In a tragic attempt to convert a UK failure into a Scottish Government one, Hannah Rodger writes:
THOUSANDS of masks have had to be destroyed by Scottish health boards after they were found to be disintegrating and a health hazard. The masks, which are understood to be more than a decade old, were sent to frontline staff in March.
With Miles Briggs and Anas Sarwar then given space for an opportunistic rant and the regular Jean Freeman reference, you have to then read between her lines to get the actual news.
These masks came from a UK-wide PPE stockpile, handled by Medline, based in Illinois and in the ‘English West Midlands’. They are a subsidiary of Cardinal Health based in Dublin.
The 2021 expiry dates stuck over earlier ones would have been added in the warehouse in England, by staff of a US corporation, making profits out of PPE, before distribution directly to Scottish doctors. This is a UK-wide scheme. There is no Scottish intermediary re-labelling PPE to deceive doctors. Jeane Freeman has no part in this.
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
John you are ware of the testing call-centre story.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jul/19/potential-covid-19-cluster-being-tracked-in-north-lanarkshire
I read it in the Guardian. My first thought, which NHS and why is it a private company?
Same for BBC although it seems that they actually changed it to disguise which NHS it was.
It was English and comments on the BBC twitter assure me, it doesn’t matter.
You have to go to the Independent to find that out
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-cluster-outbreak-lanarkshire-test-trace-nhs-scotland-a9627366.html
And the Guardian wonder why people are abandoning it.
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Even with the Independent article you have to know that The Department of Health and Social Care is English. It doesn’t tell the reader.
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Yes
Couldn’t really write about it for lack of info
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According to the report about this in The Herald the call centre is carrying out work on contact tracing for Public Health England. If that is the case then the contract to carry out that work was given to Serco if I remember correctly
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The Guardian calls it Sitel
who
‘As a global leader in CX management, we deliver more than 3.5 million experiences every day’.
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That’s no way to run a stockpile. The stockpile shouldn’t be a big heap of stuff slowly disintegrating. It should be a dynamic buffer between manufacturers and end-users, constantly cycled and kept up to date using first in, first out. But I suppose that’s more expensive.
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PPE national stockpile. The storage of the national stockpile of PPE has a chequered history to put it mildly. It has been moved various times before coming to rest in it’s current, purpose-built location. The warehouse where it was stored before its last move did not have an electricity supply so had to rely on generators. It also went on fire at one point and was found to contain asbestos.
The UK government owned the stock of PPE but outsourced the storage and care of the stock to a private company which subsequently went through a whole series of changes of ownership.
Channel 4 news did several in-depth stories about the stock including how out of date much of it was. The Guardian also covered the story
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/22/revealed-private-firm-running-uk-ppe-stockpile-was-sold-in-middle-of-pandemic
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More on the PPE supply – where it was stored and the chaos surrounding its distribution
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/coronavirus-uk-privately-run-ppe-stockpile-chaos-movianto
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If the supplier was based in the “English West Midlands” and was on a contract with the UK Dept of Health then, I assume that such PPE was also distributed to health professionals in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. So, why has the Herald focussed on SCOTTISH health boards?
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I’m old enough to remember when The Herald was the Glasgow Herald and had decent standards to go with some excellent journalists.
Now it’s just a pro-Westminster/anti-Scottish rant sheet spreading disinformation and propaganda.
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The very latest on UK Gov and its woeful arrangement of PPE
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/20/revealed-nhs-denied-ppe-at-height-of-covid-19-as-supplies-sent-to-china-coronavirus
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Slightly to the side, but relating to today’s Guardian: there was no mention anywhere in today’s edition of Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales, other than in an editorial about the electoral system in England, in which it mentioned the three nations.
There were plenty of mentions of ‘the nation’, ‘the country’ and UK, but the context was always about some part of England. There were two articles about Ireland, but these were about Eire.
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Reading this is totally jaw dropping, and thoroughly sickening it really is.
This should be shouted from the rooftops in the ‘news’ in Scotland, that English companies covered over the BB dates and sent the masks to doctors in Scotland. We know it won’t be though, which is the scary part as well.
If this was anywhere else else it would be reoprted as a scandal at best and criminal at worst!
So angry.
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ArtyHetty,
I mentioned in one of my posts above that CH4 news had covered this in some depth on at least two occasions. Here is a link to their most recent report
https://www.channel4.com/news/safety-fears-over-85-million-masks-and-respirators
There is really no excuse for Scottish journalists not knowing about this and reporting it fully rather than reporting it in such a way as to suggest it only happened in Scotland and the SG were to blame.
What happened with the stocks of PPE was truly criminal
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One of the main reasons for Brexit was to remove as many employees’ and consumers’ rights as possible. The media always report this a ‘slashing red tape’. So, clearly the UK Government and this US company are behaving as if all these rights have already been removed.
I remember several decades ago when a Nestle formula milk product was banned in the first world, because it was actually leading to vitamin deficiencies in babies. So, did Nestle adjust the formula to improve nutritional standards? Of course not, They started marketing it aggressively in Africa, Asia and South America.
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Excellent exposure of this insidious political propaganda piece, the scandal beneath has featured in the the media elsewhere, so there is no earthly way the Herald would have been unaware of it, propaganda by omission.
As @anandprasad commented above, it took quite a bit of digging past all the deliberate verbal camouflage to figure out who Sitel were engaged by, yet another tiresome slant for propaganda purposes rather than news presentation.
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