We may be old, Boris Johnson, but don’t dare call us expendable

At the Covid inquiry in London on 31 October Boris Johnson's advisers criticised his handling of the pandemic, as text messages revealed he believed that Covid was ‘nature's way of dealing with old people’. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

I was delighted to discover that in October 2020 Boris Johnson informed his colleagues that “Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people” (‘Nastiness, arrogance and misogyny’ of No 10 exposed at Covid inquiry, 31 October). What pleased me is that he seems to have become an expert on the history of the human race. In Johnson’s worldview at this moment, was he thinking of old people as a category of human that needed to be dealt with, and now a solution had arrived?

Can I therefore apologise for the fact that the efficiency of Covid in dealing with me didn’t go so far as wiping me out? However, the blame for that surely lies at the hands of the health workers who did all they could to save my life. As the inquiry has also revealed, the desperate lack of preparedness and, I would add, those workers’ understaffed, low-pay conditions, are surely suitable punishment for their refusal to see us old people as bits of mulch.
Michael Rosen
London