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 With almost 128,000 deaths, the United Kingdom has the world's fifth
worst official COVID-19 toll, and Johnson was slow to appreciate the
significance of the threat from the virus in early 2020 as it spread
from China towards Britain's shores.
Dominic Cummings, the strategist behind the 2016 Brexit campaign and
Johnson's landslide election win in 2019, told lawmakers that the
British government and Johnson's Downing Street office was far to
slow to spot the crisis.
The West, he said, failed to see the brewing crisis and that Johnson
in early 2020 considered COVID a "scare story" like swine flu while
many senior ministers, including the prime minister, were on holiday
in February 2020, some skiing.
Such was Johnson's skepticism that he even told officials he was
considering getting the government's chief medical advisor Chris
Whitty to give him an injection of the novel coronavirus on live
television to reassure the public, Cummings said.
"The prime minister regarded this as just a scare story," Cummings
said, adding the view of officials was Johnson's attitude was "don't
worry about it and I'm going to get Chris Whitty to inject me live
on TV with coronavirus".
"When the public needed us most, the government failed," Cummings
told lawmakers. "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, who left government after falling out with Johnson in late
2020, apologised to the families of the dead for his own mistakes
and the mistakes of the British government.
COVID CRISIS
Cummings, played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the film "Brexit: The
Uncivil War", casts the British state as an outdated system run by
incompetent amateurs who are resistant to any innovation that would
bring them closer to the modern world.
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 British officials, he said,
failed to learn the early COVID lessons from
Asia, were resistant to new ideas from young
scientists, overly secretive, overly
bureaucratic and lacked any real scrutiny from a
compliant domestic media. Ahead
of Cummings' appearance, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said
people would not be interested in the "tittle tattle" at the heart
of British power in Westminster.
"I will leave others to judge how reliable a witness that former
adviser happens to be," Shapps told BBC TV.
Asked about Cummings' criticism, Johnson's spokesman said on
Tuesday: "At all times we have been guided by the data and the
latest evidence we had." In a series of
investigations, Reuters has reported how the British government made
several errors: it was slow to spot the infections arriving, it was
late with a lockdown and it continued to discharge infected hospital
patients into care homes.
The government's chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, said in
March 2020 that 20,000 deaths would be a good outcome. Soon after, a
worst-case scenario prepared by government scientific advisers put
the possible death toll at 50,000. The toll is now close to 128,000.
Johnson has admitted that mistakes were made and that lessons need
to be learned, but his ministers say they were working at pace in
the biggest public health crisis in a century.
Johnson has pointed to Britain's vaccination programme as a success
that will allow the economy to rebound before its peers.
Britain has the world's fifth fastest vaccination programme, based
on shots per 100 people, behind the United Arab Emirates, Israel,
Bahrain and Chile.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Elizabeth Piper and Michael Holden;
Editing by Mark Heinrich, Michael Holden and Toby Chopra)
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