So much for “we’re listening to the science”.

Remember that – the Tory government slogan that they repeated like a mantra throughout the Covid-19 crisis?

Evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry suggests – strongly – that this was a lie; and one with mass-fatal consequences.

Remember Rishi Sunak’s ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme?

Announced on July 8, 2020, it involved the government subsidising half the cost of food and non-alcoholic drinks ordered at participating cafes, pubs, and restaurants, where the food and drinks were consumed on the premises, up to £10 per person (per order).

The offer was available from August 3 – 31, from Monday to Wednesday each week. There were no limits on how many times an individual could use the discount.

It led to a significant increase in restaurant visits during August – and what else do you think happened?

Research available in December of that year showed – well, here‘s what This Site said at the time:

Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak made certain that thousands more people caught Covid-19 than would otherwise have done so, with his Eat Out to Help Out scheme.

Research by the University of Warwick has shown that the initiative is likely to blame for 17 per cent of infections – one in six outbreaks – between August and early September (when it was overtaken by outbreaks linked to schools that had reopened at Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab’s insistence, we may conclude).

People will have died from catching the virus after taking part in Sunak’s crackpot plan.

He didn’t even help hospitality businesses very much, either.

In March this year, we discovered that then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock knew about this:

Matt Hancock – Health Secretary at the time – knew about it and conspired with then-Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, and Sunak (who is now prime minister, remember) to hide it from us.

Look at his WhatsApp messages from the summer of 2020:

News outlets like The Independent are reporting that Hancock ridiculed the scheme, calling it “Eat Out to Help The Virus Get About”.

Clearly the scheme should have been halted as soon as the concerns became apparent to Hancock. Instead he made a bad joke about it.

Who knows how many people died because they weren’t told about the danger? And shouldn’t Hancock, Case and Sunak be punished for allowing those deaths to happen?

And now, finally, we know that the government’s scientific advisers had opposed the scheme all along but Sunak refused to listen.

The current Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Dame Angela McLean, actually called him “Dr Death” in a WhatsApp exchange with Prof John Edmunds, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in September 2020.

Here it is:

Prof Edmunds was recorded discussing the exchange at the Covid-19 Inquiry today (October 19, 2023):

According to the BBC,

Prof Edmunds told the inquiry he was unable recall if that had been a specific reference to the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which had subsidised food in pubs, restaurants and other hospitality venues over the summer, while Covid cases had been low.

But in earlier testimony to the inquiry, he said he was “still angry” about the policy.

“It was one thing to take your foot off the brake – but to put your foot on the accelerator,” he told the inquiry.

Prof Edmunds told the inquiry 45,000 people had just died – and while the pub and restaurant sector needed support, the government could have just given them money.

“This was a scheme to encourage people to take an epidemiological risk,” he added.

To explain: he was saying Sunak was asking us to gamble on whether we would catch Covid-19 or not. And we now know that the scheme led to 17 per cent more of us being infected than would otherwise have contracted the disease.

This Writer is unaware of any statistics showing the number of people who died – but there would have been fatalities.

This means Rishi Sunak is directly responsible for the deaths of many people who might otherwise have been alive and contributing to UK society today, if not for him and his homicidally reckless fiasco.

As some have already commented: no wonder he is refusing to release his own WhatsApp messages from the time of the scheme.

The question now is: how can he be brought to justice?

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