Lord Frost has described lockdown as a serious policy mistake. The former head of the UK Brexit negotiating team, told The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, that instead of using antiviral drugs and effective ventilation, the Prime Minister chose lockdown when it wasn’t necessary.
According to The Telegraph:
Lord Frost has accused the Government of “Covid theatre”, as he called on Boris Johnson to scrap mask mandates and warned that the country will look back on lockdowns as a “serious public policy mistake”.
Instead of pursuing “stuff that works” such as antiviral drugs and effective ventilation, Mr Johnson has locked down the country and restricted freedoms unnecessarily, the peer argued, as he called on ministers to rule out any prospect of a new lockdown and to consider a more diverse range of advice when making public health decisions.
Lord Frost, who rose to prominence as an adviser to Mr Johnson in the Foreign Office before being handed a peerage for his leadership of the UK’s Brexit negotiating team, resigned dramatically days before Christmas over concerns about the Government’s “direction of travel”.
He told The Telegraph that coronavirus policy was the main reason for his departure from the Cabinet.
“That was the reason I resigned. That’s what took me out of the Government in December,” he said. “I didn’t agree with the Plan B measures, masks, vaccine passports – that’s what forced me out.”
Frost told The Telegraph that he would like to see the government make it official that the country will never be locked down again. He also criticised Boris Johnson for failing to consider a broad enough range of expert advice on key issues such as masks and vaccines.
He said:
“I’ve seen a fair bit of the material and I do think that there hasn’t been enough internal debate. There haven’t been enough voices challenging the epidemiologists. There hasn’t been enough of a voice of the economy in this, [or] an attempt to get to grips with the trade-offs.
I have seen the Prime Minister kind of groping for that information and it not being there, and I think he’s not necessarily being well-served by everybody around him.”
