Let the bodies pile high: even if Boris Johnson didn’t say those words, that was the ultimate result. And his decision to ignore what happened – his determination that lessons won’t be learned – makes him and his party unfit to govern, at national or local level.
If the people of the UK were the kind who take notice of facts, we would be indebted to Simon Wren-Lewis of Mainly Macro for pointing out how badly our Tory government – among many others – got its strategy for Covid-19 wrong.
Professor Wren-Lewis points to a study in top medical journal The Lancet, showing that countries that tried to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 – in order to keep their economies going – caused many times the number of deaths suffered in countries that decided to eliminate the virus altogether.
And their economies suffered more, as well!
You want proof?
Here’s the chart from the Lancet article comparing the number of deaths (per million, per day) in mitigation countries (blue) with those in elimination countries (red):
That seems conclusive – as does the chart showing the effect on our respective economies:
Elimination countries saw a smaller fall in GDP, and a faster recovery at the end of 2020 and so far in 2021. There was no health/economy trade-off and anybody who suggests that is a liar.
But this is an article about whether lessons were learned – and the answer is that in the UK, they clearly weren’t.
Consider Boris Johnson’s keenness to end the first lockdown at the earliest opportunity in order to get the economy moving again.
What did he achieve? Not one, but two further lockdowns.
He learned nothing – either from the UK’s own experience or from comparisons with other nations.
He deliberately ignored the facts in order to pursue a boneheaded plan that caused tens of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.
And he has trumpeted this national disaster as though it were a huge success.
What kind of psychopath claims that deliberately causing more than 100,000 avoidable deaths is a resounding success?
There can be only one conclusion: he didn’t learn anything from his failures because he didn’t want to.
We may take our finding from this and apply it to other situations in which bad outcomes are followed with a claim from government that “lessons will be learned”.
They won’t. These people are lying and should be ejected from government – of any kind – as soon as possible.
And guess what?
There are local elections on May 6.
Source: mainly macro: How most of the West got the pandemic so badly wrong?
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