U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson volunteered to be injected with the coronavirus early in the pandemic to calm public fears about the new pathogen, according to his former adviser in a scathing indictment of the government’s early handling of the pandemic.
“The prime minister regarded this as just a scare story,” Johnson’s former senior adviser Dominic Cummings told British lawmakers on Wednesday, according to Reuters. He added that Johnson said he would allow chief medical officer Chris Witty “to inject me live on TV with coronavirus.”
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A couple of weeks after placing the country under lockdown, Johnson ended up contracting a nearly fatal case of the coronavirus in April 2020 and remained in the hospital for a week receiving oxygen treatments in the intensive care unit. His tone about the virus changed when he was discharged from the hospital on April 12. Johnson praised healthcare professionals in the United Kingdom’s publicly funded National Health Service healthcare system, saying: “I can’t thank them enough. I owe them my life.”
Cummings, who helped organize the 2016 Brexit campaign and masterminded Johnson’s landslide victory in 2019, said key government officials were woefully unprepared to deal with the new virus, with some having been on vacation at the onset of the pandemic early last year.
“It’s completely crackers that someone like me should have been there, just the same as it’s crackers that Boris Johnson was in there,” Cummings said.
He added that Matt Hancock, the health secretary, “should have been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody in multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet Room and publicly.”
BORIS JOHNSON DISCHARGED FROM HOSPITAL ON EASTER SUNDAY AFTER CORONAVIRUS TREATMENT
Johnson told members of Parliament on Wednesday that he will take “full responsibility for everything that has happened” and insisted that his government did everything it could to minimize the loss of life.
The U.K. has the world’s fifth-highest death toll due to COVID-19, with roughly 128,000 fatalities. The country’s vaccination rates, meanwhile, have picked back up in the past few weeks after a slight dip in the first week of May, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
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The latest vaccination rate in the U.K. is roughly 580,000 shots per day, putting it on track to immunize the majority of its population in another two months. To date, more than 56% of U.K. adults have received at least one dose of the Pfizer, Moderna, or Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines.