UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wanted the government to “just let people die” rather than impose a second national lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic, London’s former chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, told the government’s official Covid-19 inquiry on Monday.
Neither Sunak, who was chancellor at the time, nor then-PM Boris Johnson were in favor of closing the economy again and compounding the financial ruin wrought by the first lockdown, according to Vallance’s diaries, which the scientist kept as a sanity-preserving exercise during the pandemic.
“Rishi thinks just let people die and that’s ok. This all feels like a complete lack of leadership,” he wrote in a diary entry dated October 25, 2020 seen by the inquiry, which is tasked with probing the government’s response to the pandemic.