Historians are coming to further appreciate the life-and-death influence of former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson — influence that earned Johnson a share of the 2020 Ig Nobel Medical Education Prize.
BBC News reports (on October 31, 2023) some new, pertinent information:
Boris Johnson agreed with some Tory MPs who thought Covid was “nature’s way of dealing with old people”, the inquiry into the pandemic has been told. [This information] comes from diary entries by former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance…. In August 2020, Sir Patrick wrote that Mr Johnson was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and the economy going”.
The 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for Medical Education was awarded to Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can.
NOTE: That was the second Ig Nobel Prize awarded to Alexander Lukashenko. In the year 2013, the Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Alexander Lukashenko, for making it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.