UK COVID inquiry: Boris Johnson says he underestimated threat from virus

On Wednesday, former British prime minister Boris Johnson offered his most direct apologies for how he handled the coronavirus crisis, claiming that his administration had been overly complacent and had first miscalculated the risks the virus posed. Johnson addressed the public during an official investigation into the UK’s response to the pandemic, acknowledging that he was accountable for all decisions made and that he understood the public’s outrage following allegations of government incompetence, scheming, and misogyny amid the country’s largest health crisis in decades. Johnson stated that rather than being the “typhoon” that killed over 230,000 people in Britain and infected many more, COVID-19 had initially appeared as a “cloud on the horizon”. At first, Johnson said he did not trust the death toll projections and that he had only seldom perused the government’s principal scientific advisory group’s minutes, even though their recommendations had prompted the largest suppression of civil liberties since World War II. Johnson served as prime minister for three years, from 2019 to 2022, before resigning in scandal. Among the scandals were claims that he and other officials had attended drunken parties in Downing Street in 2020 and 2021, when the majority of British citizens were forced to stay at home. He was reluctant to lock down, and the investigation has already heard devastating testimony about how he was perplexed by the science. According to reports, Johnson once suggested that he should be given a COVID-19 injection live on television in order to allay public anxieties and inquired if putting a hair dryer up his nose could eradicate the virus. (With agency inputs)