‘The Guardian’ on Friday revealed on the basis of information received under the Right to Information Act (RTI) that ‘Exercise Alice’ was carried out in a very secret manner in 2016.
London. The British government conducted an exercise five years ago, the purpose of which was to assess the ill effects of Mars’ knock and find ways to deal with it. MERS is a respiratory infection, which develops due to exposure to ‘Mers-Cov’, a very deadly form of Coronavirus. ‘The Guardian’ made this disclosure on Friday on the basis of information received under the Right to Information Act.
According to the newspaper, ‘Exercise Alice’ was carried out in a very secretive manner in 2016. It was one of more than a dozen exercises on epidemic management in Britain for five years before the knock of Kovid-19. Apart from Public Health England (PHE), officials from the Department of Health and Social Welfare (DHSC) participated in this. The PHE had earlier declined to provide details related to the exercise, citing national security. Now the demand for making public the information of all the exercises is gaining momentum among the public.
A top UK infectious disease expert said ‘Exercise Alice’ was completely relevant in the wake of the Kovid-19 pandemic. Its blueprint was drawn on the basis of measures to be taken to prevent flu. But the details of the exercise not being made available to the major advisory committees are surprising.
October 2020, UK Health Minister Matt Hancock published a report on one such campaign ‘Exercise Cygnus’. He told the British Parliament that ‘Exercise Cygnus’ was designed keeping in mind the flu pandemic. Its goal was not to assess the risk of other potential epidemics and find ways to stop their spread.
