Boris Johnson has admitted he “can’t rule out” plunging the U.K. into a Covid lockdown again in the future, despite only just releasing the nation from two years of crippling on-off restrictions. MailOnline has the story.
The Prime Minister previously promised the route back to normality was “irreversible”, seemingly consigning draconian stay-at-home orders to history. But the PM has now said it would be “irresponsible” for the Government not to keep a blanket shutdown in its virus-fighting playbook. He added: “I’m not going to take any options off the table.”
In an interview with GB News set to be aired tomorrow, Mr. Johnson added: “I want to avoid any such thing ever happening again.”
However, he insisted any decision on bringing back curbs must get the balance right between prioritising public health and saving lives. …
Speaking to Tory MPs Esther McVey and Philip Davies on GB News, Mr Johnson said: “I can’t rule out something. I can’t say we wouldn’t be forced to do non-pharmaceutical interventions again of the kind we did. I think it would be irresponsible of any leader in any democracy to say that they are going to rule out something that can save lives.”
He added: “I believe the things we did saved lives. I’ve got to be absolutely frank with you, there could be a new variant more deadly, there could be a variant that affects children, that we really need to contain, I’m not going to take any options off the table. But I don’t think it will happen. We’re now in the phase where the virus is losing its potency overall and we’ve got a massively vaccinated U.K. population.”
But the PM admitted the endless cycle of on-off restrictions introduced over the last 24 months had caused the nation’s obesity rates to soar. Ministers this week brought in rules that force restaurants, cafes and takeaways with more than 250 employees to include calorie counts on their menu. Mr. Johnson denied the measures equated to a “nanny state”, arguing they were necessary to tackle Britain’s growing obesity problem.
He’s learned nothing at all, it seems. Even after it’s been exposed that his own staff who wrote the rules made no effort to keep them.
It was always one of the big problems with the original 2020 lockdowns, besides of course their intrinsic harms – that they set a devastating precedent for public health policy that overturned all prior science and guidance on how to respond to infectious disease. We sceptics now have our work cut out to eliminate the presumption that lockdowns are acceptable – not least because the current crop of political leaders and public health officials have their reputations tied to the lockdown policy, which they enthusiastically embraced.
Worth reading in full.
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