Health

Tony O’Brien: Playing the Covid blame game won’t help us to deal with the next health crisis

Let’s not waste time pretending there was a ‘perfect’ way our leaders could have handled the pandemic – we need real learning, not recriminations

Extraordinary health emergency: we cannot afford the risk of a committee of politicians turning the review of our handling of the pandemic into a circus. Picture: Getty

There is no doubt that it is critically important to draw lessons from the international and national response to the Covid pandemic. This was, after all, an extraordinary health emergency in which unprecedented public health measures were taken, leading inevitably to unprecedented economic and social impacts.

We are also facing the unfortunate global reality that issues such as climate change, and resulting impacts on biodiversity, will increase the frequency and scale of global pandemic events. ...