Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings told BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg on Monday that the prime minister was adamant that to keep the economy open last autumn no further lockdowns could be contemplated. Johnson, said Cummings, declared of the deadly virus, “We should basically just ignore it and just let the thing wash through the country and not destroy the economy and move on.”

Cummings provided the BBC with a series of devastating WhatsApp messages written at the time by Johnson backing up his claims.

In May, Cummings provided initial insider details on the vast criminal exercise in herd immunity that has led to the deaths of more than 150,000 people from COVID-19 in Britain. Early planning scenarios being worked out in Downing Street were based on up to 800,000 people being killed by the virus. He told a parliamentary inquiry days later, again backed up with WhatsApp messages, that due to the government’s indifference, “Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die.”

Speaking to Kuenssberg he revealed much more information, including the fact that chief medical adviser Chris Whitty and chief science adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and others in the highest echelons of government were fully aware of Johnson’s homicidal agenda.

Cummings recalled that last autumn, “He [Johnson] said we should never have done the first lockdown, he said that repeatedly in meetings in Number 10.”

Cummings added, “After the first wave passed and after he [Johnson] came back to work, initially his view was essentially, thank goodness we did do that.

“But very quickly, as the [right-wing] Telegraph and various parts of the media and Tory Party started screaming, he then basically reverted and said, actually the whole thing was a disaster, we should never have done it, I was right in February, we should basically just ignore it and just let the thing wash through the country and not destroy the economy and move on.”

Johnson, said Cummings, “always referred” to the Daily Telegraph, for which he had previously written a £275,000 a year column, as “my real boss”.

Among the WhatsApp messages made available by Cummings is one dated October 15, 2020, from Johnson to his advisers. Johnson demonstrates his contempt for human life as he spews up anti-scientific ravings to the effect that getting COVID is actually beneficial.

The prime minister wrote, “I must say I have been slightly rocked by some of the data on covid fatalities. The median age is 82 - 81 for men 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So get COVID and live longer. Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4 per cent) and of those virtually all survive. And I no longer buy all this nhs [National Health Service] overwhelmed stuff. Folks I think we may need to recalibrate”

Another message from Johnson said, “There are max 3m [million] in this country aged over 80. It shows we don’t go for nation wide lockdown.”

By the time Johnson wrote these messages, there had already been 43,346 deaths in Britain due to COVID, even based on the government’s manipulated figures. After a fall in cases and deaths due to the spring 2020 lockdown, cases and deaths again began to rise again exponentially following Johnson’s comments, fuelled by the end of lockdown, an enforced “mass return to work” and schools, and a surge of the Alpha (then called “Kent”) variant.

Such was Johnson’s maniacal focus at the outset of the pandemic on everyone in Britain being infected to supposedly achieve herd immunity that Cummings had to prevent him from attending his weekly audience with the queen, amid fears that he was infected with COVID—a fear that proved to be well founded.

“I said to him, there’s people in this office who are isolating, you might have coronavirus, I might have coronavirus, you can’t go and see the Queen. What if you go and see her and give the Queen coronavirus?

“You obviously can’t… I just said if you, if you give her coronavirus and she dies what, what are you gonna, you can’t do that, you can’t risk that, that’s completely insane. And he said, he basically just hadn’t thought it through, he said, yeah, ‘holy shit, I can’t go’.”

Summing up Johnson’s stance last autumn, Cummings described a “weird mix” of “partly ‘it's all nonsense and lockdowns don’t work anyway’ and partly ‘well this is terrible but the people who are dying are essentially all over 80 and we can’t kill the economy just because of people dying over 80’.”

Cummings told Kuenssberg, “Lots of people heard the Prime Minister say that, the Prime Minister texted that to me and other people.”

Johnson was only the criminal representative of the most nakedly pro-herd immunity layers of the British bourgeoisie.

Just days before sending his texts Johnson’s Telegraph “boss” had published a piece of anti-scientific nonsense written by microbiologist and herd immunity advocate Professor David Livermore. Livermore was one of the signatories of the herd immunity promoting Great Barrington Declaration. He wrote, “The median age of those who have succumbed is 82 years, while life expectancy is 81 years. Fewer than 400 UK residents under 60 without comorbidities have died. For this, we have restricted human interactions and stifled the economy.”

Livermore was pushing herd immunity even as he noted, “Covid-19 is the worst pandemic I’ve seen in 40 years as a microbiologist. It is not a hoax. It fills ICUs faster than seasonal flu. It is implicated in a million deaths already.”

Weeks prior to Johnson’s October 2020 outbursts—one of which saw him blurting out “ no more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands !”—Great Barrington Declaration signatories Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Carl Heneghan addressed the Tory cabinet on September 20, 2020 to argue against another lockdown. They were joined by Swedish epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who pioneered Sweden’s disastrous herd immunity policy.

The response of the media to Cummings initial revelations and those yesterday has been a collective shrug. Everyone is being told to look away under conditions in which crimes are being detailed that in any other period would have led to the fall of the government and even the prosecution and jailing of the perpetrators.

It is only possible for Johnson and the criminals in government who are responsible for social murder on a mass scale to come through this unscathed because their policy was backed by a ruling elite that prioritises the continued accumulation of wealth over the lives and safety of the population.

Everything Johnson said and did was an open secret, known to everyone in the Downing Street circle and by every major political journalist, including those at the BBC and Guardian .

Cummings stated, “When you get to the week of around about 15th to the 19th of September, by that point the data was clear about what was happening and [chief scientific officer] Patrick Vallance and [chief medical officer] Chris Whitty came to Downing Street and said it’s clear where this [the spread of the virus] is going, we think that you should consider hitting it hard and early… The prime minister said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, I’m not doing it.’ He put his own political interests ahead of people’s lives for sure.”

If anything the ruling elite are even more bullish now in implementing a herd immunity agenda than at any other time during the pandemic. Their collective demand is that we must all “learn to live with the virus.”

Johnson’s bosses at the Telegraph responded to Cummings’s revelations Tuesday with a column by Ross Clark, headlined, “If only Boris had ignored the obsessive Dominic Cummings and acted on his liberal instincts”. Clark declared that for all Cummings’s talk, Johnson was never tough enough in acting in the interests of big business. Johnson acted “according to his liberal instincts,” as he “tried to balance the competing demands of liberty, the economy and saving lives. He pursued less drastic options for controlling Covid infections… but ultimately was not strong enough to over-rule demands to employ the blunt weapon of a full lockdown…”