Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson defended his actions during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic while expressing regret for the pain and loss suffered by victims during a heated public inquiry Wednesday in London.
"Can I just say how glad I am to be at this inquiry and how sorry I am for the pain and the loss and the suffering of the COVID victims," Johnson said on the first of his two days of evidence to the inquiry.
He insisted that he was not adequately warned about the potential severity of the pandemic in the early months of 2020.
One of the key questions posed to Johnson was why he did not take more urgent action in January and early February 2020, despite warnings about the rapid spread and potential lethality of COVID.
"When you read that an Asiatic pandemic is about to sweep the world, you think you've heard it before. And that was the problem," Johnson said during his testimony. "I was not being informed that this was something that would require urgent and immediate action."
The former prime minister admitted that there was not enough emphasis placed on the forecasts.
He acknowledged the need for a louder warning, saying "because of the experience that we'd had with other zoonotic diseases (infections transmitted between species), I think collectively in Whitehall, there was not a sufficiently loud enough klaxon."
"It's clear that we vastly underestimated the risks in those early weeks. If we properly understood how fast COVID was spreading and the fact that it was spreading asymptomatically, there are many things we would have done differently…We were operating on a fallacious inductive logic about previous reasonable worst-case scenarios," he added.
