Boris Johnson ‘was obsessed with older people accepting their fate’, Covid inquiry hears

The former prime minister told senior advisers that the coronavirus pandemic was ‘just nature’s way of dealing with old people’ and he was ‘no longer buying’ the fact the NHS was overwhelmed during the pandemic, the Covid inquiry heard during Lee Cain’s evidence session.

The government’s chief scientific adviser at the time, Sir Patrick Vallance, wrote in one of his notebooks in August 2020 that Johnson was ‘obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and the economy going’.

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Boris Johnson favoured ‘older people accepting their fate’, Covid inquiry hears