Covid cost-cutting will put blinkers on our best Covid research

Analysis: several world-leading studies to guide future Covid care depend on widespread testing now threatened by government cuts

After a bruising two years in which the UK failed to prove its resilience to a pandemic, the government hopes to re-cast the nation as a scientific superpower: a country that has built on the lessons of the crisis to deliver better research, more precision healthcare, and a more streamlined pathway to new drugs and vaccines.

But the government's decision to substantially cut back on free Covid testing, as part of Boris Johnson's living with Covid" strategy, already threatens to undermine pioneering trials and coronavirus surveillance that are the envy of other nations. Together, they are crucial for understanding how drugs keep patients out of hospital, how immunity is holding up in vulnerable care homes and hospitals and how the epidemic is unfolding around us.