Exclusive: Emails show PM’s aide told head of NHSX ‘no delay please – just send immediately’
Dominic Cummings demanded senior civil servants pay half a million pounds to an external data team, according to leaked emails that show the prime minister’s then chief adviser urging officials to bypass government procedures.
On 22 March 2020, the day before Boris Johnson ordered the UK into full lockdown, Cummings instructed civil servants at NHSX, the government unit responsible for digital transformation in health, to grant the money to Our World in Data, a research project run by a not-for-profit organisation with Oxford academics.
