UK govt had 'no sense of urgency' on COVID, says PM's ex-advisor

Nation discards 'viable' crisis management for 'political and technical' considerations

Prime Minister Boris Johnson's former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, said he and the leadership had "disastrously failed the British public" with their initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic and that a lockdown should have been implemented earlier, but there was "no plan" for it.

In several hours of evidence given to members of Parliament in a joint hearing of the Commons Health and Science and Technology committees on Wednesday, Cummings was asked about key decisions that were taken to deal with the threat of COVID-19 during his time in government.

Among multiple allegations made, he said "achieving herd immunity" without vaccination "was regarded as an unavoidable fact" in the official planning for the pandemic, the BBC reported.

Until the end of February 2020, the United Kingdom government had "no sense of urgency" around the threat of the COVID-19 disease, he said, adding that the prime minister had dismissed it as a "scare story".

Cummings said he first texted the Health Secretary Matt Hancock on Jan 25, about "pandemic preparation", and had first raised it with Johnson in the first half of January. He said the nation was not on a "war footing" in February.

His comments were deeply critical of Johnson's initial response to the crisis, including that the prime minister was in February willing to "get injected with coronavirus on TV" as he was so skeptical over its threat and that he regarded it as the new "swine fl u".

The experience of China in January and February with the disease outbreak was "essentially discarded by the system", for "political and technical" reasons, he said.

It meant the way East Asia was handling the crisis was not considered a "viable" option for the UK, he said, adding that this did not change until after the critical week in mid-March when crucial decisions were finally made that would lead to implementing a lockdown.

He added: "I deeply regret that I didn't hit the emergency panic button earlier than I did. Senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of what the public expects during a crisis like this."

According to Cummings, Johnson was only convinced in an official meeting on March 14 by science advisers that the country would need to lockdown.

He said it was only then that leadership acknowledged that "advice on herd immunity was wrong, and that a plan B was needed".

This was six weeks after the UK's first case and six weeks after the World Health Organization alarm was raised. The problem was, Cummings said, that the government "didn't have a plan" for such a lockdown. He said it was obvious "in retrospect" that the UK should have locked down in the first week of March. The UK eventually went into lockdown on March 23, amid spiraling infection rates.

Cummings said the Health Secretary Matt Hancock "should have been fired" for lying in government meetings on COVID-19, adding that Hancock was "completely wrong" in suggesting herd immunity was never part of the government's original plan. He said Hancock "lied in meetings" about the nation's preparedness to deal with the virus.

As the hearing continued, Johnson faced questions in the House of Commons from opposition leader Keir Starmer, who asked if the prime minister agreed with Cummings' view that the government had failed in its handling of the pandemic.

Johnson said the government acted "with the intention of saving lives" and that it had followed "best advice". He said he took "full responsibility" and was "truly sorry" for the suffering people have endured. He said "people deserve daylight to be shone on all the issues" and that he has set up an independent inquiry for this purpose.

Earlier in the day, Cabinet minister Grant Shapps dismissed Cummings' forthcoming appearance as a "sideshow" suggesting the former adviser had "his own agenda".

Transport Secretary Shapps acknowledged mistakes were made. He said: "There's no rulebook, there's no textbook to open and see how to deal with a pandemic, the last time the world faced anything like this was 100 years ago with Spanish fl u. It's easy to be professors of hindsight."

Shapps said that the government had "got it right" on the "very big calls" like the vaccine program and developing mass testing.