The legacy of Boris Johnson’s initial approach to the pandemic can be measured in lives needlessly lost and ruined, says Michael Rosen
Your report on US officials’ reaction to Boris Johnson’s initial coronavirus policy, to aim for herd immunity (Trump team thought UK officials ‘out of their minds’ aiming for herd immunity, book says, 19 August), confirms what many of us have been saying for some time. If we follow the timeline of what he said and did in the months leading up to the first lockdown of 16 March last year, we can indeed see quite clearly that herd immunity was the first go-to policy.
Some examples: Johnson saying on 3 February that he was against “market segregation” as a way of dealing with the coronavirus – in other words, he was against a government-led intervention policy that might hamper trade. Later, on 3 March, he described how safe it was to shake hands with Covid patients and said that he would go on doing so. On 12 March, Robert Peston, presumably armed with his usual first-hand knowledge, wrote in the Spectator how herd immunity was the policy of the day. As late as 13 March, government scientists, speaking on BBC Two’s Newsnight and Radio 4’s Today programme, spoke openly of herd immunity as being the inevitable or necessary approach.