Having read his identical (copied and pasted) response to several people regarding the Cummings affair, I have, for the first time, written to my MP Richard Drax to ask him three questions. Here’s the letter……
28th May 2020
To: Mr R Drax MP
Dear Mr Drax
I hope you are well.
In your standard response to several constituents regarding the breaking of lockdown guidelines by Dominic Cummings (which I have viewed from several people so no need to reply with it), your final paragraph states: “Meanwhile it is vital that we all concentrate on the top priority, which is to get the country back to work as safely and quickly as possible. I have seen many businesses in South Dorset and across the country struggling to survive due to this lockdown. And with recovery now a very real likelihood, it’s time to move on.”
I have three questions:
1. Why is your (and your government’s) stated priority never to prevent deaths? Throughout the pandemic, it was repeatedly asserted at Daily Briefings that the main priority was to keep cases below the levels of NHS capacity. In order to achieve this stated aim, it is clear that the government’s actions led to mass deaths in care homes with residents refused admission to hospital or patients with Covid removed from hospital into care homes. Now, with average daily tested Covid-19 deaths over the last 10 days still at a rate of 110,996 deaths per year, you assert that the ‘top priority’ is to get the country back to work!
When will you and your government put ‘saving lives’ or ‘preventing deaths’ as your top priority?!
2. You say you’ve seen many businesses struggling to survive and added that recovery is now a very real likelihood. My friend works in a local care home and has seen many residents struggling to survive and then losing that struggle. For them, there is no likelihood of recovery. They’re dead. Denied hospital admission. Sent back to the care home to die – untreated, untested and even uncounted!
When will you resign?
3. Would you not agree that, if a government special advisor holds a press conference in the Downing Street Rose Garden and, in the course of that event, lies to the public, he must go?
In the Rose Garden, Cummings stated: “For years I’ve warned of the dangers of pandemics. Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning.”
It has since emerged that he did no such thing and that he lied about this to the British public. His blog post from March 2019 – the only thing he wrote last year which relates to the subject and was actually about potential and real accidents in biological laboratories – contained no mention of coronavirus. However, the blog post was edited on 14th April (the day Cummings returned from Durham) to include a mention of SARS and coronavirus!
It was hardly a warning though. The section mentioning coronavirus reads: “The report describes yet another well-publicised incident in China in which “two researchers conducting virus research were exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus samples that were completely inactivated. These researchers subsequently transmitted SARS to others, leading to several infections and one death in 2004.”
So, would you not agree that, if a special advisor lies to the public in this way, he must go?
Yours sincerely
Thomas Lane
Weymouth Resident
