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Coronavirus

Coronavirus - The Poll

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I apologise for bumping this thread, as I’m conscious that we’re now well past the point of COVID being a major threat. Most of us probably want to forget that the pandemic ever happened and think of it like a bad dream.

However, I thought that it was worth bumping the thread today because the official UK government inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic is now ongoing, and various senior officials intimately involved with the UK’s COVID response have been providing testimony and evidence over the last week or two.

All of this has made for very interesting news stories, to say the least, so I thought I’d bring you all a summary of some of the highlights.

Some of the most notable revelations include:
  • Boris Johnson saw elderly people as expendable and thought that the economy should not be harmed to protect them. According to Sir Patrick Vallance’s pandemic diaries, Johnson was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate” and was “not entirely sure [he] disagreed” with his backbenchers, who thought that “the whole thing [was] pathetic and COVID [was] just nature’s way of dealing with old people”. This was reinforced by comments from Johnson saying that he wanted “the bodies [to] pile high” being confirmed as true: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67278517
  • It is widely claimed that Boris Johnson was indecisive over pandemic decision making. Former No 10 Press Secretary Lee Cain claimed that COVID was “the wrong crisis for this prime minister’s skill set”, with Johnson’s leadership style being described as “sounding out opposing views for some time before coming to a settled view”. Cain said that this worked well on issues like Brexit, but that “oscillating” did not work well during COVID. Dominic Cummings and other senior aides widely nicknamed Johnson “the trolley” due to his tendency to change his mind drastically and quickly: https://www.theguardian.com/politic...truggle-to-reverse-narrative-covid-leadership
  • Boris Johnson was initially very dismissive of COVID as a threat. He wanted to be injected with COVID on live TV to prove to the public that it wasn’t a threat, and his initial worry was more about “talking the economy into a slump” than about public health: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67347456
  • Boris Johnson reportedly wanted to end social distancing entirely and declare that the UK was “over COVID” just as a second wave was due to hit the country in September 2020, in a move that was deemed “Trump-Bolsonaro level mad and dangerous” by Cabinet Secretary Simon Case: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-trump-covid-inquiry-b2437355.html
  • Dominic Cummings revealed that Boris Johnson asked Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance whether COVID could be destroyed by “blowing a special hairdryer up the nose”, showing a YouTube video of a man doing this as evidence. Cummings also revealed that Johnson tried to go for an in-person meeting with the Queen when he had COVID symptoms on 18th March 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...rs-dominic-cummings-evidence-to-covid-inquiry
  • Messages portrayed a mood of chaos in government during the pandemic. WhatsApp messages from Cabinet Secretary Simon Case revealed that he described Johnson’s government as “basically feral”, and said that dealing with them was “like taming wild animals”, with Lord Mark Sedwill responding “I have the bite marks”. According to Patrick Vallance, Sedwill himself referred to the government as “brutal and useless” and “totally incompetent”: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/en...ral-covid-inquiry_uk_654bb320e4b0e63c9dc1efe7
  • A series of explosive WhatsApp messages from Dominic Cummings were revealed, in which he called people in Boris Johnson’s government “useless f***pigs”, “morons” and “c**ts”, and described the Cabinet Office as “terrifyingly s**t”. Cummings has apologised for his language, but says that his language “only understated” the incompetence of the discussed individuals: https://www.politico.eu/article/useless-fuckpigs-dominic-cumming-describe-boris-johnsons-cabinet/
  • The government is widely accused of having been too male-centric, and a “macho” culture bred by Johnson is thought to have caused problems during the COVID pandemic. Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen MacNamara stated that she felt that an “institutional bias against women” meant that issues such as domestic abuse and childcare were not given sufficient thought during policy making. She felt that there was an “absence of humanity” during decision making and that the overall mood was “macho”, “heroic” and “driven by ego”, which led to women’s voices and the voices of minorities not being sufficiently heard: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...ity-helen-macnamara-evidence-to-covid-inquiry
  • McNamara was also the subject of a widely panned message from Dominic Cummings talking about “Helen’s bulls**t”, “personally [handcuffing] her and [escorting] her from the building” and “dodging stilettos from that c**t”: https://inews.co.uk/news/who-helen-macnamara-senior-civil-servant-2725464
  • Health Secretary Matt Hancock was widely panned and viewed as incompetent and dishonest by those around him. Lord Sedwill joked that Johnson should “protect the NHS and save lives” by sacking Hancock, and described him as “so far up Boris Johnson’s a*se his legs [were] brown”. Hancock was accused of having a “clearly damaging” lack of candour; he allegedly promised a COVID plan that did not exist, people were having to double check what he had told them, and there was a “lack of confidence” that what he said was actually happening. There were accusations that Hancock “did not understand the regulations”, and that COVID legislation was written by Hancock only 15 minutes before it was due to take effect. Dominic Cummings described Hancock as “a proven liar”, “a problem leaker”, and a “c**t”, and numerous officials urged Johnson to sack him. These calls were repeatedly ignored by Johnson: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/matt-hancock-sedwill-covid-inquiry-b2445156.html
Those are just some of the most eye-opening revelations from the COVID inquiry; there are probably more, but I thought that the post would go on for ages if I listed all of them.

I don’t know about you, but I do feel that this inquiry has been quite an eye opener in terms of revealing the mood in government during COVID and the way in which it actually operated…

Other witnesses, including Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and Rishi Sunak, are yet to speak.
 
I'd much rather see a public inquiry into exactly where all of the billions of pounds went that got spent during Covid and to see how dodgy it possibly was and for names to be named. I remember hearing of 'consultants' getting paid thousands of pounds an hour or something like that and I'd love to see the accuracy of that and if it was appropriate and of any possible relationship of these consultants to people in government at the time. Also, obviously, the multi-million pound contracts handed out to people who had never been involved in any similar business previously etc. I want people to actually be held accountable, as well as 'lessons being learned'. I will not be holding my breath waiting though.
 
BarryZola said:
I'd much rather see a public inquiry into exactly where all of the billions of pounds went that got spent during Covid and to see how dodgy it possibly was and for names to be named. I remember hearing of 'consultants' getting paid thousands of pounds an hour or something like that and I'd love to see the accuracy of that and if it was appropriate and of any possible relationship of these consultants to people in government at the time. Also, obviously, the multi-million pound contracts handed out to people who had never been involved in any similar business previously etc. I want people to actually be held accountable, as well as 'lessons being learned'. I will not be holding my breath waiting though.
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Well they haven't quite got to that bit get, but they've started scraping around it with the revelations / admission about PPE Medpro and Michelle Mine's direct involvement in the securing of contracts for that firm.

BigT said:
To be honest this enquiry is now a waste of taxpayers money, what is it going to tell us we didn’t already know?
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You can't run an inquiry until everything is over. It's also about getting everything on the record. Lessons need to be learned and although we may have already "known" some of this stuff, due to press reports and leaks at the time, it wasn't a matter of record. We now know that Boris really did say "Let the bodies pile high", we know that he wanted to get jabbed with the virus on national television. It's showing us how much of a poo show it really was, confirming what we expected.

The inquiry will drag on for a long while yet, and as it should do, but we can't learn exactly how everything went wrong until it's over. A large part of this will involve going over / confirming facts we've known all along. It's also incredibly important for all of the people and families affected by COVID and the mistakes that were made by the former government.
 
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