Ex-Johnson Adviser Paints Devastating Photograph Of Britain’s Pandemic Response : NPR

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Pandemic situations in the U.K. have improved a good deal, but the coronavirus has killed about 128,000 men and women there, which makes for a dying rate so extreme in the U.K. that it truly is a tiny larger even than the loss of life level in the United States. Critics of the pandemic reaction by Prime Minister Boris Johnson include things like one particular of his former top rated advisers. Here’s NPR’s Frank Langfitt.

FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: The former adviser, Dominic Cummings, instructed a parliamentary committee yesterday that mistakes by Johnson’s governing administration led to tens of 1000’s of deaths. Cummings reported initially Johnson dismissed the coronavirus as a scare story, and other people in his government failed to recognize its deadliness.

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DOMINIC CUMMINGS: The Cabinet secretary explained, Primary Minister, you should go on Television set tomorrow and demonstrate to men and women the herd immunity approach and that it really is like the previous rooster pox functions. We need folks to get this illness because that is how we get herd immunity by September. And I stated, Mark, you’ve got acquired to halt working with this chicken pox analogy. It really is not correct. And he claimed, why? And Ben Warner claimed, due to the fact chicken pox is not spreading exponentially and killing hundreds of hundreds of people.

LANGFITT: Ben Warner’s a knowledge scientist and federal government adviser. Cummings also explained Johnson resisted lockdowns for the reason that he feared harmful the financial state and said he would instead see, quotation, “bodies pile high” than put the nation into a third one.

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CUMMINGS: The variation that the BBC documented was precise.

Unknown Human being: And you read that.

CUMMINGS: I heard that in the prime minister’s research.

LANGFITT: Cummings concluded that Johnson was out of his depth.

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CUMMINGS: Fundamentally, I regarded him as unfit for the occupation, and I was trying to produce a composition all around him to consider and end what I considered were being really poor decisions and drive other items as a result of towards his needs.

LANGFITT: Confronted with the accusations in Britain’s Property of Commons yesterday, Johnson reported he considered Britons weren’t intrigued.

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Key MINISTER BORIS JOHNSON: What the people today of this country want us all to do is to get on with the sensitive small business now of trying to reopen our economic system, restore people’s freedoms, get back again to our way of lifetime by rolling out the vaccine.

LANGFITT: Such public accusations would be deadly to several politicians, but polls clearly show most people distrust Cummings. And Johnson has tested to be Teflon during his career. Frank Langfitt, NPR News, London.

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