Top UK civil servant wanted to run Covid ‘chicken pox parties’ in March 2020
Dominic Cummings has apologised for the UK’s slow response to the Covid-19 pandemic, while saying Boris Johnson did not take the virus seriously even in February 2020.
He said “senior officials and advisers such as me fell disastrously short” of expected standards during February and March of 2020 and that thousands died “unnecessarily”.
Johnson’s former top aide said that herd immunity was Downing Street’s strategy up until mid-March and that health secretary Matt Hanock lied when he said it was never the plan on 15 March 2020.
Cummings also said that Hancock “should have been fired for at least 15, 20 things including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly”.
Cummings told MPs this morning that the government was not spending much time on Covid-19 in January or February last year, saying that Boris Johnson saw it as a a “scare story” and “the new swine flu”.
He said other top Downing Street advisers “were literally skiing in the middle of February” and that “it wasn’t until the last week of February that there was any sense of urgency across the Cabinet Office”.
The Prime Minister reportedly said in February 2020: “I’m going to get Chris Whitty to inject me with Covid so everybody knows there’s nothing to be frightened of.”
Cummings is facing MPs on a joint session of parliament’s Health and Science committees in a marathon session.
Cummings has repeated his claim that the government’s plan was to not lock down hard, when the pandemic began, and was instead to prolong the first peak of Covid-19 in order to get herd immunity and avoid a second peak in winter 2020.
He said “Hancock himself and the chief scientific and medical officers were briefing journalists on the week of the 9th [March] that this is what the plan is”.
The former Number 10 aide said that “by the 11 and 12 [March] we’d already gone terribly wrong” and that he had began to call for a lockdown.
“Me and others realised the system was delaying [stricter Covid measures], because there’s not a proper plan in place,” he said.
“The justification was ‘it doesn’t matter if it’s now or in a week’s time’. The logic doesn’t work – these things are being delayed because there isn’t preparation and planning being made.”
More to follow.