Caprice slams ‘experts’ who ridiculed her call for tougher border controls at start of Covid crisis – after Dominic Cummings admitted she was right and Whitehall fears over ‘racism’ blocked action

Caprice Bourret today praised her vindication after a bizarre twist in the Covid investigation saw Dominic Cummings admit the government should have listened to her call for tougher borders.

The ’90s pin-up welcomed the former Number 10 assistant’s admission that her suggestion to limit travel and contain the emerging virus had been ‘correct’.

Mr Cummings told the official inquiry earlier this week that there was a feeling in Whitehall that such a move would be seen as ‘racist’.

Writing for the House magazineCaprice said she was “shut down” and faced “widespread ridicule” for speaking her mind on TV on March 16, 2020.

“People across the country ridiculed me for daring to speak out about a global health crisis,” the model wrote.

‘Everyone tried to discredit my position. For months I faced relentless trolling on social media because my views were considered bizarre and unrealistic.

‘Clearly the TV ‘expert’ doctor was factually wrong and my predictions were correct – the very measures I advocated in 2020 – face masks, travel restrictions and containment – ​​were implemented by the government and helped us overcome the pandemic to contain.

‘I believe my background has led many to underestimate me. However, I have always embraced this underestimation. Remaining resolute in the face of skepticism is essential, and it is a quality that has served me well throughout my career.”

In his testimony, Mr Cummings painted a grim picture of complacency about the virus in Whitehall, arguing that after it arrived in Britain there was a “fatalistic” view that there was no point in trying to stop the spread.

He said the initial advice was that lockdown was both “impossible” and “crazy” as it would only result in a worse second wave.

WhatsApps shown at the hearing – many of which were expletive-laden – showed maverick aide Boris Johnson warning on March 12, 2020 that moving too slowly could turn the NHS into a ‘zombie apocalypse movie’.

But he told the inquiry that ideally there would have been a drastic reduction in travel once the virus was discovered, along with ramping up mass testing. That would have had a ‘much better outcome’, without the need for blanket restrictions.

Mr Cummings suggested that part of the reason such measures were not implemented was because it was seen as ‘racist’ to close borders – citing the example of Caprice being derided as an ‘idiot’.

The former Dancing on Ice star spoke in favor of face masks and travel restrictions during the Jeremy Vine show on March 16, 2020.

Mr Cummings said strict border controls on travel from China and the rapid expansion of testing once the virus was identified could have had a “much better” outcome than the national lockdown.

He said there was a “fatalistic” approach within the government, which failed to make efforts to create new systems to control the spread of the coronavirus.

‘My view is that what should have happened is that as soon as the first reports came at the end of December, approximately on New Year’s Eve 2019, we should have stopped flights to China immediately. “There was a very hardcore system at the airports and at the borders and there should have been a very huge testing infrastructure,” he said.

That meant both scaling up the test and trace system and finding an industrial capacity system to manufacture tens of millions of rapid tests.

Combining ‘this country is actually controlling its borders for the first time ever and taking it seriously’ with test and trace capacity, rapid testing capacity, along with ‘human challenge’ vaccine trials, would have been a ‘much better approach’.

It would have been better “not just in terms of deaths, but also in terms of the fact that we could have kept the economy open to a much greater extent than we ever could.”

Mr Cummings agreed that without a scaled-up test and trace system, closing the borders would not have been enough to stop the spread of coronavirus.

But he said: ‘It’s half the heart of the issue, but the other half of the heart is that if you look at the whole thing in a fatalistic way – what DH (the Department of Health), the Cabinet Office and Sage did in the beginning – and you think there is no effective alternative to herd immunity.

Caprice (pictured on the red carpet in 2020) said her background as a model caused her to be routinely ‘underestimated’

The former Dancing on Ice star spoke in favor of face masks and travel restrictions during the Jeremy Vine show on March 16, 2020

‘If you say that at a global conceptual level there is either A: shape a curve to herd immunity, or B: try to work your way out of the problem, then the whole system was thinking in January, February, early March that the only A plausible approach to this was to shape the herd immunity curve.

‘Nobody thought it was really practical to find a way out of the problem.

“The fundamental shift we went to was trying to get out of it rather than fatalistically accepting it.”

Pointing to Caprice’s questions: ‘Why don’t we close the borders?’ he noted that “many public health experts mocked her as if she were an idiot.”

“That was the prevailing conventional wisdom within the public health system and Caprice’s dismissal was reflected in Number 10 by the public health system,” he said.

“If you’re going for a single herd immunity by September, then obviously border-hopping was not considered relevant or coherent with such a strategy.”