UK health chief defends virus record after Cummings attack
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s health minister on Thursday defended his handling of the coronavirus pandemic after a former top government aide alleged the government’s botched response had led to tens of thousands of needless deaths.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock hit back after Dominic Cummings singled him out for criticism in an excoriating attack on the government.
In testimony to lawmakers on Wednesday, Cummings accused Hancock of lying to the public and said he “should have been fired” for mistakes including testing failures that saw patients with the virus discharged from hospitals to nursing homes. Thousands of people died with COVID-19 in British care homes in the first months of the outbreak.
Hancock said “the unsubstantiated allegations around honesty are not true.”
“I have been straight with people in public and in private throughout,” he told legislators in the House of Commons. “Every day since I began working on the response to this pandemic last January, I’ve got up each morning and asked: ‘What must I do to protect life?”
Cummings, who left his job as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s top adviser in November, claimed the government’s slow and chaotic initial response, and Johnson’s failure to learn from mistakes, meant that tens of thousands of people had died unnecessarily.
He said Johnson was “unfit for the job” of prime minister.
Johnson brushed aside the criticism, saying “some of the commentary I have heard doesn’t bear any relation to reality.”
“What people want us to get on with is delivering the (reopening) road map and trying, cautiously, to take our country forward through what has been one of the most difficult periods that I think anybody can remember," he told reporters on Thursday.
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