Covid: Thousands died who didn't need to die, says Dominic Cummings
Thousands of people died needlessly as a result of government mistakes in the handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
The PM's former chief aide said Boris Johnson had initially dismissed Covid as a "scare story" and said the UK had been too slow to lock down.
And he claimed Health Secretary Matt Hancock had lied on multiple occasions and should have been fired.
"Tens of thousands of people died, who didn't need to die," said Mr Cummings.
In a marathon evidence session, which is still going on, Mr Cummings said: "The truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this."
He added: "I would like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that were made and for my own mistakes at that."
Mr Johnson hit back at some of his allegations at Prime Minister's Questions, insisting that the government's priority had always been to "save lives".
Mr Cummings - who was forced out of Number 10 at the end of last year after an internal power struggle - said it was "crackers" that he and Mr Johnson had been in charge, claiming "thousands of people" could have provided better leadership than the PM, or his then Labour rival Jeremy Corbyn.
He likened the management of government officials and those on the front line during the crisis to "lions" being "led by donkeys".
In a series of explosive claims, Mr Cummings said:
- The government was not on a "war footing" in February 2020 as the global crisis mounted, with the PM on holiday and "lots of key people were literally skiing"
- Mr Johnson initially thought Covid-19 was just a "scare story" and the "new swine flu"
- The PM had offered to "get Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV" to show there was nothing to fear from the virus
- Mr Johnson had never wanted tougher border controls to prevent the spread of the virus, as he wanted to be like the mayor in film Jaws, who kept beaches open despite the threat of a killer shark
Mr Cummings is being questioned by the Health and Science select committees for their inquiry into "lessons learnt" on the government's response to the pandemic.
Care homes
The former adviser reserved his most savage criticism for Matt Hancock, claiming the health secretary should have been fired for "15 to 20" different things - accusing him of "criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm".
He said he had called on Mr Johnson to sack Mr Hancock, calling him "completely incapable of doing the job".
The prime minister had been furious when he came back to work after recovering from coronavirus to find that untested patients had been discharged to care homes in England, thereby allowing the virus to spread, Mr Cummings claimed.
Both he and the PM been told "categorically in March that people will be tested before they went back to care homes".
Subsequent government claims about putting a "shield" around care homes were "complete nonsense", he said.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer quoted Mr Cummings at Prime Minister's Questions, as he called on the PM to apologise for his "complacency" at the start of the pandemic, which he said had led to "needless deaths".
He also asked Mr Johnson if - as Mr Cummings has claimed - he had delayed a lockdown in autumn last year because "Covid was only killing 80-year-olds".
The PM did not respond to this allegation but he insisted the government's had tried at every stage to "save lives".
'Lost faith'
"The handling of this pandemic has been one of the most difficult things this country has had to do for a very long time and none of the decisions have been easy," he said.
"To go into a lockdown is a traumatic thing for a country, to deal with a pandemic on this scale has been appallingly difficult, and we have at every stage tried to minimise loss of life, to save lives, to protect the NHS and we have followed the best scientific advice that we can."
Sir Keir asked the PM whether Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill had told Mr Johnson he had "lost faith" in the honesty of Mr Hancock - one of the claims from Mr Cummings in his evidence to the committee.
Mr Johnson replied: "The answer to that is no."
He added that he had not seen Mr Cummings' evidence to the select committee.
More than 127,000 people diagnosed with coronavirus have died in the UK since the start of the pandemic.
Earlier, Mr Cummings tweeted a picture of a whiteboard on which the government's "plan B" for the first wave of the virus was sketched out.
He told the MPs the original plan had been for limited intervention, with the hope of achieving "herd immunity", but that was abandoned when it became clear the scale of the death toll that would result.
The government had been operating under the "false" assumption that people would reject a lockdown and there had been no "proper scrutiny" of decisions taken by the Sage committee of scientists, Mr Cummings said.
A meeting of the government's emergency Cobra committee on 12 March had been disrupted by US President Donald Trump wanting to start a "bombing campaign" against Iraq, Mr Cummings said.
At the same time, he added, Mr Johnson's partner Carrie Symonds was "going crackers" about a "completely trivial" story in the Times regarding the dog she co-owned with the prime minister.
Mr Cummings said he was "completely baffled" as to why Downing Street has tried to deny that herd immunity was the official plan early last year.
"It's not that people were thinking this is a good thing and we actively want it, it's that it's a complete inevitability and the only real question it's one of timing, it's either one of herd immunity by September or it's herd immunity by January after a second peak."
The UK went into lockdown on 23 March last year, amid spiralling infection rates.
Some 72% of the adult population has had one Covid vaccine jab and 44% has had two doses.
May 27, 2021 at 02:21AM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57253578
Labels: BBC News
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