In the slightly incongruous setting of south London’s splendid Kia Oval cricket stadium, Naomi Fulop gathered her strength to give the assembled British media her response to the damning findings of Heather Hallett’s latest Covid inquiry report.
Reading a statement from her mobile phone, her voice quivering just a little, as fellow members of the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice (CBFFJ) group stood alongside her, Fulop recalled the terrible time when her mother died from coronavirus in January 2021. It was in the second lethal wave of the pandemic, a vaccine still a far-off aspiration, during the third national lockdown. Like so many other people, Fulop believes her mother died because those caring for her did not have adequate personal protective equipment (PPE), a belief supported by the findings of Lady Hallett, a former court of appeal judge.
“Today’s report lays bare a catastrophic failure of preparedness that cost lives, wasted billions and allowed a privileged few to profit from a national emergency,” Fulop said. “The human cost was felt in homes across the country, including my own. My mum, Christina Fulop, was housebound and cared for by wonderful domiciliary care workers. During the second wave, they were expected to wear one thin medical mask for an entire eight-hour shift, moving from one frail person to another. We believe that is how she contracted Covid. She later died in hospital. The same avoidable tragedy was repeated in hospitals, care settings and homes across the country.”
Deborah Doyle, another member of the group, told the Guardian that her mother, Sylvia Griffiths, died in April 2020, in the first wave, in a Sunderland care home where staff also had inadequate PPE.
“They were a medium-sized care home, and there were a lot of residents who passed away,” Doyle said. “The nurse who looked after my mum, who was a wonderful Nigerian man, a very stoic gentleman, was with her when she passed away. He was absolutely bereft because he couldn’t believe the number of residents who were dying.”
The public inquiry into Britain’s Covid disaster is itself a triumph and vindication for the families group. Individuals whose loved ones died in that time of terror and isolation came together steadily from first founding in May 2020 to become a formidable campaigning group of 7,000 seeking answers and justice. Soon enlisting support from a team of lawyers led by the solicitor Elkan Abrahamson and the barrister Pete Weatherby KC, veterans of justice causes including representing bereaved Hillsborough families, the group pushed hard for a public inquiry. After Boris Johnson, still the prime minister in May 2021, agreed to establish the inquiry, the families group pushed hard for his government’s procurement chaos and infamous “VIP lane” to be considered as part of it.
In her report, Hallett confirmed much of the chaos and waste that was gradually exposed by campaigners and the media at the time. The UK’s depleted stockpile of PPE was so inadequate it was “perilous”, and it did leave health and social care workers without the equipment they needed to protect themselves and the people for whom they were caring from a deadly disease. Johnson’s government was also catastrophically unprepared for the rapid procurement it then had to do in a worldwide scramble for PPE, and wasted approximately £10bn of the almost £15bn it spent – and a key element of the system it rapidly set up was the VIP lane. It gave high priority for consideration of lucrative PPE contracts to companies that had connections to the government.
The families group has always believed that this system, which paid £4.2bn to companies whose contracts were processed via the VIP lane, institutionalised corruption and cronyism. Hallett said the inquiry had not found that, and that although the VIP system was “inherently biased towards those with connections to the UK government”, that was unintended; it was “a misguided attempt to give priority to the most credible offers”.
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Fulop and her fellow CBFFJ members said they felt vindicated by the report’s findings and welcomed Hallett’s recommendations for improvement. But on the conclusions about the VIP lane, they were not convinced.
“No other country in the world created a VIP lane,” Fulop told the media. “It was a deliberate and shameful choice. It was a hidden route that gave anybody who knew the right people access to huge amounts of public money, with little to no oversight or transparency. The result was that a few people got richer, while PPE didn’t get to those who needed it. The VIP lane led to PPE procurement being less effective and more expensive … Lives were lost as a result, including my mum’s.”
Six years on from the terrible time when the virus hit a country dreadfully unprepared for it, the bereaved families had come to the Oval to make their voices heard again and insist that lessons be learned.
