Companies should end their futile commercial arms race and back the best bid to give our NHS the equipment it so desperately needs
‘The race is on”, declared Sir James Dyson a fortnight ago, as the billionaire inventor joined scores of other manufacturers hurriedly working on designs for Covid-19 ventilators. And what a race it has turned out to be – a tribute, it seems, to the Monty Python Silly Olympics as everyone heads off in different directions, some entrants get lost, at least one drops out altogether.
So much for Matt Hancock’s claim that the Government would start plugging the acute shortfall of life-saving machines with the support of the great and the good of UK industry.
The Health Secretary had promised 1,500 new ventilators by the end of last week, but the NHS received only 200, dealing another blow to the push. The Government has already been forced to drastically scale back a longer-term target of 30,000 ventilators in stock to 18,000 as it struggles to cope with a worldwide supply shortage. It has even been forced to rely on handouts from the US and Germany.
The grand total that the NHS now has access to stands at just 10,120, woefully short of what is needed as the national coronavirus death toll surpasses the 11,000 mark, and one government scientific adviser warns the UK could eventually become the worst affected country in Europe.