British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday rejected criticism from his former adviser Dominic Cummings, saying he did not accept Cummings’ accusation that government inaction led to unnecessary deaths.
Asked by opposition leader Keir Starmer whether he accepted the central allegations of Cummings’ testimony to a parliamentary committee, Johnson said “No.”
He said: “The handling of this pandemic has been one of the most difficult things this country’s had to do for a very long time but none of the decisions have been easy.
“To go into a lockdown is a traumatic thing for a country, to deal with a pandemic on the scale has been appallingly difficult, and we’ve at every stage tried to minimise loss of life, to save lives and protect the NHS, and we have followed the best scientific advice that we can.”
Earlier, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser said the government failed in the COVID-19 crisis and fell “disastrously short” of the standards the public had a right to expect during the most devastating global pandemic in decades.
With almost 128,000 deaths, the United Kingdom has the world’s fifth worst official COVID toll, and Johnson was slow to appreciate the significance of the threat from the virus in early 2020 as it spread from China towards Britain’s shores.
Dominic Cummings, the strategist behind the 2016 Brexit campaign and Johnson’s landslide election win in 2019, began giving evidence to British lawmakers on the lessons that can be learned from the pandemic.
Cummings, who left the government late last year, has said the British health ministry was a “smoking ruin”, that Western governments failed during the crisis, and that the secretive British state was woefully unprepared for the pandemic.
“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,” Cummings told lawmakers.
“When the public needed us most, the government failed,” he said. “I think it’s obvious that the Western world, including Britain, just completely failed to see the smoke until the alarm bells in January, there’s no doubt about it.”
Cummings, played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the film “Brexit: The Uncivil War”, casts the British state as an outdated system run by incompetent amateurs who are resistant to any innovation that would bring them closer to the modern world.
British officials, he said, failed to learn the early COVID lessons from Asia, were resistant to new ideas from young scientists, overly secretive, overly bureaucratic and lacked any real scrutiny from a compliant domestic media.
Asked about Cummings’ criticism, Johnson’s spokesman said: “At all times we have been guided by the data and the latest evidence we had.”
In a series of investigations, Reuters has reported how the British government made several errors: it was slow to spot the infections arriving, it was late with a lockdown and it continued to discharge infected hospital patients into care homes.
The government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, said in March 2020 that 20,000 deaths would be a good outcome. Soon after, a worst-case scenario prepared by government scientific advisers put the possible death toll at 50,000. The toll is now close to 128,000.
Johnson has admitted that mistakes were made and that lessons need to be learned, but his ministers say they were working at pace in the biggest public health crisis in a century.
Johnson has pointed to Britain’s vaccination programme as a success that will allow the economy to rebound before its peers.
Britain has the world’s fifth fastest vaccination programme, based on shots per 100 people, behind the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Bahrain and Chile.
Following are the main charges Cummings made against Johnson’s government to a parliamentary committee.
GOVERNMENT FAILURE
Cummings accused Johnson’s government of failing the public by reacting too slowly to the spread of the novel coronavirus, leading to unnecessary deaths.
“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.”
“And I’d 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.”
UNPREPARED
“Number 10 was not operating on a war footing in February on (COVID) in any way shape or form. Lots of key people were literally skiing in the middle of February.
“It wasn’t until the last week of February that there was really any sort of sense of urgency I would say … in terms of Number 10 and cabinet.”
LATE TO LOCKDOWN
Cummings said Johnson was told on March 14, 2020, he needed to implement a lockdown, but the government did not have a plan.
“On the 14th we said to the prime minister: ‘you are going to have to lockdown’ – but there is no lockdown plan, it doesn’t exist,” Cummings said.
He quoted Helen MacNamara, former deputy cabinet secretary, as saying “we are absolutely fucked … I think we’re going to kill thousands of people”.
Johnson announced a lockdown on March 23.
DOWNPLAYING THE NEW “SWINE FLU”
Cummings accused Johnson of playing down the threat of the pandemic, saying the prime minister regarded it as just another scare story and that the prime minister offered to be injected with COVID-19 live on television.
“The basic thought was that in February the prime minister regarded this as just a scare story … he described it as the new swine flu,” Cummings said.
“The view of various officials inside number 10 was if we have the prime minister chairing COBR (civil contingencies committee) meetings and he just tells everyone it’s swine flu, don’t worry about it, and I’m going to get (Britain’s Chief Medical Officer) Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus … that would … not help.”
HERD IMMUNITY
Cummings accused the health ministry of believing that so-called herd immunity was inevitable because if the government moved to try to suppress the spread of the coronavirus during the summer of last year, it would only rear its head again in the winter putting the health service under strain.
So, in March last year the government was aiming to establish “herd immunity”, where the virus spreads through the population to increase overall resistance, by September, he said, adding no one thought it was a “good thing”.
He also said the cabinet secretary called on the prime minister to go on television and explain herd immunity by describing it “like the old chicken pox parties”.
The government has repeatedly said that “herd immunity has never been a policy aim or part of our coronavirus strategy”.
SECRECY
Cummings described the secrecy surrounding decisions made by a grouping of top scientific advisers to the government as a “catastrophic mistake”.
“I think there’s absolutely no doubt at all that the process by which (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) SAGE (took decisions) was secret, and overall the whole thinking around the strategy was secret, was an absolutely catastrophic mistake because it meant there wasn’t proper scrutiny,” he said.
He said the process of deciding how to tackle the spread of coronavirus in the early days was “closed”, describing it as a “group think bubble” that struggled to change course.
HEALTH MINISTER “LIES”
Cummings said health minister Matt Hancock should have been fired for “lying” in government meetings on COVID-19.
“I think that the Secretary of State for Health (Hancock), should have been fired for at least 15, 20 things including lying to everybody in multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly,” Cummings told a parliamentary committee.
He listed two occasions when he believed Hancock had lied, including when the health minister told Johnson and Cummings that the situation with PPE (personal protective equipment) was fine when, Cummings said, the government did not have enough.
The health ministry gave no immediate comment to the charge.
Photo: Former special advisor to the British Prime Minister, Dominic Cummings. EPA-EFE/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA
