• I WAS particularly struck by Dr Jonathan Fluxman’s view (February 22) on how there is a lack of trust in public health officials these days and how this was so disastrous in the way the pandemic was managed.

I was lucky to have been a GP in Camden & Islington in the early 1970s when we had a very active Medical Officer of Health, Dr Wilfred Harding. I was privileged to have had discussions with him.

MOHs had strong powers to make decisions in the interest of protecting the health of all the people in their communities. Examples in Camden and Islington were the provision of free condoms, long before the advent of HIV and AIDS, and the setting up of a drug dependency unit.

I am quite sure that Dr Harding would have had his eye on the emergence of a new virus in China in 2019 and its potential for spreading.

By the time the World Health Organisation declared that there was indeed a “public health emergency of international concern” in late January 2020 he would have already been making plans on how to protect Camden residents and deciding when to enact them. He had the legal powers to do this on public health grounds.

If this had happened all over the country it is very likely that local prompt containment of contagion would have lessened the severity of the pandemic and brought it to an end much earlier.

I think people would have listened to the advice and actions of trusted MOHs like Dr Harding and adhered to them. This is what public health services were set up to do for more than a hundred years.

The services have not been replaced and I am very concerned about the management of inevitable epidemics and pandemics in the future. They will happen.

ROBERT MacGIBBON FRCGP, NW5