The award-winning journalist John Pilger revealed the NHS ran an exercise in London in 2016 which proved it was unable to cope with a pandemic like Covid-19, but the findings were suppressed.
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.
He described the failure as “crime” and told host Afshin Rattansi that findings of the exercise, titled Cygnus, had been hushed up 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.”
The journalist stressed that the NHS had been “devastated” by the Tory led government bringing in the Health and Social Care Act in 2012.
Pilger’s scathing comments come a day after the UK recorded the most deaths in a single day during the crisis of 854, taking the total up to 6,159.
Projections from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, US, warned that the UK could become the worst hit country in Europe by Covid-19, possibly accounting for 40% of the continent’s deaths.
The documentary film maker, who’s most recent works include ‘The Dirty War on the NHS,’ also blasted successive British governments since the 1980s for slashing funding for the NHS and pursuing a policy of privatization by “stealth”.
