Take mutant strain ‘with a pinch of salt’, Tory MP says
SCIENTISTS’ “disaster” warnings about the new strain of Covid-19 should be taken with a “pinch of salt” until a more in-depth review of the data has been conducted, a senior Tory MP has said.
Sir Desmond Swayne said yesterday that he believed Boris Johnson had been “bounced” into announcing Tier 4 restrictions for London and the South East by the “health lobby”.
His scepticism was shared by a senior scientist on the Government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group.
Prof Robert Dingwall said he was surprised that after the group expressed “moderate confidence that there was something we should be concerned about”, that this was “transformed over the course of 24 hours into a national panic”. He said he found it “very hard to see the logic” of Tier 4 restrictions because the new variant is “all over the UK anyway”.
Adam Afriyie, the Conservative MP, urged the Government to abandon cycles of lockdowns and restrictions, which he said had “self-evidently failed” to curb the virus. Writing for The Telegraph online, he said: “With tens of thousands of new beds and equipment, akin to the Nightingales, and tens of thousands of new staff, we could allow the economy to function.”
Sir Desmond claimed that scientists’ warnings about the new strain had been deliberately timed for after Parliament had risen for the Christmas recess, so MPS could not scrutinise the data. He said: “Just a little bit of a pinch of salt is required to see actually what we’re dealing with. Let’s give it a few more days of unpicking by people who are capable of reviewing the data in an informed way.”