Dear Nickie Aiken (Tory MP for the Cities of London & Westminster),

Hello. I’m afraid you will be receiving several emails from me during this bank holiday weekend. I am one of the few people locally who has not gone to the seaside for the weekend, as so many others appear to have done following the pathetically confused advice from the government, which I fear will lead to many new Covid-19 infections this week.

I find it ironic that everyone is baying for the resignation of Dominic Cummings when the Prime Minister himself broke the rules early on by visiting a hospital and shaking hands with patients with Covid-19 and laughingly said so to a media camera. I have the footage and it’s been shared many times. (See the video link in the report some pages below this one on this blog.)

But I am writing also to criticise the entire government policy on Covid-19. Although I do not have a degree in public health, I have been studying and publishing information on international women’s health issues since 1985. This has included information about the HIV pandemic, about which I published a 400-page book in relation to women’s health in four languages, and more recently regarding the Zika virus, which had a terrible effect on babies born to women with that virus. I am now publishing a twice weekly international newsletter on abortion rights and reproductive health and rights for readers in 129 countries, and have been informing myself about policy on preventing, mitigating and treating Covid-19 for that publication. What I have to say is very simple…

The number and rate of infections and deaths from Covid-19 in each country is a direct reflection of whether their government’s policy is correct or incorrect. In this country, every Tory MP who appears in the media and on television has apparently been instructed to say, like an automaton, that the government has been “following the scientific advice”. But the numbers do not lie. The numbers say that the government has failed, from day one, to implement evidence-based policy that would have prevented most of the current 37,000+ confirmed deaths and 257,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the UK. These statistics, these dead human beings who gave their lives helping other people, are among the highest figures in the world for such a tiny country.

It is Boris Johnson and his whole government who should resign in shame for having killed so many people by ignoring World Health Organization advice, not just early on but up to this day.

Compare this to Taiwan, also an island, with a population of 23 million, compared to our 66 million. Taiwan, so near China, was one of the first places the virus could have hit. (In 2019, 2.71 million visitors from mainland China travelled to Taiwan and thousands of Taiwanese travel back and forth to China on a daily basis as well.) Yet Taiwan as of yesterday had had only 441 infections and 7 deaths from Covid-19. That is the measure of the failure of our government, your leader. What did Taiwan do that the UK has not:

1. Inspection of all travellers since January arriving from other countries for signs of infection and quarantine any who test positive.

2. Mobilisation of their Central Epidemic Command Center – a rapid-response agency formed in the wake of the 2003 SARS outbreak – to implement quarantines, give the government advice on proven policy, advise hospitals and publish daily informative messages for the public.

3. Testing large numbers of people from the start. Putting people with infection in a special quarantine hospital until 14 days after they test free of the virus.

4. Manual contact tracing to find everyone who had contact with the infected persons and testing and quarantining them if infected.

5. Producing millions of masks and ensuring they are sold cheaply to every citizen, and are always worn when people are outside their homes, especially on public transport. Fines for those who have been warned but do not mask.

6. Enforcing messages about how critical social distancing is, daily.

7. Ensuring that everyone seeing patients has proper PPE – in hospitals, care situations and many many others.

Unlike us, almost no one has died. Unlike us, they never needed lockdown. Unlike Johnson’s health minister and Public Health England cronies, they knew what the correct science was and they have implemented it to the letter.

The Johnson Tory government has done none of these things properly, or at all. The mucking about with apps has been appalling. The use of DeLoitte ad other incompetent private firms,  Johnson’s buddies no doubt, not using local NHS labs with expertise, refusing EU PPE equipment when it was offered, was/is outrageous. Johnson is lying to the people on a daily basis, just like he promised those millions for the NHS on the side of a bus last year. On top of the rest of it, they have been charging the least well paid and least protected NHS health workers and care workers for their own NHS care and only giving in when there was massive protest… the last straw for me.

The verdict: criminal negligence on a large scale. 40,000 people dead unnecessarily whose lives had no value to Boris Johnson because they probably wouldn’t have voted for him anyway. There’s not much to choose between Johnson, Trump, Bolsanaro and Modi. All very right-wing and self-serving. All dead ignorant about health, welfare and human rights. All incompetent in spite of all the money they can command and represent.

So I want Boris Johnson to resign, and that will take care of Cummings too. Two for the price of one.