When news began to spread in January of a lethally contagious coronavirus in China, ministers and scientists rushed to reassure the public that England was unusually well placed to manage the threatened global pandemic.
Public Health England — an agency conceived as the answer to the US’s respected Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when it was founded in 2013 — had distinguished itself in the fight against Ebola in Sierra Leone, earning plaudits from one leading scientist who described its expertise in microbiology and virology as “spectacular”.
But as ministers scramble to explain England’s poor response to the virus, which has officially killed almost 41,000 people there (the total UK-wide death toll is over 45,000), Boris Johnson’s under-fire government is increasingly seeking to blame PHE for much of what has gone wrong.