US officials in the Trump team thought the UK was “out of their minds” to pursue herd immunity when the pandemic began, a new book about the coronavirus crisis has revealed.
The UK’s initial approach, which saw a late imposition of social distancing restrictions, was shocking to the officials in Donald Trump’s team, according to the authors of Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order.
“We thought they were out of their minds. We told them it would be an absolutely devastating approach to deal with the pandemic,” one US official said. “We thought they were nuts and they thought we were nuts. It turns out, in the end, we were a little more right than they were.”
More than 20,000 lives could have been saved if the UK government had imposed lockdown one week earlier, former scientific adviser Prof Neil Ferguson has said.
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