The official scapegoat for the Coronavirus debacle will be the name ‘Public Health England’ now due to be abolished, but with the incompetent morons who ran it set to staff the new department uninterrupted.
Yes, really.
Matt Hancock announced the change of name at a press conference today, adding that the government will "take the best scientists and advisers from PHE to form part of the new organisation.”
In a clever move designed to distract attention from those actually responsible for the Coronavirus crisis the sacrificial lamb is just the name of a Whitehall department.
This is not the first time this type of misdirection has been performed by the NHS. In 2010 the incoming government decided that Regional Health Authorities and Patient Care Trusts were two levels of bureaucracies that were not required and set about an 3 year plan to abolish them to be replaced by CCGs (clinical care groups) that were supposed to be clinically lead and patient focused. However, what actually happened was an internal jostle for overpaid jobs a tax bill of some 2.3 BILLION and not a single bureaucrat anywhere losing their job. Just like the PHE change to come, and expect to hear no end of overblown claims about the ‘new’ department. it’ll be; money-saving, service-transforming, waste-reducing, democracy-enabling, health-promoting and choice-empowering, whilst they will probably host an investigation into why the PHE failed so dismally, but in reality, all of these things will be performed by the very same idiots responsible for the Public Health England. The cycle of incompetency set to continue unabated by this hiatus.
In a move that perfectly illustrates the problem Tory peer Baroness Dido Harding, currently in charge of Whitehall's failed contact-tracing operation, will temporarily head the ‘new’ department and lead the search for a permanent replacement. One Liberal Democrat MP branded the appointment a "reward for failure" which fails to cover it. Matt Hancock said the pandemic had "shone a light on our public health system" and that he has "learned a lot about what needs to change" but his problems go much deeper than this. Failing to grasp the problem, or perhaps part of it, Hancock paid tribute to public health ‘experts’ for "incredible work" and commended PHE's research as "some of the best that's been done" into COVID-19.