Dominic Cummings has rubbished claims that there was a “protective shield” around care homes during the pandemic, saying it is “complete nonsense”.
Appearing in front of a select committee, the prime minister’s former aide said there are ‘at least 15-20 things’ Matt Hancock should have been fired for.
One of which is that he lied to the PM when he told him people would be tested before being sent into homes, a claim rubbished by Cummings.
He said: “The government rhetoric was we put a shield around people in career homes – that was complete nonsense.
“Quite the opposite of putting a shield around them, we sent people with Covid back to care homes with Covid.”
The Government should have paid people to stay at home and isolate if they had Covid symptoms, Cummings said.
Pointing to the South Korean system, Mr Cummings told MPs it was “a combination of stick and carrot”.
“It’s much stricter in terms of legal things, like you’ll get put in jail if you break the quarantine,” he said.
“But we also will provide food to your door, we will pay you so you’re not financially disadvantaged etc, like lots of things essentially, if we just cut and pasted what they were doing in Singapore or Taiwan or whatever and just said ‘that’s our policy, everything would have been better. I think it’s just no doubt about that at all.”
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