In one of his last public appearances as prime minister, Mr. Johnson rejected recent claims that the UK had imposed excessive Covid restrictions by Tory leadership contenders Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
There is a kind of logic inversion occurring, he added, since individuals are suddenly claiming that the present issues in the NHS are the result of too much lockdown.
“I’m afraid to suggest that the contrary is the case in that the challenges we are now having in the NHS would be considerably worse if we hadn’t shut down, if we hadn’t sought to prevent the spread of the illness.”
“And I really encourage folks to simply consider the logic of what they are saying,” he said.
Last week, Mr. Sunak made the astonishing argument that it was wrong to give so much deference to SAGE, the Government’s powerful scientific body, whose gloomy predictions convinced Mr. Johnson to impose a number of harmful restrictions.
Boris Johnson has argued that the pandemic’s harsh stay-at-home orders did not destabilize the NHS.
He also said that No. 10 failed to recognise economic trade-offs “from the outset” in a scathing interview with the Spectator magazine.
Despite initially aiding in the containment of the epidemic, the Government’s two-year cycle of restrictions damaged the economy and caused a dramatic increase in NHS backlogs.
Ministers ultimately lost trust in harsh measures and turned to relying on immunity and vaccinations to ward off Covid.
Mr. Sunak said that he “wasn’t permitted to speak about the trade-off” between lockdowns’ ability to restrict the spread of viruses and their consequences on the health care system, the economy, and the educational system.
The plan was never to recognize them. According to the script, doing something for our health is good for the economy, therefore there is no trade-off, he stated.
‘I felt like no one talked. We didn’t talk at all about missed [doctor’s] appointments, or the backlog building in the NHS in a massive way. That was never part of it.’
Last week, Rishi Sunak made a shocking allegation that it was wrong to give so much deference to SAGE, the Government’s important scientific council, whose gloomy predictions convinced Boris Johnson to enact a number of harmful restrictions.
Meetings with ministers at the time, according to Mr. Sunak, were “basically me around that table, just arguing” and “very unpleasant every single time.”
Later, he insisted that he had never opposed lockdowns, despite his article strongly implying that he had.
SAGE scientists responded by accusing him of shifting blame, saying that ministers are the ones who make choices and that it is “not the responsibility” of experts that ministers neglected to seek out more comprehensive information.
Last month, Mr. Sunak again bragged about flying from California to his home state to personally prevent another shutdown during the winter Omicron wave.
Ex-aide turned harsh critic Dominic Cummings rose to the outgoing Mr Johnson’s defence and accused Mr Sunak of peddling ‘dangerous nonsense’.
He added that it ‘reads like a man whose [epically] bad campaign has melted his brain [and] he’s about to quit politics’.
once aide now a severe critic Dominic Cummings intervened on behalf of the departing Mr. Johnson and charged Mr. Sunak of spreading “dangerous falsehoods.”
Mr. Johnson stated: “It is very, very essential that people remember what the measures to prevent the transmission of Covid were aiming to achieve” when on a visit to the Sizewell B power station in Suffolk.
We had at least 40,000 patients in NHS beds during the height of the epidemic, and the NHS has a total of roughly 100,000 beds.
‘And we knew that the NHS system would have been swamped if you had another 20,000 or 30,000 more, which, statistically speaking, could have easily occurred.
“And what would have happened is that all those people who didn’t get the help they wanted with their cardiac concerns, with their cancer diagnosis, and all those other health conditions – they would have been pushed out even further, and the NHS would have been in an even worse position now to deliver the help that’s required,” the author continued.