Boris Johnson Wanted to Be Injected With the Coronavirus on Live TV to Show it Wasn’t a Big Deal: Top Aide
A former top aide to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is making bombshell claims about the government’s coronavirus response — namely, the bizarre degree to which Johnson downplayed Covid-19 in the early part of 2020.
In shocking testimony before a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, Dominic Cummings — the former chief adviser to the prime minister — admitted that the British government’s response to the coronavirus was wholly unacceptable.
“The truth is that senior minister, senior officials, senior advisers like me, fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its Government in a crisis like this,” Cummings said. “When the public needed us most, the government failed.”
At the center of that disastrous response, Cummings said, was Johnson — who believed the virus was much ado about nothing, comparing it derisively to swine flu. The prime minister’s cavalier attitude towards the virus was such, according to Cummings, that Johnson wanted England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, to inject him with Covid-19 on live TV just so he could show that it wasn’t a big deal.
“The view of various officials inside Number Ten was, if we have the Prime Minister chairing Cobra meetings and he just tells everyone “It is swine flu, don’t worry about it, I’m going to get Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus, so everyone realizes it is nothing to be to be frightened of,’ that would be, that would not help actually serious planning,” Cummings said.
Johnson later contracted the virus and was, at one point, moved to intensive care, before making a full recovery.
Cummings — who resigned in November 2020 — relayed comments made by deputy cabinet secretary Helen McNamara, who Cummings referred to as “the second most powerful official in the country.” McNamara, according to Cummings, told the prime minister that there was no plan to fight the virus.
“I think we are absolutely fucked,” Cummings said, quoting McNamara. “I think this country is heading for a disaster.”
Watch above, via the BBC.
