Boris Johnson asked whether Covid could be be cured by blowing a hair dryer up your nose, after watching a YouTube video.
Dominic Cummings made the allegation in his evidence to the Covid inquiry, describing it as a “low point”.
Johnson’s former chief of staff said the then prime minister asked Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance what they thought of the idea.
Cummings said as the pandemic raged he often “couldn’t be sure” whether it was actually Johnson himself who was “the source of false stories” in the media about Covid.
“A low point was when he circulated a video of a guy blowing a special hair dryer up his nose ‘to kill covid’ and asked the CSA (chief science adviser) and CM (chief medical officer) what they thought,” Cummings said.
The inquiry has also revealed that Vallance, the CSA, believed Johnson was “obsessed with old people accepting their fate”.
Writing his his diary on December 12, 2021, Vallance said: ”[Johnson] says his party ’thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people - and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them.”
Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, also once worried that Johnson was “Trump-Bolsonaro level mad” on Covid.
In April 2021, then president Trump suggested injecting bleach into the body could be a way to fight the virus.