“We Should Be Aiming to Eliminate Covid”: New Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Woeful Record on Lockdowns

The new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has in recent months been rebranding himself as a lockdown sceptic, winning Esther McVey’s support in the leadership contest and pledging, according to McVey, never to impose “full lockdowns or damaging restrictions” again. However, prior to the post-Omicron political wind-change, Hunt was an eager supporter of the extreme Zero Covid position, advocating elimination of the disease, criticising the lifting of restrictions, voting for vaccine passports and praising the Chinese example of police-enforced quarantine.

In May, the Spectator collected together some of Hunt’s most pro-lockdown quotes. Such as the time, in July 2020, when he spoke to the pro-restriction group Independent SAGE and pledged his allegiance to the Zero Covid creed:

I very much agree… that we should be aiming for zero infection and elimination of the disease because that is basically the approach taken in countries which have a SARS strategy as opposed to a flu strategy and those are the countries that have overwhelmingly been the most successful in tackling coronavirus. My sister lives in Beijing and she flew back to Beijing in the middle of lockdown. Just to give you an idea of the contrast, she was escorted from the airport in Beijing to her home by Ministry of Health officials and then put into her home for two weeks’ quarantine. The door was sealed and she had a police car sitting outside her house periodically. Now I’m not saying that we go that far in this country but I just think it’s an indication of how serious they are, in the countries that have had to deal with SARS, about stopping, at the route, every possible source of infection.

Hunt was a leading critic of Boris Johnson for not locking down quicker in March 2020, as joint Chair of a parliamentary committee that released a report on the matter, hyperbolically calling it “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced”. In early 2021 he insisted restrictions must stay until reported infections were below 1,000 a day and in late 2021 he voted for ‘Plan B’ restrictions and vaccine passports.

In February 2021, as his colleague Mark Harper was leading the Covid Recovery Group in demanding the removal of pandemic restrictions, Hunt was insisting that they stay until cases were below 1,000 a day. In October, Hunt welcomed a report by a joint parliamentary committee into Covid on which he sat as one of two chairs. The report itself said that the delay to impose a first lockdown last spring was “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced”.

Asked on Good Morning Britain about whether the U.K. should have locked down sooner he replied: “That’s what we conclude in the report, that we should have gone earlier.” And then, in December that same year, the one-time Health Minister also voted with the Government on ‘Plan B’ and was not one of the 128 MPs who defied Boris Johnson’s ‘vaccine passport’ scheme.

This doesn’t sound like a person I’d like to be making decisions next time the world panics over a nasty cold.