UK Health Secretary tweets people shouldn’t ‘cower’ from Covid, before deleting it and apologizing
“I’ve deleted a tweet which used the word “cower,” he said. “I was expressing gratitude that the vaccines help us fight back as a society, but it was a poor choice of word and I sincerely apologize,” Javid said on Twitter on Sunday, a day after using the word in a tweet announcing that he had fully recovered from the virus. “Like many, I have lost loved ones to this awful virus and would never minimize its impact,” he added in his apology.Javid The opposition Labour party’s deputy leader Angela Rayner had asked the Health Secretary to apologize for his comments, adding in a tweet: “NHS and social care heroes & all of our key workers did not ‘cower.’ They risked their lives to keep us all safe.” The Liberal Democrats party health spokeswoman Munira Wilson called the tweet “outrageous, while thousands remain in hospital with Covid-19.”The UK suffered a devastating first wave in 2020, followed by a troubling winter in the wake of the discovery of the Alpha (Kent) variant., attributing to one of the highest numbers of Covid-19 related deaths in the world — nearly 129,000 since the pandemic started. Johnson’s government has been widely condemned for being slow to implement pandemic control measures, such as mask mandates and lockdowns, as the virus began to spread in spring 2020.As of July 24, more than 83 million vaccination doses have been administered in the UK, with over 54% of the population fully vaccinated.But despite the vaccination program’s success, the country could be heading towards a potential new wave of Covid-19, fuelled by the Delta variant.Final Covid restrictions were lifted in England earlier this month, however cases, hospitalizations and deaths are again on the rise, highlighting too the unpredictability of a new era of the pandemic in the UK.