John Ashton - Blinded by Corona: How the Pandemic Ruined Britains Health and Wealth and What to Do about It

Everyone should read this book. Its powerful and penetrating insight holds our leaders to account - and finds them wanting.

PROFESSOR ROGER KIRBY, PRESIDENT ROYAL SOCIETY OF MEDICINE

Once you start reading this book, it is hard to put down. It puts COVID-19 into the wider trajectory of public health within Britain, and is absolutely devastating on the response of the UK government to the COVID-19 crisis. A must-read for all those interested in understanding what went wrong and why.

PROFESSOR DEVI SRIDHAR, CHAIR OF PUBLIC HEALTH, UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

As with the Hillsborough disaster, the fuel crisis, needle exchange and other crises John Ashton is calling this one correctly here. He was speaking out on COVID-19 before any politician was awake.

PROFESSOR GABRIEL SCALLY, MEMBER OF INDEPENDENT SAGE,

PRESIDENT OF EPIDEMIOLOGY & PUBLIC HEALTH ROYAL SOCIETY OF MEDICINE

John Ashtons views are erudite, uncompromising, and humane. He has judged how this pandemic would unfold better than computer simulations and politicians. The answers are in these pages and governments should listen.

PROFESSOR KAMRAN ABBASI, EXECUTIVE EDITOR BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL

This is an important book. John Ashton shows how and why the catastrophic actions of Boris Johnsons government failed its people and led to many thousands of unnecessary deaths. If we are to avoid similar disasters, read this scorching indictment of those in power.

KEN LOACH

Professor Ashtons counsel and knowledge has proven him to be an authoritative figure on how the threat of COVID-19 should be responded to. His early calls for mass testing were quickly heeded to in the Kingdom of Bahrain, and established him as one of the worlds leading public health experts on countering COVID-19.

SALMAN BIN KHALIFA, FINANCE MINISTER BAHRAIN

In 1847 the much celebrated and revered Doctor William Henry Duncan was appointed as Liverpools first Medical Officer of Health. Like Dr Duncan, and motivated by a passion for the common good, John Ashton sees the world through the lens of public health. From the outset of the Coronavirus pandemic he has offered trenchant and coherent arguments about how the Government and public-health authorities needed to respond. His insightful book provides a valuable compass and road map as we continue to navigate our way through this pandemic. He also offers sound advice on how to be better prepared for fresh waves of Covid and other potential threats to public health. As Dr Duncan might have saidjust what the doctor ordered.

LORD ALTON

There will be many analyses of the UKs response to corona virus, but Professor Ashton has not only been vocal in his view of the UK's response, he has put his theories into practice in leading the response of The Kingdom of Bahrain. At time of writing, Bahrain's response is seen as a global exemplar. Vocalising an opinion is easy; devising and executing a successful pandemic strategy is not. It is for that reason that Professor Ashton's book is so informative and so important.

FORMER MP Charlotte Leslie, CHAIR OF CMEC

John Ashton has been the voice of Cassandra throughout the pandemic. He has earned the right to be the first to tell the whole story, showing that we had both experience and knowledge, but failed to use it. But in the face of the arrogance of centralisation, Ashton gives us hope that local communities and expertise are equipped to bring the 2020 pandemic to its conclusion.

CRISPIN PAILING

The year 2020 will go down in world history as the Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic, taking its place in the annals of public health, alongside the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the Great Plague of London of 1665, the so-called Spanish flu of 1919 and other major epidemics that have swept the world both before and since with enormous loss of life, together with tumultuous economic and political ramifications.

What is different about COVID is that it had been long anticipated and that despite a century of an ascendant medical science and a rhetoric of preparedness, many countries were caught out. Not least among them was the UK.

To understand the root causes of this catastrophic failure it is necessary to address seventy years of neglect of the public-health system since the Second World War and to recognise that the very success of scientific medicine over that time brought with it the seeds of this major public-health disaster. It is also important to make the connection between biological phenomena like the pandemic and the way we live on the planet with global economies, rapid urbanisation and their impacts on biological systems and sustainability. We inhabit the earth on sufferance with no inalienable right to survive more than other animal species that have come and gone. The story of COVID-19 is a story of hubris, the hubris of humans as a species, together with the hubris of political and scientific leaders who lacked the humility to ask themselves the difficult questions early enough and to be open and transparent with the public.

The British government, under the recently elected Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was caught flat-footed and stands accused of doing too little, too late. When it comes to the specific COVID-19 failings of the Johnson cabinet and its scientific advisers in the United Kingdom we might reflect, with Tolstoy, that successful countries are all alike whilst every unsuccessful country is unsuccessful in its own way and that tens of thousands of British people have almost certainly died wantonly.

It is the dream of scientists to defeat the pathogens and other agents that can wreak havoc in human populations. With each victory the hope is that a definitive blow has been dealt in the fight to ward of illness. In the scientific age the hospital has come to replace the cathedral as the focus of hope for eternal life.

This dream is especially grandiose when it comes to ever evolving infectious diseases that can be found in the reservoir of other species that we come into contact with as we exploit the natural environment for our own comfort and convenience. After we have managed to control and suppress an epidemic, perhaps with the aid of a vaccine and modern medicines, there is a feeling of congratulation and invincibility.

Too often scientists and politicians seem to forget that in a world population of 8 billion sharing habitats and environments with multiple other species, from other mammals to the humblest but most versatile of simple life forms such as RNA viruses, respect for nature is a prerequisite for survival. Ren Dubos, the American microbiologist and author of Mirage of Health, who coined the phrase Think globally, act locally, reminded us that at some unpredictable time, and in some unforeseeable manner, nature will strike back.

The known unknown is that there will be another epidemic, and later another, and another. Just what isnt known is the why, how, and when before it is too late. There will be no sabre-rattling beforehand and how well a population can mitigate an epidemic will depend on its preparedness, resilience and public mobilisation acting in concert with the evidence and the science. The advantage that nature will always have over mankind is the element of surprise and the arrogance of leaders who think they have all the answers.

I have spent over forty years in a public-health career encompassing academia as well as hands-on public-health practice at all levels; from the neighbourhood to the global with the World Health Organization, I have dealt with a wide range of major public-health emergencies and knew that one day the world would face a crisis on the scale of the Influenza pandemic of 1918-19. What none of us knew was whether it would be in our lifetime.

When the first news broke of the unfolding epidemic in China it seemed possible that this might be the big one. It felt necessary to sound the alarm in the interview I gave to Sky News on February 1, outside Arrowe Park Hospital on the Wirral, Merseyside, as the first returnees from Wuhan went into quarantine there, and the first cases were reported in York.