London (Parliament Politics Maganize) – Throughout the coronavirus epidemic, Boris Johnson has maintained he did not adopt a “let it rip” approach. He testified for the Covid investigation, saying that he had presented counterarguments at meetings to subvert the consensus.
He said that by taking action, he was able to stop the virus from spreading across the population. In the fall of 2020, when the number of cases started to rise once more, he also denied the claim that he moved too slowly.
He refuted claims made on his second day of evidence before the inquiry that he was hesitant to lock down a second time because he was willing to let older adults pass away in order to maintain the economy. He branded the proposal “rubbish” and stated that his goal had been to “save human life at all ages” in a tetchy argument.
Johnson’s Inquiry
This week, Mr. Johnson has been questioned for about ten hours. He has apparently spent hours preparing with his government-funded inquiry attorneys, and he has sent in a 233-page witness statement. Protesters disrupted his first day of hearing on Wednesday. On both days, they staged protests outside the inquiry building, holding up images of loved ones who had passed away and jeering him as he left.
On his second day of testimony, Mr. Johnson addressed the fall of 2020, when he was allegedly too sluggish to reinstate limitations following a spike in instances. During one conversation, he was given passages from the diaries of Sir Patrick Vallance, who was then the government’s principal scientific advisor.
Sir Patrick Says
According to Sir Patrick, in an October post, Mr. Johnson had advocated for “letting it all rip,” citing that any victims had “reached their time anyway” and “had good innings.”
He shook his head and was heard muttering “honestly” under his breath when the chief lawyer for the investigation stated that he was reluctant to reimpose limits in the autumn because of these “secretly held” opinions. “The implication that you’re trying to draw from those conversations is completely wrong,” he said.
“My position was that we had to save human life at all ages.”If you look at what we actually did, never mind the accounts that you have culled from people’s jottings from meetings… if you look at what we actually did, we went into lockdown as soon as we could. “I had to question the meeting’s consensus.”
“A lot of what has been reported is incorrect, and there are words that are described to me that I simply don’t recognize,” Mr. Johnson said after expressing remorse for the “hurt and offense” that some of his language had caused. He gave an explanation of how he spoke “in an unpolished way” in order to let people “speak freely.”
The government-sponsored Eat Out to Help Out program, which offers discounts to patrons to entice them to return to restaurants once they reopen, was another topic of discussion with Mr. Johnson. He stated there was no indication that the measure “made a big difference” in the infection rate after it was adopted and that it was not considered a “gamble” at the time.
Conflicting data exists over whether the initiative actually helped spread the virus, and a spike in cases in the UK coincided with increases in other European nations without the program. The investigation also viewed excerpts from Sir Patrick’s journals, one of which stated: “Wales very high – PM says ‘it is the singing and the obesity I never said that.”
The purported comment against Wales that surfaced in an entry dated September 11, 2020, was not questioned by Mr. Johnson. Although he remained relatively composed during the hearing, the former prime minister fiercely defended himself against claims that he was indifferent to the suffering of others throughout the epidemic. He started crying and talked about his stay in intensive care following his COVID-19 infection.
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Becky Kummer Says,
Mr. Johnson “failed to take the pandemic seriously in early 2020, leaving us brutally unprepared, and failed to learn from his mistakes, meaning that the second wave had an even higher death toll than the first,” according to Becky Kummer, a spokesman for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK. “He delayed for fear of how it might impact his reputation with certain sections of the press.
Many lessons from the pandemic might save lives in the future, but one of them is undoubtedly that someone as self-serving as Boris Johnson is not fit for power.”