Boris Jonson seeks experts to staff his Covid-19 testing labs
[ad_1]
Boris Johnson pleads with universities to send him 400 ‘technicians, post-docs or graduate students’ to man new coronavavirus testing mega-labs and save the system from collapse
- Boris Johnson wants university boffins to staff his planned covid testing labs
- The PM is seeking the ‘urgent support’ of 50 universities and medical schools
- Thousands of Britons have complained about the difficulty in getting Covid tests
- Some walk-in centres in Greater Manchester have queues in excess of five hours
Boris Johnson is begging university leaders to send him hundreds of academics to save Britain’s chaotic coronavirus testing system from collapse.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the Prime Minister has written to the bosses of more than 50 top universities and medical schools to request their ‘urgent support’ to man the Government’s new mega-labs, which are short of staff as demand surges.
His plea comes as thousands of people across Britain are still unable to get coronavirus tests. Some have been advised they must travel hundreds of miles to have a swab and there were last week reports of five-hour queues at some walk-in centres in Greater Manchester.
Boris Johnson has pleaded with universities and medical schools to send him experts to allow him to staff his planned massive Covid-19 testing centres which are central to his plan to prevent a second spike
Scientists claim the problems stem from the Government’s network of privately run Lighthouse laboratories, which are now struggling to meet demand after scores of academics who helped set them up in March and April returned to their day jobs over the summer.
In his personally signed letter to university chiefs, Mr Johnson asks that ‘experienced staff, who have already helped to establish the Lighthouse laboratories, return and extend these programmes, training the next generation of staff’.
He appealed for 400 ‘technicians, post-docs or graduate students with molecular biology experience’ to staff the Lighthouse laboratories in Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Manchester, Newport and Glasgow, and for ‘qualified technicians/post-docs with management experience, to join the Test and Trace Laboratory Team to help manage our overall lab capacity’. He also urged the academics to sign up for six to 12 months ‘starting as soon as possible’ and promised the Government would reimburse them at their current university rates.
Mr Johnson had vowed to establish a ‘world-beating’ £10 billion testing system that would complete 500,000 tests a day by next month. However, the system is currently processing just 200,000, with more than 70,000 of those being done by NHS labs. Official figures show the time it takes to process the test samples is also lengthening with care home residents waiting an average of 83 hours for their results – almost three times longer than in June.
Mr Johnson wants 400 qualified technicians to staff his major labs across the country
Jon Ashworth, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, last night said: ‘This extraordinary begging letter from the Prime Minister is proof that testing, far from being world-beating, has become a fiasco on his watch. Ministers have left it too late to plan for this crucial moment. It was well-known that many Lighthouse lab staff would have to return to universities and research institutions and it was well known that with children going back to school and people coming back to the office that we would need extra testing and the capacity to process that testing.’
Allan Wilson, president of the Institute of Biomedical Science and an expert on testing, said: ‘This letter from the Prime Minister demonstrates that there are staffing shortages in the Lighthouse labs. They have lost a lot of staff and now they are looking for the universities to replace staff or urging those who have left to come back.’
Sarah-Jane Marsh, the director of testing at NHS Test and Trace, last week admitted that people were unable to get coronavirus tests because laboratories had reached a ‘critical pinch-point’.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs on the Health Committee last week that there had been ‘a problem with a couple of contracts’ that would be ‘sorted’ in a couple of weeks. Asked about Mr Johnson’s intervention, a Department of Health spokesman said: ‘We recently announced new facilities and technology to build our testing capacity further and process results faster. As this is built, more staff will be required and recruitment is taking place.’
lTrials of a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University are to resume after a pause due to a reported side effect in a volunteer. The New York Times reported the volunteer had been diagnosed with transverse myelitis, an inflammatory syndrome affecting the spinal cord.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock welcomed the restart, adding: ‘This pause shows we will always put safety first.’
[ad_2]
Source link
