fake truth

I suppose it is important to be patriotic during the current crisis. To ignore the doubletalk of some of the politicians who say one thing one day and then contradict it the next. To not notice when a politician studiously avoids answering a questioner. After all, the questions are only from a mere journalist, not an expert. And wait, we've also been told not to listen to experts or read their reports in any case.

It would be entirely wrong to bring out fact-checking at this time, to indicate that the NHS has been underinvested for the last ten years.

Nor to look at any fat-cat monetisation of the catastrophe. The Americans are fast to begin to sue China, with aggressive lawyers pursuing billions oops - trillions - of dollars of claims against Beijing. No-one in Europe thought of that when America tragically exported the Spanish flu from Kansas on troopships.

It pushes the shorting of crashing equities for profit in UK markets into the shade. Then there's the squabble over PPE warehousing, a UK example of which was outsourced to the Americans, who now, during the crisis, are in the middle of selling the site to the French.

We shouldn't blame anyone either. Not for the decline in funding, nor reduced staffing number in the NHS. Not for the removal of protections suggested after the last epidemic hit to Britain which was WBM (within blogging memory).

I looked back to the H1N1 epidemic and noticed that there were various committees and papers produced, some of which seemed to make good sense. They are tricky to find because some of the key links have broken, so the material isn't where you'd expect to find it. For example, all of the papers and findings from the last wave were stored in a tidy grouping.

Unfortunately, the link to the helpfully named www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publichealth/Flu is now a 'link not found'. Still, with a little persistence, it is possible to trawl around the National Archives to find some of the original papers and lessons learned. However, not everyone has a Doctorate in Information Science, so the searches may prove rather difficult.

Thank goodness then, for the alternative link, which still works here: