Covid-19: Thousands died needlessly from UK pandemic response, says PM’s former aide

The government and senior officials fell “disastrously short” in their response to the covid-19 pandemic, the prime minister’s former chief aide has said.

In a lengthy session giving evidence to the parliamentary health and science select committees’ inquiry into lessons learnt from the pandemic on 26 May, Dominic Cummings acknowledged that thousands of people died needlessly as a result of the government’s mistakes.

Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser told MPs that the government had been too slow to get onto a “war footing” in January and February 2020, had no initial plan beyond herd immunity, and had been too slow to impose lockdowns in March and again in the autumn.

“The truth is that senior ministers, 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 told MPs. “When the public needed us most the government failed. I would like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that were made and for my own mistakes at that.”

Cummings was highly critical of the prime minister, who he said was “unfit for the job.” The former aide claimed that Johnson initially dismissed covid-19 as a “scare story” and was later reluctant to lock down again in September 2020 despite the clear evidence from the first wave.

“There’s this great misunderstanding people have that because it [covid] nearly killed him therefore he must have taken it seriously,” said Cummings. “But in fact, after the first lockdown, he was cross with me and others with what he regarded as basically pushing him into the first lockdown.”

Cummings was also scathing about the health secretary, Matt Hancock, whom he accused of lying on several occasions and said should have been fired.1

He called for the public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic to start as soon as possible. “Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die,” he said. “There’s absolutely no excuse for delaying [an inquiry]. A lot of the reasons for why that happened are still in place.”

Cummings later said that disagreements between himself and Johnson over the response to the pandemic ultimately led to Cummings’s departure from government. He said that Johnson was fixated on reopening the economy, regretted the first lockdown, and ignored advice from him, the chief scientific officer, and the chief medical officer to impose a “circuit breaker” lockdown last September when covid cases were surging.

“He didn’t think in July, or September, ‘Thank goodness we did the first lockdown, it was obviously the right thing to do.’ His argument then was, ‘We shouldn’t have done the first lockdown, and I’m not going to make the same mistake again,’” Cummings said.

He also confirmed that herd immunity was the government’s initial strategy in March 2020 before the first lockdown. Cummings said, “It was either herd immunity by September, or by January after a second peak. That was the assumption up until Friday 13 March. It was regarded as an unavoidable fact.”

He added, “The fundamental groupthink problem was being trapped in the idea that there was only a choice between herd immunity by September or herd immunity by January (2021), whereas in fact the right way of looking at it was: we can avoid both.”

Speaking at prime minister’s questions in response to Cummings’s claims, Johnson told MPs, “The handling of this pandemic has been one of the most difficult things this country has had to do for a very long time, and none of the decisions have been easy.

“To go into a lockdown is a traumatic thing for a country, to deal with a pandemic on this scale has been appallingly difficult, and we have at every stage tried to minimise loss of life, to save lives, to protect the NHS, and we have followed the best scientific advice that we can.”