Former Downing Street SPAD Dominic Cummings has documentary proof the PM "feared" Health Secretary Matt Hancock "misled" him over care home COVID-19 testing, ITV has claimed.
ITV Political Editor Robert Peston claimed on Friday that Cummings, who was sacked as Prime Minister Boris Johnson's special adviser in November, has documents showing Hancock was called in for an alleged meeting on 4 May 2020.
"I understand Cummings has documentary evidence that as late as May last year he and the PM feared they had been misled by Hancock about how he would protect the elderly in care homes, and that he was guilty of negligence", Peston wrote.
Peston quoted a "source" who had claimed there was "a fear in Downing Street that Mr Hancock's 'negligence' had 'killed people in care homes'".
The Health Department said it "did not recognise" the claim, adding that Hancock "had many meetings with the PM across a range of issues".
Hancock himself said at a Downing Street press briefing on Thursday evening that it "wasn't possible" to test every patient before capacity had been built up — which proved problematic in the first months of the outbreak.
"My recollection of events is that I committed to delivering that testing for people going from hospital into care homes when we could do it", Hancock insisted.
But new data shows transmission from hospitals to care homes was very limited.
A report by Public Health England on Thursday found that only 97 care-home outbreaks — 1.6 percent of the total — were "seeded" by hospital discharges, resulting in 806 infections and 286 deaths.
The UK has seen almost 4.5 million confirmed cases of the deadly virus since the first in January 2020, with nearly 128,000 deaths within 28 days of a positive test.