Is truth the first casualty of pandemics? Of all the deplorable claims made about Covid, for me the most brazen was one of the earliest, in April 2020, by Boris Johnson. He said we “succeeded in the first and most important task”, because “at no stage has our NHS been overwhelmed. No patient went without a ventilator. No patient was deprived of intensive care … We avoided an uncontrollable and catastrophic epidemic.”
When the prime minister uttered those extraordinary words, immediately after his own hospitalisation with Covid, I nearly choked in disbelief. Our death toll that day had reached 26,771. It was a dizzying number, too vast to comprehend. You grope for analogies to anchor such losses in your mind. This was like 60 jumbo jets full of human beings, each packed to capacity, falling from the sky. The insensitivity of attempting to spin as “success” such manifest horror took my breath away.
