Dominic Cummings is under fire after it emerged he had altered articles he claimed had predicted the threat of coronaviruses after he returned to Number 10 in April.
A post on Dominic Cummings’ personal blog, dated March 2019, appears to have been edited on April 14th this year, the day he returned to work after self-isolating in Durham, according to the internet archive.
It comes after the first government minister resigned because he could not defend Mr Cummings' actions.
MP Douglas Ross, who was a Scotland minister, and a number of Tory MPs have called for Mr Cummings' resignation - which the chief aide said he has not offered, and will not offer.
In his pre-prepared statement read out at yesterday’s news conference, chief advisor to the prime minister Dominic Cummings said: "For years, I have warned of the dangers of pandemics. Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning."
Cummings spoke of the post at a press conference watched by 3.7 million people on BBC alone as he tried to explain his 500+ mile round trip to Durham and back, where he stayed on his father’s property.
He claimed he returned from Durham to London on April 14th, to work.
According to his blog’s own sitemap, this is the day a post about bio-lab mishaps threatening to cause a pandemic was edited to include a reference to coronaviruses on the 14th April.
The original post from March, 2019 was edited to add a passage where he quotes an article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists talking about a report from the US Government Accountability Office that speaks about a 2004 incident where two Chinese researchers were exposed to, and transmitted strains of the disease.
It read: “… two researchers conducting virus research were exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus samples that were incompletely inactivated.”
In the original post before April 14th, no such section, or mention of coronaviruses, existed and Cummings himself only offers a comment on this report, about the threat posed by a pandemic with such security problems present.
Dominic Cummings was far from the only person to warn about the dangers of a future pandemic, but with the use of the internet archiving service Way Back Machine Jens Wiechers was the first to spot the addition to his blog.
Cummings added this into an article about bio-labs mishaps that could cause global pandemics, and also seemed to retrospectively add a ‘pandemics’ tag to his posts too.
No.10 sources have since confirmed the blog was changed to the BBC's Faisal Islam.
This comes during increasing calls for his resignation, or sacking, as Boris Johnson stands by his chief advisor.
