Coronavirus: ‘Selfish’ nations have taken ‘comfort’ from countries with more deaths, Boris Johnson tells UN

‘Every day people were openly encouraged to study a grisly reverse Olympic league table, and to take morbid and totally mistaken comfort in the greater sufferings of others’

Boris Johnson has accused “selfish” nations that escaped the worst impact of Covid-19 of taking “mistaken comfort” from countries with higher death tolls.

In an address to the United Nations, the prime minister attacked a “grisly reverse Olympic league table” of death rates.

For a long time, those tables placed the UK very near the top. Britain received international criticism for its perceived bungling of its pandemic response as the death toll passed 40,000.

Mr Johnson, addressing the UN remotely from London, said coronavirus had “made individual nations seem selfish and divided from each other”.

“Every day people were openly encouraged to study a grisly reverse Olympic league table, and to take morbid and totally mistaken comfort in the greater sufferings of others,” he said.

“We cannot go on like that, we cannot make these mistakes again,” he added, vowing the UK would strive to “heal those divisions and to heal the world”.

In the speech, the prime minister announced a 30 per cent increase in funding for the World Health Organisation – £340m over four years – to make the UK the largest national donor if Donald Trump quits the body, as threatened.

And the UK will give £500m in aid funding to help 92 of the world’s poorest countries secure a vaccine, through the WHO’s Covax programme.

Mr Johnson has repeatedly refused to accept calculations showing the UK – along with the US and Brazil – suffered many more deaths in the early months of the pandemic, calling them premature.

He has also stalled on a public inquiry into his handling of the crisis, despite promising one in the House of Commons, to the fury of bereaved families.

Addressing the general assembly, Mr Johnson pointed to Bill Gates’ “amazing prediction”, in 2015, that a pandemic was coming “which has come true”.

“We responded as if to a persistent Microsoft error message by clicking ‘ok’ and carrying on.

“Humanity was caught napping. We have been scrabbling to catch up, and with agonising slowness we are making progress.”

He warned that after “nine months of fighting Covid-19, the very notion of the international community looks, frankly, pretty tattered”.

“Unless we get our act together, unless we unite and turn our fire against our common foe, we know that everyone will lose,” Mr Johnson said.

“The inevitable outcome would be to prolong this calamity and increase the risk of another.

“Now is the time – therefore, here at what I devoutly hope will be the first and last ever Zoom UNGA [United Nations General Assembly] – for humanity to reach across borders and repair these ugly rifts.”