U.S. President Donald Trump has slammed Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to “cancel Christmas” in much of England with a new “tier four” regional lockdown, saying the “cure” to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic “cannot be worse than the problem itself!”
The American leader responded on social media to his British counterpart’s decision to scrap a partial five-day respite from lockdown rules over Christmas and plunge London and much of southern England into new “tier four” restrictions, even harsher than the tier three restrictions which were previously the strictest in England’s system of tiered regional lockdowns.
“We don’t want to have lockdowns,” President Trump said, quote tweeting a post by the BBC featuring a clip from Boris Johnson’s press conference on the new curbs.
“The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself!”
President’s Trump’s view of lockdowns as potentially being more damaging than the pandemic itself is not without its supporters in the United Kingdom, with Lord Sumption — who served as a Supreme Court justice until 2018 and is still a member of its Supplementary Panel — denouncing lockdowns as both “useless” and “immoral” shortly before “tier four” was announced.
“There have been savage lockdowns, as in Spain, which put the army on the streets to stop people going out, even for exercise. There have been purely advisory regimes, like Sweden’s… The common factor is that they have failed,” the 72-year-old jurist insisted.
“[P]ause to think about the damage all this is inflicting on the young,” he urged the public in an article for The Telegraph.
“They are seeing their careers and job prospects destroyed before their eyes. We will get over Covid-19 eventually. Many of them will never get over the long-term effects of the countermeasures,” he suggested.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.