The UK government has drawn up plans to carry out up to
10 million covid-19 tests a day by early next year as part of a huge
£100bn expansion of its national testing programme, documents seen by The BMJ show.
The internal correspondence reveals that the government is prepared to almost match what it spends on the NHS in England each year (
£130bn) to fund mass testing of the population “to support economic activity and a return to normal life” under its ambitious Operation Moonshot programme.
A briefing memo sent to the first minister and cabinet secretaries in Scotland, seen by The BMJ, says that the UK-wide Moonshot programme is expected to “cost over £100bn to deliver.” If achieved, the programme would allow
testing of the entire UK population each week.
Critics have already rounded on the plans as “devoid of any contribution from scientists, clinicians, and public health and testing and screening experts,” and “disregarding the enormous problems with the existing testing and tracing programmes.”
The leaked documents reveal a
heavy reliance on the private sector to achieve the mass testing. Firms named are GSK for supplying tests, AstraZeneca for laboratory capacity, and Serco and G4S for logistics and warehousing.
Commenting on the leaked plans, Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said they bore the hallmark of
a government “whose ambition far exceeds its ability to deliver.”
He said, “This plan transmits unbounded optimism, disregarding the enormous problems with the existing testing and tracing programmes. Worse, it envisages a major role for Deloitte, a company that has presided over many of these problems. It focuses on only one part of the problem, testing, and says nothing about what will happen to those found positive, a particular concern given the low proportion of those who do adhere to advice to isolate—in part because of the lack of support they are offered. What parliamentary scrutiny will there be of a programme that would cost almost as much as the annual budget for the NHS [in England]? However, on the basis of what is presented here, this looks less like Apollo 11, which took Neill Armstrong to the moon successfully, and more like Apollo 13.”