Rishi Sunak is reported to have said that the UK should ‘let people die’ during the Covid-19 pandemic. Latest News

A recent inquiry into Britain’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed a quote from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Times of India.

According to Patrick Vallance, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, then finance minister Sunak said during a meeting with then prime minister Boris Johnson that the government should “let people die” rather than impose a second national lockdown.

Vallance made a note of the meeting on October 25, 2020, in his diary, which was presented to the inquest on Monday.

The diary also records how Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s most senior adviser during the pandemic, relayed to Vallance what he had heard at the meeting.

Valens quoted Cummings in his diary as saying: “Sage thinks just let people die and that’s all right. It all seems like a complete lack of leadership.”

According to a spokesman for Sunak, the Prime Minister will set out her position when giving evidence to the inquiry “rather than answering each one piecemeal”.

The inquiry, which will run until the summer of 2026, is examining the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic which has shut down large parts of the economy and killed more than 220,000 people in Britain. Reuters Report

Senior government officials have repeatedly said the government was unprepared for the pandemic and that a “toxic” and “macho” culture has hampered the response to the health crisis.

The danger for Sunak is that the evidence at the inquiry undermines Johnson’s attempts to cast himself as a chaotic leadership change even though he was one of the most senior ministers in that government.

Previous evidence showed he was branded “Dr Death” by a government scientific adviser in the summer of 2020 for his “Eat Out to Help Out” policy, which subsidized pubs and restaurants but was criticized by health experts for spreading the virus.