Coronavirus: UK health minister insists he didn’t lie to Johnson about COVID-19 pandemic

Madrid, 10 (European Press)

Britain’s health minister, Matt Hancock, insisted on Thursday that he had not lied to Prime Minister Boris Johnson about the COVID-19 pandemic, after former adviser to the “prime minister” Dominic Cummings confirmed this.

Specifically, Cummings reported that Hancock lied to colleagues about how COVID-19 was handled in British nursing homes. Johnson’s former adviser, who is highly critical of the minister, said Hancock “should have been fired for at least 15 or 20 things”, including “lies” on “multiple occasions”, such as cabinet and citizen meetings.

He also noted that the minister said in a cabinet meeting that people who will enter nursing homes will undergo diagnostic tests for COVID-19. “We later found out that didn’t happen,” he said, asserting that “the government’s rhetoric” is now that the housing is protected, which Cummings considers “complete nonsense.”

In an intervention in the House of Commons, the British minister made particular reference to the issue of housing and emphasized that the government had put in place a protocol allowing older people to undergo diagnostic tests when they were ‘available’.

In parallel, he reiterated that the British Executive has always followed the “clinical recommendations”, which include three “key points”: that the British health system did not have the capacity to conduct tests at the time; the fact that testing of asymptomatic patients may lead to false positive results; And that the tests were conducted four days before returning to the residences, so that patients could return to the residences and test positive afterwards.

“From the beginning we knew that people living in housing were among the most vulnerable, and we did everything we could to help them,” he emphasized, before confirming that thousands of COVID-19 deaths in housing were affecting him. a lot and they always will,” compiled Sky News.

Hancock, on the other hand, said he knew Cummings wanted him fired, but noted that he had always had the “full support” of Johnson, the BBC reported.