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Boris Johnson’s ex-aide Dominic Cummings rips Britain’s coronavirus response, says PM ‘wanted to be infected with Covid-19 on live TV’
- Cummings accused Johnson’s government of failing the public by reacting too slowly to the spread of the coronavirus, leading to unnecessary deaths
- He said the prime minister regarded the pandemic ‘as just a scare story’ and health minister Hancock should have been fired for lying in meetings
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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser said his ex-boss failed in the Covid-19 crisis and ministers fell “disastrously short” of the standards the public had a right to expect during the most devastating global pandemic in decades.
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With almost 128,000 deaths, the United Kingdom has the world’s fifth worst official Covid-19 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, told lawmakers that the British government and Johnson’s Downing Street office was far to slow to spot the crisis.
The West, he said, failed to see the brewing crisis and that Johnson in early 2020 considered Covid a “scare story” like swine flu while many senior ministers, including the prime minister, were on holiday in February 2020, some skiing.
Such was Johnson’s scepticism that he even told officials he was considering getting the government’s chief medical adviser Chris Whitty to give him an injection of the novel coronavirus on live television to reassure the public, Cummings said.
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