Operation Moonshot - £100 billion currently shelved20 Mar 2021 09:21
(Published 16 September 2020)
Operation Moonshot: Testing plan relies on technology that does not exist
Delivering mass testing on the scale and level of ambition set by the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, will probably require “testing technology that currently does not exist,” say leaked documents revealed by The BMJ.1
The Operation Moonshot plans, which could see the government spend over £100bn to ensure 10 million covid-19 tests a day, show it’s likely that new testing technology would need to be developed, validated, procured, and made operational within months to meet the early 2021 deadline.
Jon Deeks, professor of biostatistics at the University of Birmingham and leader of the Cochrane Collaboration’s covid-19 test evaluation activities, has described the plan as a “nice dream.”
He told The BMJ, “This is not the way we should be tackling something when people are dying right now: thinking about things we have not got. We should be thinking about the things we have got and we know work. Backing a horse that hasn’t yet been born is a really bad strategy.”
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3585
(Published 23 October 2020)
The UK government has abandoned plans to spend £100bn on a massive expansion of its national testing programme, legal documents have shown.
A letter from government lawyers also reveals that the ambitious Operation Moonshot programme, first revealed in leaked documents seen by The BMJ last month, has now been quietly subsumed by the national test and trace programme.
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4112