LONDON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th August, 2020) UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock confirmed on Tuesday that Public Health England (PHE), the executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care, will be replaced by a new body, as part of a new strategy to strengthen the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"The changes I am announcing today are designed entirely to strengthen our response, to ensure the system works to help you do your vital work," Hancock said in a speech at the Policy Exchange think-tank in London.
The minister explained that the new agency will merge some of the work the PHE has been doing, with the National Health Service Test and Trace System and the Joint Biosecurity Center, for a more comprehensive response to both biological threats and infectious diseases.
"The National Institute for Health Protection will have a single and relentless mission: protecting people from external threats to this country's health, external threats like biological weapons, pandemics, and of course infectious diseases of all kinds," he added.
Hancock also confirmed that Dido Harding, a member of the House of Lords who has been running the Test and Trace program since the pandemic struck, will be in charge of the new health institution.
Reacting to the health secretary's announcement, Labour lawmaker and Hancock's counterpart in the shadow cabinet Jonathan Ashworth accused the government of trying to blame the PHE for its own failure when dealing with the novel coronavirus outbreak.
"Today we'll get a structural reorganisation, an attempt at blame shifting, more corrosive privatisation. The shift we need is towards a local test & trace system delivering mass testing, finds cases, uses local expertise to trace & supports people to isolate with security," Ashworth tweeted.
He also said the changes made by the government in the middle of a pandemic are "time consuming" and "irresponsible."
The UK COVID-19 death toll climbed to 41,369 on Monday after another three deaths were reported by the Department of Health and Social Care, which also added 713 fresh coronavirus cases, taking the total number of infections to� 317,379 since the pandemic began.
