Scientists were given too much power when it came to lockdown decisions, prospective Prime Minister Rushi Sunak has claimed. The Tory leadership contender says he “wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off” of lockdowns during earlier phases of the pandemic.
Mr Sunak said one of the Government’s biggest mistakes was giving too much power to scientists and claimed the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) edited its minutes to hide dissenting opinions. The former chancellor made the statements in an interview with the Spectator magazine.
“We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did,” he is quoted as saying. “And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place. We’d probably have made different decisions on things like schools.”
