Thread by @ariehkovler

Watching former Boris Johnson advisor @Dominic2306 testify at the Parliamentary inquiry on the Covid-19 pandemic, I'm struck how it's SO much better, more useful, more constructive and more informative than a Congressional hearing.

https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1397471543282786312

@Dominic2306 No subpoena power (Cummings himself has refused to attend a committee summons before), no enforceable penalties for lying. But also no grandstanding by Members, no speeches, no nonsense. Short questions, long answers.

Cummings reflective. Apologises for not setting up a Downing Street "red team" on the coronavirus to inspect Govt preparation in January 2020.

Cummings said meetings of COBRA, the UK Government's crisis meeting structure, are 'mostly going through Powerpoint slides' and not a great use of his time. Which honestly sounds fair enough, despite some of the pearl-clutching reactions.

Cummings says he and other Downing Street officials deliberately stopped Boris Johnson from chairing COBRA because Johnson thought it was all just a scare story and would have made the meetings pointless.

Cummings says that in April 2020, he edited a 2019 blog about Gain-of-Function research on coronaviruses because he could see it'd become a US political issue when Trump used it to attack Biden during the election campaign. That didn't happen, though it's become an issue now.

Cummings: original UK plan assumed that the coronavirus would be impossible to suppress, vaccines would be 2021 at earliest. Only options were single peak in spring 2020 and herd immunity by Sep or second, worse winter peak and herd immunity by Jan 2021.

[AK comment: In retrospect, this plan would never have worked. No nation in the world, however lax its restrictions and however high its death toll, has reached natural herd immunity by June 2021]

Cummings: We didn't want to stop large sports events because it would just drive people into pubs. But we didn't take the next logical step and say maybe we need to close pubs.

Cummings: began doubting the UK scientific consensus in early March. Wrote to Johnson and others on March 11 to challenge the decision to delay the inevitable lockdown.

But he clarifies that by the time he raised these points on 11th it was "too late; we had already gone terribly wrong"

Cummings says the strategy was based on two big, wrong assumptions: that the British public wouldn't accept a lockdown or a track-and-trace system. Cummings says he was sceptical of the behavioural science that made these claims.

Cummings: On the day the big meeting on Covid strategy was supposed to happen, Trump called and says he wants the UK to join a bombing campaign in Iraq. At the same time, Boris Johnson's girlfriend is furious about a Times story about his dog.

Cummings: Scientist Ben Warner took Boris Johnson through the data on 13 March, showing the modelling was wrong. "He was like Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day".

The Cummings testimony is obviously somewhat self-serving. But I've been a political adviser (not at that level!) and it rings true. The terror that you've made the wrong decision, the constant managing up, the attitude to COBRA-like crisis meetings.

Also the sense of unreality while a crisis happens, the feeling you're in a film.

Cummings: The Cabinet Secretary told me and the Prime Minister that he had lost confidence in Health Secretary Matt Hancock and his honesty

Cummings: Of course the UK political system is broken. At the last election, the choice was between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. With a choice like that, the system must be broken.

Cummings: Why was *I* promoted so highly? I'm not clever and never built anything. Too many people in government are overpromoted.

This whole line of questioning was because Rebecca Long-Bailey doesn't understand what Cummings means by 'incentives'.

Cummings talking about a govt risk register. I ran the UK Jewish community's risk register. It's one of the more valuable projects I've worked on.

Apparently, the UK Government's plan on solar flares is even worse than their pandemic plan. And Cummings implies that maybe the Anthrax terrorism plan isn't so robust either.

Ministers have responsibility, but hiring and firing is done by the civil service. So when the Covid crisis hit, everyone was like the Spider-Mans in the Spider-Man meme, pointing at each other. Thanks, Dom.

Well, it's more like this

Interesting: Cummings says that the Health Secretary's target of 100k coronavirus tests a day was a disaster because the rush to meet the target made it harder to build mass (1M+) testing for the medium term.

Cummings: People still don't understand how the coronavirus spreads because the Govt didn't explain it properly. Still too much emphasis on handwashing, not enough on airborne transmission

Cummings says that in March 2020, he considered resigning and holding a press conference saying the Govt is killing thousands if a lockdown hadn't been agreed — and that he made a similar threat in autumn 2020