Status: October 12, 2021 7:50 a.m.
A parliamentary report gives Great Britain Prime Minister Johnson a bad report: At the beginning of the pandemic, he had waited too long before a lockdown. The government’s approach was wrong and cost lives.
A parliamentary report has criticized British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the coronavirus. Delaying a lockdown at the start of the pandemic last year was “one of the greatest public health failures” in the country’s history, it says in the investigation report. The government’s “wrong” approach cost thousands of lives.
MEPs not only criticized the government for being late in imposing curfews on its own people – they also pointed out that Britain was very late in tightening its border controls. Accordingly, the government initially underestimated the corona virus and worked with the wrong models. The government course “should have been questioned more by everyone”.
“Major Early Mistake”
The government’s strategy in the first three months of the crisis echoed official scientific advice that widespread infection was inevitable as testing capacity was limited, there was no immediate prospect of a vaccine, and the public was unlikely to accept prolonged closures the report says. As a result, the government was simply trying to control the spread of the virus rather than trying to stop it altogether. This was a “serious early mistake” shared by the UK with many countries in Europe and North America.
However, the report’s authors also praise the government’s early focus on vaccines as the ultimate way out of the pandemic and their decision to invest in vaccine development.
Cummings also interrogated
Members of the Science Committee and the Health Committee in the UK House of Commons had heard numerous witnesses for their report, including former Health Secretary Matt Hancock and the controversial ex-advisor to Johnson, Dominic Cummings, who himself was charged with disregarding quarantine rules after his Covid illness was under criticism. An independent public investigation of the government’s corona policy is not expected to follow until next year.
The UK is one of the worst hit countries in Europe by the pandemic, with around 138,000 corona deaths. While numerous European governments had adopted corona measures such as lockdowns relatively early on, Johnson was only able to bring about them at the end of March 2020. Shortly thereafter, Johnson himself ended up in intensive care with a corona infection, and many of his cabinet colleagues and advisors became infected. At the time, his advisers had long circulated plans for a controlled “contamination” of the population.