The government’s original plan to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic was to let the virus rip through the population to spread herd immunity, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
In a post on social media the former top Downing Street aide said the media had failed to properly scrutinise and instead “parroted” the government’s claims that it had never advocated the approach, despite evidence to the contrary.
His comments come ahead of an appearance before a joint committee of MPs on Wednesday, when he is expected to pin the blame on Boris Johnson for failures in the UK’s response to the coronavirus, which left over 150,000 people dead.
“The media have been generally abysmal on Covid, but even I’ve been surprised by one thing: how many hacks have parroted Hancock’s line that ‘herd immunity wasn’t the plan’ when ‘herd immunity by September’ was literally the official plan in all docs/graphs/meetings until it was ditched,” he said on the post on Saturday afternoon.
In a 5 March 2020 interview Boris Johnson said there was “a need to stirke a balance” in imposing restrictions that would flatten the peak of the pandemic to reduce strain on the NHS but allow “the disease, as it were, to move through the population”.
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