A consultant who lived through the 2014 West African outbreak has a blunt message for Britain’s pandemic planners. Speed matters. Money matters. And compassion matters more than you think.
Dr. James Mathews, a British surgeon who contracted Ebola while volunteering in Sierra Leone, has been briefing NHS emergency teams on the realities of viral catastrophe. His advice is not the sanitised version you will find in official guidance. It is the product of watching colleagues die and patients turned away.
“The first mistake is hesitation,” Mathews told a closed session of the UK’s pandemic response unit last week. Sources present confirm he was emphatic. “You wait for perfect data, you wait for political approval, meanwhile the virus is already three steps ahead. Speed is the only currency that matters.”
His second point was equally blunt. Cash. “Everyone talks about triage and protocols. But without money for beds, for protective gear, for paying staff hazard wages, those protocols are just paper. The government needs to open the cheque book before it opens the hospitals.”
Mathews’ experience is not abstract. He spent weeks in an isolation unit in Freetown, fighting a virus with a 50 per cent mortality rate. He saw the system fail. He saw how lack of resources turned treatable patients into corpses. He knows that the difference between containment and catastrophe is often measured in days and dollars.
But his most striking observation concerned the human element. “Compassion is not a luxury. It is operational. If you treat patients like numbers, they will not trust you. They will hide symptoms. They will flee. You have to show you care, even when you are exhausted and terrified. That is what stops a virus from spreading.”
The warning comes as Britain accelerates its pandemic preparedness following the COVID-19 inquiry. Official documents, obtained by this paper, show that the government’s draft response plan still lacks specific funding commitments for surge capacity. Mathews’ advice suggests that is a dangerous oversight.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health declined to comment on the briefing but said the government was “learning lessons from past outbreaks.” That is precisely what Mathews fears: learning too slowly.
His final words to the team were a prediction. “The next big one is coming. Maybe not Ebola, maybe something airborne. When it hits, you will not have time to argue about budgets. You will have to move fast, spend hard, and keep your humanity. Or you will fail.”
Sources confirm Mathews is now advising a private group of NHS clinicians who are drafting their own contingency plans. They do not trust Whitehall to act in time. And given what he has seen, who can blame them?
