Rishi Sunak, Britain’s Treasury Secretary under COVID and now a candidate for Prime Minister, has parted the curtain with an insider’s account of how lockdowns happened there.
Sunak reveals that Boris Johnson wholly adopted “the fear narrative” and recited frightening but wrong COVID death toll predictions from various computer models. As for the cost of lockdowns on health, civil liberties, and the economy: “The script was not to ever acknowledge them,” Sunak said. “The script was: oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy.”
Sunak’s account has been confirmed by other former government officials. Mark Harper, former chair of the Covid Recovery Group, says “dissenting voices were not allowed” in COVID deliberations. “When I raised questions — and we questioned the modeling — people in Number 10 briefed out to journalists that we deliberately wanted to kill thousands of people, which was clearly nonsense.”
Lord Sumption, a former British Supreme Court Justice, calls the lockdown “an experiment in authoritarian government unmatched in our history even in wartime.” He blames “the government’s hysterical public messaging” for the severe lockdowns that “made the UK’s recovery the slowest in Europe.”
Fraser Nelson, the Spectator editor who interviewed Sunak, concludes the government’s plan was “to create the impression that lockdown was a scientifically-created policy which only crackpots dared question.”
Let’s be clear: the crackpots were the politicians and “experts” on both sides of the Atlantic who imposed lockdowns on society at a ruthless cost