Boris Johnson asked scientists if people could kill Covid by blowing a hairdryer up their nose after he watched a YouTube video suggesting this, according to The Mirror.
The then-PM shared the clip on a WhatsApp group including Government health experts and senior No10 officials. In a written statement to the Covid Inquiry, Dominic Cummings accused Johnson of spreading misinformation during the pandemic, the report said.
The report further said that Dominic Cummings accused Johnson of spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
“A low point was when he circulated a video of a guy blowing a special hair dryer up his nose ‘to kill Covid’ and asked the CSA (Chief Scientific Adviser) and CMO (Chief Medical Officer) what they thought,” the former No10 adviser wrote, according to The Mirror.
Johnson, the report added, complained to officials that he felt like he was Inspector Clouseau in Pink Panther as he recovered from having Covid in May 2020.
Johnson demanded that Cummings create a “dead cat” to distract the public from Covid in autumn 2020. “My relations with the PM were in a bad state and getting worse,” the former adviser wrote in his witness statement. “By June he was blaming me for, in his words, ‘bouncing’ him into the first lockdown and saying he should have been the Mayor of Jaws… He wanted to declare Covid ‘over’ even though this would obviously backfire, not just on him but on government credibility generally.
“At one point in autumn he told me to ‘put your campaign head back on and figure out how we dead cat Covid, I’m sick of Covid, I want it off the front pages’. I said that no campaign could ‘dead cat Covid’ and I would not spend my time on such a project.”
Cummings, according to the report, also told how Johnson went on a fortnight long holiday in February 2020, as the pandemic was about to hit, as he wanted to work on a book he was writing about William Shakespeare.