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Time to end the Sars blame game

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A desire to find fault and apportion blame has, from the outset, driven the Legco inquiry into Sars. And it has lived up to these expectations. Now, it is time for the finger-pointing to end - and for Hong Kong to move on.

In the report, released yesterday, the select committee took five senior health officials to task for various mistakes made during last year's outbreak.

The main conclusions - with one notable exception - come as no surprise. It has been obvious all along that if anyone was to be blamed for mishandling the outbreak, then certain senior officials would be in the firing line. We did not need an eight-month inquiry, 73 witnesses and a report running to more than 400 pages to tell us who they were.

Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food Yeoh Eng-kiong was criticised for not being sufficiently alert in the early stages, sending mixed messages to the public and for failing in his monitoring role.

The performance of the then director of health, Margaret Chan Fung Fu-chun, was also found to be unsatisfactory. The committee said she too should have been quicker to recognise the danger signals when atypical pneumonia struck Guangdong, and had wrongly delayed listing Sars as a disease covered by quarantine laws.

Hospital Authority chairman Leong Che-hung does not escape. He was held responsible, among other things, for the decision to make Princess Margaret Hospital a designated centre for Sars treatment - with the result that its staff were overstretched and services overwhelmed.

More surprising is the conclusion that Tung Chee-hwa deserves praise for his commander-in-chief role. Mr Tung is given credit for making Sars the government's top priority and for being prepared to consider 'drastic measures' to halt the spread of the disease.

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