Tory Health Secretary Matt Hancock blundered humiliatingly today when he tried to shift blame for the government’s decision to dump his and Johnson’s (and Cummings’s) deficient coronavirus contact-tracing app and switch to a generic version made available for Android and Apple phones on a worldwide problem that had also stymied “every other country”.
Hancock made his toe-curlingly embarrassing claim on the same day that Japan launched its own app that works fine on Apple and Android phones:
But Hancock was not only embarrassed by Japan’s competence. As the prestigious Nikkei Asian Review pointed out this week in an article on the Japanese launch, more than forty other countries already have their own app:
These countries appear to have been well aware of the obvious need to work with the creators of the two main smartphone operating systems and did so without pouring unknown sums of money into an abortive attempt to launch one via a company with close links to Boris Johnson’s chief adviser. In spite of this, Hancock was unable to say when the generic version would be up and running in the UK.
Of course, the BBC and others have so far failed to make any serious challenge to Hancock’s patent nonsense.
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