If what's below is true then it makes very uncomfortable reading for the Government. Unfortunately Cummings has no credibility whatever because of his antics in Barnard Castle last year and his pathetic excuses afterwards.
Dominic Cummings last night accused Boris Johnson of having pursued a secret policy of herd immunity to combat the coronavirus that would have led to “catastrophe”. He also claimed that all three lockdowns could have been avoided if someone “competent” had been in charge.
In a broadside at the prime minister before he gives evidence to MPs this week, the former Downing Street aide said the “shocking truth” was that herd immunity was the government’s plan until less than a fortnight before the first lockdown. It was abandoned only when ministers were warned that it would lead to “hundreds of thousands choking to death” on hospital wards.
Cummings also accused the government of doing “very badly” on mass testing, a failure that meant lives were “needlessly lost”.
No 10 has repeatedly denied that the government pursued a policy of herd immunity — in which a large number of people catch the disease and become immune, preventing it from spreading.
But Cummings’s new offensive on Twitter accused Matt Hancock, the health secretary, of peddling “bullshit” when he denied that was ever the plan in March last year.
Cummings said the belief that Britain would have achieved herd immunity by September 2020 “was literally the official plan in all documents, graphs and meetings until it was ditched”.
He said that in the week beginning March 9, “No 10 was made aware by various people that the official plan would lead to cata—strophe. It was then replaced by plan B. But how ‘herd immunity by September’ could have been the plan until that week is a fundamental issue in the whole disaster.”
A public inquiry will examine how the pandemic was handled
On March 13, the chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, appeared to suggest that herd immunity was one of the goals, but two days later Hancock said it was “not a goal or strategy”. The first lockdown was not imposed until March 23, a delay that Cummings will claim was down to Johnson’s indecision.
In a foretaste of the assault he is planning on the reputations of the prime minister and the health secretary, Cummings added: “If we’d had the right preparations and competent people in charge, we would probably have avoided lockdown one.” He said there would “definitely” have been “no need for lockdowns two and three”.
Cummings is expected to use Wednesday’s hearings to accuse Hancock of telling repeated “lies” about preparedness for the crisis and to explain why he repeatedly tried to persuade Johnson to fire his health secretary.
Officials in the Cabinet Office are also concerned that Cummings will accuse Johnson of missing key meetings on the crisis because he was working on a biography of Shakespeare, the money from which he needed to fund his divorce from Marina Wheeler, his second wife. Johnson missed five Cobra emergency meetings at the start of the crisis.
There is also concern that he will reveal damaging details of the decision to decant patients from hospitals into care homes, where the virus ran rampant at a cost of thousands of lives.
Rounding on civil servants and health service leaders, Cummings described the planning for the pandemic as both “AWOL” and “a disaster” and said that “awful decisions delayed everything” and made the first lockdown necessary. He accused health leaders of failing to get mass testing up and running despite being told by Johnson and the then cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill to treat it as “a wartime project”. Branding Public Health England “particularly awful”, he said there could have been “millions” of tests a day by September. Instead, the government began gearing up only that month.
Cummings said that early, hard lockdowns were best for saving lives and the economy
Cummings said time, money and lives were “needlessly lost” as a result of Whitehall’s “awful process”, adding: “If mass testing had been developed properly earlier in the year as it could and should have been,” Cummings claims we “would probably have avoided lockdowns two and three while awaiting [the] vaccine”.
Wednesday’s joint hearing of the Commons health and science committees promises to be explosive.
Cummings will argue that he was convinced by the data to lead the charge in favour of early draconian lockdowns in both March and September 2020. Allies say he will accuse Johnson of “indecision” and say that led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Cummings’s critics will argue that he was in every key decision-making meeting.
Rolling out the argument he will use with MPs, Cummings said that early hard lockdowns were best for both saving lives and saving the economy. “Obviously they’re ‘destructive’,” he wrote. “But if you have to do it because the alternative is hundreds of thousands” of people “choking to death” and “no NHS for months for everybody else”.
Cummings’s ability to damage Johnson will be constrained by the Official Secrets Act, which will limit his ability to release classified documents.
Cummings will pass papers to the committee but the MPs have been told they should release only documents or parts of documents that relate to their “lessons learned inquiry” into coronavirus.
Johnson has himself ordered a full public inquiry into how the pandemic was handled.
Downing Street and the Department of Health declined to respond to Cummings’s claims.
