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Bereaved families: Covid inquiry revelations worse than we feared [1]
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Date: 2023-11
The evidence from the Covid inquiry this week is worse than what bereaved families feared was happening at the time. Back then, we were often criticised for being unfair on the government when we raised our concerns. It’s clear now we weren’t being anywhere near critical enough.
In March 2020, when I was panicking about the reports coming out of Italy and how best to protect my family if Covid-19 struck the UK, Boris Johnson was said to be “laughing at the Italians” and joking that “we were going to be great (at Covid-19)”.
Meanwhile, Matt Hancock was displaying “nuclear levels” of overconfidence, literally pretending to bat away criticism like a cricketer, and assuring everyone that there were plans in place that never actually materialised.
When the pandemic did strike, and our NHS became overwhelmed, I had to say goodbye to my dad, Ian for the last time. He was 56 years old, recently retired and was looking forward to spending time with his family. I’d do anything for another day with him, and if it hadn’t been for the utter chaos in Number 10, we might have had many more years together.
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By the time the second wave came around and many thousands more had died, Johnson had learned nothing. He was saying that if you caught Covid you would “live longer”, that he didn’t buy “all this NHS overwhelmed stuff” and agreeing that “we should let the old people get it”.
And our now prime minister, Rishi Sunak was ignoring all scientific advice and insisting people “Eat Out to Help Out”. But while he was posing in Wagamama’s, the chief medical officer was calling the scheme “eat out to help out the virus”, and our current chief scientific adviser was calling him “Dr Death the chancellor”. How can he be trusted to manage a pandemic in the future?
Whilst all this was going on, we’ve been told government decisions were being controlled by a group of special advisers from privileged backgrounds. They were more interested in “football and hunting” than they were in issues like domestic abuse, or how their decisions would impact the disabled, low income households, at risk children and others who weren’t like them.
Some of them, like Dominic Cummings, used obscene, misogynistic language to describe their colleagues. When you see that these figures had such a shocking disregard for each other, you can only imagine the disregard they had for families like mine.
They left our most vulnerable with the least protection. Their response had an “absence of humanity”, as Helen MacNamara, the second most senior civil servant at the time, said this week.
Families like mine will have to live with the cost of that inhumanity for the rest of our lives. Meanwhile Johnson has a new handsomely paid TV show on GB News, and is paid hundreds of thousands as an after dinner speaker. Hancock whines that he is a victim of “injustice” while being paid a fortune to appear on SAS Who Dares Wins, fresh from his appearance on I’m a Celebrity…
They ‘fail upwards’ into more money and power, while families like mine are left ripped apart by their callousness and brutality.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/covid-inquiry-bereaved-families-for-justice-boris-johnson/
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