown rules.

I have to say though, the failure of an NHS App was entirely predictable. Why they didn't go for Apple/Google in the first place is beyond me.
I've heard a few point the finger at the Cheltenham festival, but I haven't seen any evidence to back up the claim.
There was an article around a month after, but that was the mad Prof Ashton stirring it up.