Dominic Cummings to say PM said ‘Covid is only killing 80-year-olds’ to delay lockdown
Dominic Cummings will tomorrow tell a joint parliamentary committee that Boris Johnson justified delaying a second lockdown last autumn by saying “Covid is only killing 80-year-olds”.
The Prime Minister’s former aide will reportedly tell the meeting that Johnson said last September that he would not repeat March’s lockdown and that he said: “I’m going to be the mayor of Jaws, like I should have been in March.”
The explosive claim, reported by ITV, would come after Cummings tweeted over the weekend that the government’s initial plan was to let the UK get herd immunity, through mass Covid infection, instead of locking down the country.
Cummings said the plan only changed when health secretary Matt Hancock and the Cabinet Office realised this strategy meant “hundreds of thousands choking to death, no NHS for anybody for months, dead unburied and an econ (sic) implosion”.
Ministers denied that herd immunity was ever the plan on the weekend.
Cummings said it had been “very foolish and appalling ethics” by the government to deny that herd immunity was the strategy and that they were lying.
The Vote Leave mastermind will speak from 9.30am tomorrow for three hours about the government’s Covid response at a joint meeting of the health and science committees.
Here are three things to watch for.
March 2020
Sky News reported yesterday that the first hour of the committee meeting will be dedicated to the events of March 2020, with a flurry of questions expected about why it took the UK longer to lock down than other European countries.
Cummings has already started to reveal classified government documents that seem to suggest herd immunity was the initial plan for the UK’s Covid response and that the lockdown only happened after a U-turn due to media pressure.
He has tweeted pages of the documents that show different death counts in different scenarios, which he says indicates the UK’s plan was to shield over 70s and let the virus go through the rest of the population.
The former Johnson aide said this was the strategy to avoid a second peak during winter when the NHS is already usually stretched.
This would appear to chime with the Sir Patrick Vallance’s comments on 13 March that the UK’s strategy was to “reduce the peak of the epidemic, pull it down and broaden it” while protecting the elderly and vulnerable.
It came as other countries across Europe were locking down, while the UK was still telling people to go to work.
Second lockdown
Another hour of the committee meeting will be dedicated to the events surrounding the second lockdown last October.
Prior to the lockdown the government implemented a tiers system as cases began to surge across England, before Johnson finally implemented a second lockdown.
Cummings has said on multiple occasions now that the Prime Minister was very hesistant in calling a second lockdown and did everything he could to avoid it.
It is expected that Cummings will likely back these claims up with evidence in the committee meeting tomorrow.
Did Johnson say ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’?
The Telegraph reports that Cummings will be asked if whether Johnson said he would rather “see bodies piled high in their thousands” than implement a third lockdown.
The claim was made in the Daily Mail last month, with other media outlets also confirming the story.
Johnson stringently denies ever having said it.
Multiple MPs on the two committees told the Telegraph that someone will definitely ask if he heard Johnson make the comment, with one saying the question could prove “embarrassing for Boris and for Downing Street”.