From the point of view of his Conservative leadership campaign, Rishi Sunak felt compelled to out himself as the little guy in the Covid battles. He claims that no one but him thought about the potential harms of lock down, such as missed doctors appointments, children not attending school, or the health service waiting list. I was fighting at those meetings. He said it was very uncomfortable.
The government's messaging about the dangers of the virus was objected to by him. Posters of people on ventilators was the worst thing to do.
Isn't it a powerful image? Beneath a hoodie, there's all that resolve. Sunak was a one-man crusade for common sense and human rights in the face of fundamentalist monomania. Sunak analyzed how the UK came to suffer. He claimed that the government made a fatal mistake by empowering the independent scientists of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.
That's right, well. More than 170,000 people have died of Covid since the beginning of the Pandemic. Sunak would have to concede that lockdowns served a vital purpose in order to have any credibility.
Sunak is trying to pander to the libertarian wing of the party faithful in almost every line of the interview. He claims that the country would lock down if it had the power to do so. That is completely incorrect. His role was advisory. It is up to the executive to make the difficult decisions.
After a few months of pretending to follow the science, Downing Street went off piste. In September 2020, for example, Johnson was urged to lock down. Prof Stephen Reicher explained that the scientific advisory body Sage produced a paper with a simple message: do something now or else lose control over the virus. It would have to be something that could be done to reduce the number of infections. Reicher said that Britain found itself in a limbo where the Pandemic drags on and causes more damage because the government chose to ignore it.
Sunak claims that the committee would issue horrifying scenarios about what would happen if Britain did not impose lockdown without revealing the basis on which they had been calculated. I didn't get this in the first year. This is also claptrap. The decision to lock down for the first time in 2020 was influenced by the Imperial College modelling. The model predicted a quarter of a million deaths. It was published in its entirety on 16 March 2020. Sunak might want to read it here since he missed it.
I can only conclude that Sunak is so desperate to be prime minister that he wants to rewrite Covid history. Dean Russell asked Chris Whitty if he was worried about Covid being prioritised over other things. Covid over cancer and other serious issues. What do you think about that?
Sunak and Russell are both examples of people who have no idea of health. They say it because they want to make a point. It's not true that the lockdowns cause the problems with cancer. If we hadn't had the lockdowns, the whole system would be in deep, deep trouble and the impacts on things like heart attacks and strokes and all the other things people must still come forward for when they had them, would have been worse than it was.
Sunak is twisting the truth in order to get votes. He is spreading misinformation that is dangerous. The public is encouraged to think that the worst of scientists is true. Scientists weren't given enough power and were used as human shields for political incompetence and Procrastination. Shame on Sunak for showing disrespect to himself.
Breathtaking: Inside theNHS in a Time of Pandemic is a book written by a doctor.
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