London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Wednesday, Oct 08, 2025

Cummings to release ‘crucial document from Covid decision-making’

Cummings to release ‘crucial document from Covid decision-making’

Boris Johnson’s former senior adviser posts series of tweets relating to UK coronavirus strategy

Dominic Cummings has said he will release a key document on Covid decision-making in government when he appears in front of MPs next week as part of their inquiry into the handling of the pandemic.

The prime minister’s former senior adviser, who departed in December, has made it clear in recent months that he believes crucial mistakes were made in the early weeks of the pandemic, including on border closures and mask-wearing.

“I’ve got the only copy of a crucial historical document from Covid decision-making,” he tweeted, saying he could offer up the document for auction as a non-fungible token to raise money for the family of Covid victims.

In a later tweet, he said he would give the documents to the joint inquiry, which is being conducted by MPs on the Commons’ health select committee and the science and technology committee.

Cummings is due to appear before the committee next Wednesday, where he has said he will answer questions “for as long as MPs want”. He has also said he is prepared to submit private text messages to any Covid-19 inquiry.

No 10 said it would not comment on the disclosure threat. “I’m not going to speculate about what information individuals may or may not choose to present at committees,” Boris Johnson’s spokesman said.


Cummings has made a number of critical comments in recent days about mistakes the government made during the pandemic, including calling the UK’s borders policy “a joke”.

In a Twitter thread, he said that “political pundits” had spread a “tradeoff” argument between lockdown and economic recovery, saying that evidence was clear that “fast hard effective action [is] best policy for economy AND for reducing deaths/suffering”.

He said Westminster, across the spectrum, had been “totally hostile to learning from east Asia” including countries such as Taiwan.

He said it was based on “nonsense memes like ‘asians all do as they’re told, it won’t work here’. This is what many behavioural science ‘experts’/charlatans argued, disastrously, in February 2020. This nonsense is STILL influencing policy, eg our joke borders policy.”

Cummings suggested that half measures initially pursued by the government had been the worst of both worlds. “Pseudo ‘lockdowns’ [without] serious enforcement are hopeless: econ[omy] hit and people die anyway, nightmare rumbles on.”

He also suggested that the relative success of the UK’s vaccine taskforce and subsequent rollout of the vaccination programme had made the government complacent.

The government should have been willing to take even more risks on the vaccine programme than it did, he said, including immediate human challenge trials, which he said could have resulted in vaccines as early as last summer.

Cummings said he regretted how little public scrutiny of the government’s plans had been permitted, including its vaccine programme and meetings with scientific advisers.

“I can think of no significant element of Covid response that would not have been improved by discarding secrecy and opening up,” he tweeted.

“Who is writing the plan for ‘how we deal with something worse than covid?’ If we get this right now, we do not need to have this sort of disaster again…. The covid plan was supposed to be ‘world class’ but turned out to be part disaster, part non-existent. I urged inside government to do a review of other contingency plans for more dangerous things than covid.

“MPs [should] force publication of vaccine/variant plan & require mostly open review of other contingency plans before we find out the hard way they’re as ‘world class’ as the covid plan.”

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
Private Equity’s Fundraising Surge Triggers Concern of European Market Shake-Out
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
×