Former Aide to Boris Johnson Describes Chaos and
Incompetence in Britain’s Covid Response
May 27,
2021, 1:55 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/26/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask
Dominic Cummings tells lawmakers that the prime
minister suggested that a doctor inject him with the coronavirus on live
television. The F.D.A. approves a third antibody treatment for people with
high-risk Covid.
LONDON —
Dominic Cummings, the former top aide to Prime Minister Boris Johnson of
Britain, on Wednesday painted a picture of chaos, incompetence and confusion at
the heart of the government in a ferociously critical account of its early
handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Testifying
before lawmakers, Mr. Cummings said that Mr. Johnson had initially regarded
Covid-19 as a “scare story” and at one point had suggested that a doctor inject
him with the coronavirus on live television to play down the dangers to a
worried public.
The prime
minister was being advised by a health secretary, Matt Hancock, whom Mr.
Cummings accused in his testimony of lying repeatedly, being unworthy of the
health care workers he directed and presiding over the deadly transfer of
elderly patients from hospitals to nursing homes, many of them carrying the
virus.
And as the
pandemic closed in on Britain, Mr. Johnson was distracted, his former aide
said, by an unflattering story about his fiancée and her dog.
“When the
public needed us most, the government failed,” said Mr. Cummings, the political
strategist who masterminded Britain’s campaign to leave the European Union and
engineered Mr. Johnson’s rise to power before falling out bitterly with his
boss and emerging as a self-styled whistle-blower.
Mr. Cummings
testified for more than seven hours, in a scene with few precedents in British
politics: an unelected aide who had been arguably the nation’s second-most
powerful man, offering an unfiltered look at the inner workings of the British
government as it confronted the greatest national emergency since World War II.
“The
problem in this crisis was very much lions led by donkeys, over and over
again,” Mr. Cummings said.
Mr.
Johnson, who was hospitalized with a severe case of Covid-19 in April 2020, flatly
rejected several of the assertions of his former aide in his own appearance on
Wednesday in Parliament, where lawmakers are trying to determine how the early
days of the pandemic were botched so badly.
Mr.
Cummings, 49, did not absolve himself of all blame. He admitted he had not been
open about the reasons for a much-criticized road trip he made with his family
that breached lockdown rules. And he acknowledged his mistake in not pushing
the prime minister to lock down the country earlier than he did, in March of
last year.
“Yes, it
was a huge failing of mine,” Mr. Cummings told a joint meeting of Parliament’s
Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committees. “I
bitterly regret that I did not hit the emergency panic button earlier than I
did.”
The Food
and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized a monoclonal antibody drug
developed by GlaxoSmithKline and Vir as the third treatment of its kind cleared
to help keep high-risk Covid patients out of the hospital.
In
laboratory tests the newly authorized drug, known as sotrovimab, has been able
to neutralize the virus variants first identified in Britain, South Africa,
Brazil, California, New York and India. The federal government, which has so
far purchased the other antibody treatments given to Covid patients in the
United States, has not announced any plans to purchase the new drug.
GSK has
been in conversations with the United States government and is “working through
existing commercial channels to make sotrovimab available to patients and
health systems in need,” said Kathleen Quinn, a company spokeswoman.
The company
said in a news release that it expects the drug to become available in the U.S.
“in the coming weeks.”
The new
treatment may offer an advantage as concerns rise about new virus variants that
may evade some antibody drugs.
The federal
government has paused shipments of one antibody treatment on the market, a
cocktail of two drugs from Eli Lilly, to eight states because of the high
prevalence there of the variants first seen in South Africa and Brazil. Lab
experiments suggest those variants can resist Lilly’s treatment. (The other
available antibody treatment, a cocktail of two drugs from Regeneron, appears
to neutralize the array of variants,
based on lab tests.)
GSK and
Vir’s treatment is a single drug, designed to mimic the antibodies generated
naturally when the immune system fights off the coronavirus, like those
detectable after someone infected with it recovers. Its authorization was based
on a study of 583 volunteers who had started experiencing symptoms within the
previous five days. The study found that those who got the GSK-Vir treatment
showed an 85 percent reduction in their risk of hospitalization or death,
compared with those who got a placebo.
Even as
vaccination numbers rise and infection rates fall in the United States, the antibody
treatments are likely to remain an important tool for preventing bad outcomes
in high-risk patients, doctors say. Thousands of people in the United States
are still testing positive, and hundreds dying, each day.
Last week
the F.D.A. broadened the criteria that
doctors can use to determine eligibility for the treatment, opening the door
for more young people with certain medical conditions like hypertension, and
members of racial or ethnic groups considered to be at higher risk than others
for bad medical outcomes.
“Ultimately,
it gives prescribers a lot of latitude in what they can give this for,” said
Dr. Walid F. Gellad, who directs the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and
Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh.
But the
drugs from Lilly and Regeneron have not been used as widely as expected for a
range of reasons, according to public health experts.
The
antibody drugs are all cumbersome to administer. Patients often don’t know to
ask for them or where to find them. And many doctors were skeptical of the
evidence supporting the treatments when they first became available last
November, though that has changed as more clinical trials have reported
impressive results.
“There’s
still a role for these,” Dr. Gellad said. “The problem is just people aren’t
getting them who could benefit from them, and having another one on the market
doesn’t necessarily solve that.”
GSK and
Vir’s treatment, like the other antibody drugs, must be administered via
intravenous infusion by a health-care provider, which will make it harder to
access. The drug makers are testing a formulation injected intramuscularly,
like a vaccine, but that is not expected to be available soon.
— Rebecca Robbins
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