LONDON (Sputnik) - Public Health England (PHE), the executive agency of the UK government’s Department of Health and Social Care, will be replaced by a new body, amid rising fears of a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic this fall, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
According to the newspaper, although Health Secretary Matt Hancock will make the announcement later this week, the change will become effective next month, and will not be completed until spring next year.
The new body, which the paper said will be called the National Institute for Health Protection, will merge PHE’s response expertise and the National Health Service (NHS) Trace and Test System developed by the government after the novel coronavirus struck.
"We want to bring together the science and the scale in one new body so we can do all we can to stop a second coronavirus spike this autumn," a senior minister said as quoted by the media outlet.
The announcement made by the paper has prompted an ongoing barrage of criticism from people accusing the government of trying to blame the PHE for its own failure when dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
"In short, Tories blaming a public system that they undermined, fragmented, & grossly underfunded, in order to privatise it. It’s what they are programmed (to) do," NHS consultant and clinical oncologist Clive Peedell wrote on Twitter.
Lawmaker and Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Munira Wilson described it as an "attempt to deflect responsibility for their shambolic management of the pandemic by a bureaucratic reorganisation".
The latest government figures show that the COVID-19 death toll in the UK climbed to 41,361 after another three deaths were confirmed on Saturday, while the 1,012 people that tested positive for the coronavirus as of 9 a.m. (08:00 GMT) on Saturday brought the total number of cases to 317,379.
