UK PM was reluctant to impose COVID restrictions as people dying were 'above 80': Ex-aide

Dominic Cummings, the ex-aide of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has claimed that British PM Boris Johnson was reluctant to tighten the COVID-19 restrictions as the cases surged last autumn because he thought the people dying from the disease were 'essentially all over 80'. In the first television interview after he left the job last year amid the pandemic, Cummings told BBC that Johnson had denied that the National Health Service would be overwhelmed. The UK PM told the ex-aide in a message, “I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Folks, I think we may need to recalibrate.”

Since levaing the office last year, Cummings has emerged as a staunch critic of the Boris Johnson-led government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The former political adviser has also accused the British government of being responsible for scores of avoidable deaths due to COVID-19 and has also shared a series of messages from October that are allegedly from Johnson to his aides. 

In one of the messages, Cummings claimed that the UK PM joked that the elderly in the country could 'get COVID and live longer' because most of the people who succumbed to the disease were past the average age of life expectancy. As per BBC, Cummings further claimed that in the early days of the pandemic, Johnson was willing to keep his weekly face-to-face meetings with UK’s Queen Elizabeth II going even though the ex-aide had warned his then-boss that she might lose her life to COVID-19.

Cummings told the media outlet that Johnson told the officials that he should never have agreed to the first COVID-19 lockdown and that he had to convince the British leader not to take risks with the monarch. "I said, what are you doing, and he said, I'm going to see the Queen and I said, what on earth are you talking about? Of course, you can't go and see the queen," Cummings said he told Johnson. "And he said, he basically just hadn't thought it through."

What does Downing Street say about Cummings’ claims?

In response to the series of claims that Cummings made to BBC, Downing Street said that UK Prime Minister had taken 'necessary action to protect lives and livelihoods, guided by the best scientific advice' throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The Number 10 spokesperson reportedly added that Johnson’s Conservative government had prevented the country’s NHS 'from being overwhelmed through three national lockdowns'.

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