Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson believed that corona was ‘nature’s way of dealing with old people’. This is evident from released diary entries of former chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance. “We knew it was chaotic under Johnson, that is evident now,” says United Kingdom correspondent Lia van Bekhoven.
Vallence advised the British government during the corona pandemic, but it was hardly listened to, says Van Bekhoven. Especially not by Johnson himself. ‘He did not allow himself to be shaped by the scientific advisors, but mainly by the conservative newspaper The Daily Telegraph.’
Johnson himself once worked for that newspaper, which was strongly against a lockdown in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the corona crisis. ‘That would have been one of the reasons Johnson waited so long with a lockdown.’
Sacrificing old people
According to the UK correspondent, nine months into the pandemic Johnson was still convinced ‘it was better to sacrifice old people to the virus if that means keeping the economy open’, despite ‘hundreds of scientists’ advised otherwise.
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Van Bekhoven calls the revelations ‘nothing new’, she says. ‘We knew it was chaotic and the British government under Johnson was not functioning, but what surprises me is the scale. It was permanent war between Johnson and his advisers and officials.’
