A LONG-SERVING Westminster GP has warned the government is risking lives of patients and staff with inadequate infection control policies.

Dr Jonathan Fluxman, who ran the Harrow Road GP Practice for 35 years, said hospital patients and staff were not being protected from Covid-19 and other viruses. He criticised a decision to downgrade IPC – infection prevention and control – measures in 2020 in a move that “buried science”.

The change meant that hospitals did not have to be fitted with top-quality air filtration systems and cheaper but less effective “surgical” face masks were provided to staff and patients instead.

He also criticised a culture of governance that has stopped top civil servants and health officers speaking out. “Enough is enough!” said Dr Fluxman, who is the Covid lead at Doctors in Unite union.

“How much longer are we going to bury our heads in the sand and follow unscientific guidance in infection control? It is way beyond time that we have new guidance which protects patients and staff properly in the hospitals and health centres.”

Covid groups and health campaigners protested outside St Thomas’ Hospital on Monday.

They say the lower IPC guidance is still costing lives today and putting off patients at high risk from airborne infections attending appointments.

Dr Fluxman said that health authorities were continuing to wrongly put out advice that it is “enough to wash your hands and you will be safe” from infection from Covid, that “everyone knows is airborne”, and added: “We all know this is totally inadequate, but they won’t change.” He criticised scientists who had toed the government’s line and who had “been rewarded” with knighthoods and the like. He said:

“These people have completely sold out. Everyone knows that if you are a scientist who speaks out against government policy, you get sacked. So what do you do as a trained scientist, when you have lived by the scientific principle that you are guided by evidence, with a duty to do no harm and always act in the interest of patients?

“Here we have a government that has done exactly the opposite. We saw what they did, the way they partied, at the same time, the bigger crime than Partygate was the stuff we are talking about today: burying the science.”

Dr Fluxman had warned the UK Covid-19 Inquiry about the continued use of surgical masks that “do provide some respiratory infection protection but considerably less than respiratory masks”.

He also spoke about how medical officers in the government, public health and running the NHS, were no longer “employed on contracts which guaranteed them freedom of speech”. He said: “This was stripped away at regional level in the 1990s when regional health authorities were replaced by civil service bodies… Until 1997 it was generally acknowledged that the role of the Chief Medical Officer included the telling of truth to power. That began to be eroded under the Blair government and it has continued to erode.”

Top public health officials were no longer trusted, he said, and “this lack of a source of trusted, independent, official public health advice had a major adverse impact on communication with the public during the pandemic”.

An NHS spokesperson said it acted in line with infection prevention control guidance developed by a group of organisations including public health agencies, the Department of Health and Social Care and the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group.

A DHSC spokesperson said the government had acted to save lives and livelihoods, and added: “We have always said there are lessons to be learned from the pandemic and we are committed to learning from the Covid-19 inquiry’s findings which will play a key role in informing the government’s planning and preparations for the future.”

A petition has been launched online:

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/654572