Former aide: Boris Johnson wanted to be injected with COVID on live TV

Dominic Cummings, the strategist behind the 2016 Brexit campaign and Johnson’s landslide election win in 2019, told lawmakers that the British government and Johnson’s Downing Street office was far to slow to spot the crisis. The West, he said, failed to see the brewing crisis and that Johnson in early 2020 considered Covid a “scare story” like swine flu while many senior ministers, including the prime minister, were on holiday in February 2020, some skiing. Such was Johnson’s scepticism that he even told officials he was considering getting the government’s chief medical adviser Chris Whitty to give him an injection of the novel coronavirus on live television to reassure the public, Cummings said. “The prime minister regarded this as just a scare story,” Cummings said, adding the view of officials was Johnson’s attitude was “don’t worry about it and I’m going to get Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus”.