Operation Moonshot was a UK government programme to introduce same-day mass testing for COVID-19 in England as a way of enabling large gatherings of people to take place in that country while maintaining control over the virus.
Within the operation, a number of semi-independent teams were established at pace to develop and evaluate COVID-19 technologies that at the time were essentially experimental and unproven.
Johnson suggested that mass testing would be a way to allow sports and entertainment venues to reopen again following their closure at the beginning of the pandemic, and for the possibility of people to gather for Christmas parties.
[10] A pilot scheme was announced for indoor and outdoor events in Salford, Greater Manchester, set to begin in October, with plans for a national rollout after that.
[16] Plans envisaged weekly tests of up to 10% of the population of England, using millions of 30-minute saliva kits made by the company Innova, "to help control localised outbreaks".
"[17] Several private sector firms were signed up to the programme, including GSK for the provision of tests, AstraZeneca for laboratory capacity, and Serco and G4S for storage and logistics.
[2] A legal letter by government lawyers responding to a bid by the Good Law Project to scrutinise the amounts of government money paid to private contractors said: "The proposal referred to in the Project Moonshot Briefing Pack was developed alongside the existing NHS Test and Trace programme of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
The substance of the proposal referred to in the Project Moonshot Briefing Pack has since been subsumed within NHSTT, reflecting the fast-moving and constantly evolving policy requirements in the field of testing.
[15] Opposition politicians, including Jonathan Ashworth, the Shadow Secretary of State for Health, questioned the programme's feasibility when the system was already struggling to cope with the volume of tests required of it.
[28] Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, wondered what parliamentary scrutiny there would be on spending.
Deloitte and a slew of commercial companies are being contracted to deliver them under Operation Moonshot, a plan to ramp up tests to 10 million a day, at a cost of £100 billion – 70 per cent of the annual NHS budget for England.
[1] A paper published by SAGE suggested the programme could lead to 41% of the UK population having to self-isolate needlessly within six months due to false positives, and warned of potential school closures and workers' losing their wages through incorrect test results.
"[33][36] Angela Raffle and Mike Gill, writing in the British Medical Journal in April 2021, called the UK's mass screening approach "a misguided policy, unlikely to reduce transmission", arguing that people might be "tempted" to use home kits rather than go for the more sensitive PCR test, leaving them "falsely reassured".
[3][37] Academics seeing the leaked documents expressed concern about the apparent lack of input "from scientists, clinicians, and public health and testing and screening experts.