THE HEAD of the UK Civil Service suggested advising the public to hold 'chicken pox parties' to spread coronavirus across the country, a committee of MPs has heard.
Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister's former senior aide, made the claim during an evidence session of the Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committee this morning.
He claimed that Mark Sedwill, former head of the Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary until June last year, suggested telling people they should hold old-fashioned "chicken pox parties" to generate herd immunity against coronavirus.
He said Mr Sedwill wanted Boris Johnson to go on television and tell people to hold covid-spreading parties, explaining: "The Cabinet Secretary said 'Prime Minister, you should go on TV tomorrow and explain to people the herd immunity plan, and that it's like the old chicken pox parties. We need people to get this disease, because that's how we get herd immunity by September.'"
Mr Cummings said he told Mr Sedwill to "stop using this chickenpox analogy", while another adviser explained it was "because chickenpox is not spreading exponentially and killing hundreds of thousands of people."
The former aide continued: "You could sense in the whole room there was this kind of shock."
Mr Cummings also told MPs of a "surreal" day in Downing Street, March 12 2020, when he had urged Boris Johnson to advise the public to self-isolate immediately if they were unwell.
He said the plans were "derailed" after Donald Trump requested the UK's help in a bombing campaign in the Middle East, and Carrie Symonds, the Prime Minister's fiancee, was "going crackers" about a news story featuring her, Mr Johnson and their dog Dilyn.
Mr Cummings said: "The day started off with us thinking [it] is going to be all about Covid and whether or not announced the household quarantine.
"We then got completely derailed because in the morning of the 12th suddenly the national security people came in and said 'Trump wants us to join a bombing campaign in the Middle East tonight' and we need to start having meetings about that through the day with Cobra as well.
"That day was, on Covid, completely disrupted because you have these two parallel sets of meetings.
"You have the national security people running in and out talking about are we going to bomb the Middle East, and we had the COBRA meetings being delayed and whatnot, as we were trying to figure out are we going to do household quarantine."
He continued: "Then...it sounds so surreal I couldn't possibly be true...That day the Times had run a huge story about the Prime Minister and his girlfriend and their dog, and the Prime Minister's girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office deal with that."
Mr Cummings said there was an "insane situation" in No.10, explaining: "Part of the building was saying 'Are we going to bomb Iraq?', part of the building was arguing about whether or not we're going to do quarantine or not do quarantine, Prime Minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial..."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel