![]() There was a sense of inevitability about it.” “The policy makers had their attention drawn to what was coming.” Ian Boyd, a member of the government’s main pandemic advisory committee, told me: “Since April, the big thing on everybody’s mind was winter. “This is not a failure of science advice,” Mark Walport, Britain’s former chief scientific adviser, told me. This time, Johnson cannot claim ignorance. But while Johnson assiduously “followed the science” then, this time he has fallen out of line with his scientific and medical advisers, who have been pushing him to move harder for weeks, if not months. From the beginning of the outbreak last spring, they understood the threat of a second wave in the winter. Now the question has boomeranged back.įor Johnson and his government, the answer, like most sequels, is worse. Last summer, I sought to understand why Britain had done so badly-there was little doubt it had failed the only question was why. Addressing the nation last night, Johnson warned that COVID-19 was running rampant throughout the country, with hospitals at risk of being overwhelmed, as he imposed a third national lockdown in nine months after weeks of pressure to strengthen the government’s response. Yet today, once again, Britain is failing. It may have stumbled more than most, costing many thousands of lives, but by the summer it appeared to have regained a modicum of composure, falling in line with most other European countries. ![]() More generally, Britain-like everywhere else in the world at the time-was feeling its way in the dark. Yes, the country then suffered the worst death toll in Europe, and the worst economic slump, but Boris Johnson had “ followed the science,” delaying a lockdown on the advice of his government’s medical and scientific advisers. After Britain first went into lockdown to arrest the spread of the coronavirus last year, one had to contend with a number of mitigating factors when assessing the government’s performance.
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