AN EMERGENCY urgent care task force is needed to tackle waiting times for key ailments, according to the epidemiologist Professor Carl Heneghan.

Professor Heneghan, director of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, also slammed the Government for wasting billions during the Covid pandemic.

Asked about the current increase in Strep A infections, he told GB News: “What’s concerning is the number of deaths we’ve heard – the six deaths in children is very high and that’s a major concern right now.

“There are three issues that play into that. One is that parents need to be aware of what’s going on and understand if their child’s unwell, particularly if they have anxiety, that the child must be seen, and must be seen face to face. I have concerns about the 111 system because all across the board I hear people saying it’s difficult to get through, the delays are significant.

“And then third, I think just like we had a vaccine task force right now we need an emergency urgent care task force to get on top of this problem.

“I am incredibly concerned as we go into December…I get why people need pay strikes, the nurses, the ambulance drivers do a great job, but this is not the time right now to go on strike, given the system is in such a state.

“We need to have more resources and more staffing in those urgent care settings to fit some of these issues because it’s important if your child is unwell and you’ve got a group A strep, you need to be seen within an hour – not within a day, a couple of days because that’s where it goes wrong.”

He was commenting in the wake of a report that ministers “shrugged off” a projection which indicated that 820,000 people could die of Covid.

Speaking to Philip Davies and Esther McVey, Professor Heneghan continued: “You said there is no money. Well, there was some money, that was £370 billion and actually we threw it away in the pandemic and now we’re paying the consequences of that.

“A whole raft of problems occurred, such as an 80% increase in the number of referrals to child and adolescent mental health. Huge impact, but you know what, at the time, nobody cared.

“In addition, when we did go into lockdown, people didn’t say look, we’ve got to come out of this as quickly as we can, because of the huge societal impact, the impact on the economy, well being and all of this was ignored.

“Therefore, what I think happening now is people are taking defensive positions. And the problem with that is we’re going to learn nothing.

“And that to me is a huge missed opportunity and I am concerned about the direction of travel that we’re not prepared to say we made a lot of mistakes. We need to do something differently, particularly next time.”