Recommendations were omitted from PHE’s report on BAME risks when it was published on 2nd June.
Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch told the Commons last week that PHE “did not make recommendations because they were not able to do so”.
However, Raj Bhopal, Edinburgh University emeritus professor of public health, told the BBC he’d been asked to peer-review a report that was marked ‘official-sensitive’ with the title: ‘Beyond the Data: Understanding the Impact of Covid-19 on Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Communities’.
Doctors’ Association UK (DAUK) has accused the Government of censoring expert conclusions.
In a letter to the Prime Minister, DAUK Chair Dr Rinesh Parmar, wrote: “By withholding the information in the report, it dismisses or attempts to spin the potential systemic and structural influences that may predispose higher BAME mortality. In doing this your government is inadvertently supporting a tenet of structural racism – telling BAME communities what they can and cannot handle by policing what they should and should not know.”
