Blair repeats call for government to appoint “senior minister of testing”

Tony Blair has repeated his call for the UK government to appoint a “senior minister of testing” and warned that mass testing is necessary because the aim of “eradicating” Covid-19 is not a “realistic” one.

In an interview with Times Radio this morning, the former Labour Prime Minister said the government had “chosen someone good” and “highly capable” in Dido Harding, who leads on the UK’s Test and Trace programme.

But he added: “I’m talking about a senior minister that is either from the existing stock of ministers or they can bring someone back. They’ve got plenty of talented people who aren’t in government at the moment.”

Blair said: “Once you decide that this mass testing is an essential component of getting things working again, you’ve got to drill down on every single aspect of it… structural changes necessary in government flow from it.”

The Labour politician called on the government in early April to appoint a minister solely responsible for Covid-19 mass testing in the UK, recommending that one cabinet member be in charge of a unit devoted to “literally nothing else”.

“Unless you’re able to get mass testing, at scale, with speed, I don’t see how you get a way out of this lockdown – and I’m terrified by the economic damage we’re doing with every week this lockdown continues,” he told the BBC.

Explaining the reasons for his recommendation today, Blair said: “Roughly, on some estimates, 70% of people with the disease are asymptomatic. If you’re only testing people with symptoms, you’re losing the majority of people from your testing strategy.

“We began this pandemic thinking and talking about herd immunity, and rightly moved away from that very quickly because of the immense damage that we do. But we then, I think, maybe fooled ourselves into thinking you could eliminate the disease.

“So you go from this sort of herd immunity concept to eradicating the disease. I don’t think that’s ever been realistic. All the people I speak to around the world say we’re going to be living with this disease for some time.

“The issue is how do you control it and contain it. And I think the only way that you can do that – absent a vaccine that works and is mass distributed, or a therapeutic that reduces dramatically the severity of the disease – the only way you can do it, is to test as many people as possible.

“I think from the very beginning, mass testing has been the only thing that gets you through this, allows you to avoid the severity of the very blunt instrument of lockdown, and gets you to a place where you can more or less get your economy moving whilst containing the disease.”

UCL’s Dr Jasmina Panovska-Griffiths told the BBC today that if the NHS Test and Trace system is “not done effectively or adequately, then there is a risk of an occurrence of a second wave later this year and peaking in December”.

Labour’s shadow minister Sarah Jones declared in an interview with Sky News this morning that “the government has failed on the test, track and trace system” and “the government needs to do better”.

56,651 deaths have been registered in the UK so far where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate, including suspected cases.