Coronavirus spread in UK is a ‘crime’ as NHS had 4 years to prepare for pandemic – John Pilger

Speaking to RT’s Going Underground, Pilger said that back in 2016, the UK government ran a drill in London that showed the health service was incapable of dealing with an outbreak.

READ MORE: UK’s Covid-19 deaths jump by record 854 to rise above 6,000

He described the failure as a “crime” and told host Afshin Rattansi that the findings from the exercise, titled Cygnus, had been concealed by the government.

“The result of the drill was that the health service was overwhelmed, there weren’t enough beds, there weren’t enough ventilators, there weren’t enough clinicians in the right places. The whole system, which had been battered by cuts and privatization for years, failed," he said.

The journalist explained that the NHS had been “devastated” by the Tory-led government's decision to bring in the Health and Social Care Act in 2012.

Pilger’s scathing comments come a day after the UK recorded its most deaths in a single day since the crisis began. The 854 fatalities took the total to 6,159.

Projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, US, warned that the UK could become the European country worst-hit by Covid-19, possibly accounting for 40 percent of the continent’s deaths.

The documentary film maker, whose most recent works include ‘The Dirty War on the NHS,’ also blasted successive British governments since the 1980s for slashing NHS funding and pursuing a policy of privatization by “stealth.”

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