On 19 March, even as its health service came under growing pressure from the coronavirus, the British government flatly refused to take part in a European Union joint-procurement scheme for vitally needed ventilators. The reasons are shrouded in obfuscation: the prime minister, Boris Johnson, first claimed the United Kingdom was going it alone ‘because it has left the EU’, but later he blamed an administrative error.
By then, the UK was two weeks into its disastrous ‘herd immunity’ strategy, whereby it refused to impose movement restrictions and — as we now know — spurned the mass testing advocated by the World Health Organization.
Some people have assumed that — as with the US president, Donald Trump, at the same stage — Johnson was prepared to sacrifice lives on a large scale to save the economy. But it’s even simpler and more cruel than that. The entire month of February was wasted to save his ‘Brexit’ project.
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