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Lockdown fanatics can’t escape blame for this scandal
Those who warned about the inevitable increase in non-Covid deaths were denounced as selfish murderers
CAMILLA TOMINEY
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
19 August 2022 • 4:46pm
Camilla Tominey
NHS ambulances
Some time ago, I received a heartbreaking email from a lady called Lisa
King, detailing how Peter, her beloved husband of 21 years, had become a
tragic casualty of Covid.
The father of two, 62, did not catch coronavirus. He died on October 9,
2020 because he was repeatedly denied a face-to-face GP appointment
during the pandemic – only to be told that an urgent operation to remove
his gallbladder had been delayed because of spiralling NHS waiting lists.
His sudden death, in agonising pain, was completely avoidable.
As Mrs King told me at the time: “To the decision makers, he is nothing
more than ‘collateral damage’, but to me, he is the love of my life.” When journalists like me heard these stories and warned that the
lockdown cure might be worse than the disease, we were accused of being mercenary murderers intent on prioritising the economy ahead of saving
lives.
Scientists who dared to question the severity of the restrictions were,
as Lord Sumption put it at the time, “persecuted like Galileo”. Falsely branded “Covid deniers” simply for questioning some of the “science” that was slavishly followed, they were subjected to appalling online
abuse by a bunch of armchair experts who claimed to know better.
Professor Robert Dingwall faced career “cancellation” for refusing to
drink the zero-Covid Kool-Aid, as did the likes of Professor Carl
Heneghan, Professor Sunetra Gupta and leading oncologist Professor Karol Sikora.
Yet now we learn that they were right to raise their concerns in the
face of pseudo-socialist Sage groupthink.
Official data now suggests that the effects of lockdown may be killing
more people than are currently dying of Covid.
An analysis by the Daily Telegraph’s brilliant science editor Sarah
Knapton (another figure who was pilloried for questioning the
pro-lockdown orthodoxy) has found that about 1,000 more people than
usual are dying each week from conditions other than coronavirus.
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Tuesday
showed that excess deaths are 14.4 per cent higher than the five-year
average, equating to 1,350 more deaths than usual in the week ending
August 5. Although 469 deaths were linked to Covid, the remaining 881
have not been explained. Since the start of June, the ONS has recorded
almost 10,000 more deaths than the five-year average – about 1,086 a
week – none of them linked to coronavirus. This figure is more than
three times the number of people who died because of Covid over the same
period – 2,811.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has asked for an
investigation into the data amid concern that the deaths are linked to
delays and deferment of treatment for conditions such as cancer,
diabetes, and heart disease.
Study the stats, by all means, but the DHSC might be better off simply
speaking to someone like Mrs King – along with many of the nation’s
leading oncologists and cardiologists.
In July, I visited Bart’s for a feature to mark the hospital’s 900th anniversary next year – and the doctors I met there were in no doubt
about the detrimental effect successive lockdowns have had on non-Covid patients. As breast cancer surgeon, Laura Johnson, explained: “It wasn’t that patients’ diagnoses were missed, it’s unfortunately because a
number of people didn’t come to hospital.
“They are then presenting now, 18 months later, with more advanced
disease. Half of our patients that are presenting with a cancer are
almost needing chemotherapy before surgery, whereas before that
percentage was much lower. And that’s because they’re presenting with a bigger, more aggressive, more advanced cancer.”
The horror stories are everywhere you look: from people dying needlessly
at home like Mr King, to elderly patients waiting 40 hours for
ambulances, to cancer sufferers now dying because they didn’t get appointments during lockdown, or didn’t want to be a burden.
It’s tempting to blame this on the NHS being in urgent need of reform –
and that’s surely part of the explanation. We all know how staff
shortages – again, exacerbated by the pandemic – are crippling the system. But this isn’t simply a result of a lack of resources. Healthcare
spending has risen sharply as a percentage of GDP in recent years.
The nettle that needs to be grasped is that these figures suggest that
the country is facing a growing health crisis that has been caused by
our overzealous response to the pandemic – scaremongering policies that
kept people indoors, scared them away from hospitals and deprived them
of treatment.
These excess deaths may well turn out to be a direct consequence of the decision to lock down the country in order to control a virus that was
only ever a serious threat to the old and the vulnerable.
Had a more proportionate approach been taken, akin to Sweden’s, then
would we be in this mess right now? Perhaps only a government inquiry
will be able definitively to answer that question, but what’s certain
now is the debate over the severity of lockdown was never about the
economy versus lives – as pro-shutdown fanatics would have it – but over lives versus lives.
At the start of the pandemic, the overreaction to the virus might have
been forgivable. We didn’t know much about Sars-CoV-2 and any hope of a vaccine felt like a faraway fantasy.
But it rapidly became clear that many of the measures were
disproportionate and poorly targeted – and that too little thought had
been put to alternatives, like the focused protection scheme promoted by
those who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, in which those
actually vulnerable to Covid were properly shielded.
Lest we forget that in the last quarter of 2020, the mean age of those
dying with and of Covid was estimated to be 82.4 years, while the risk
of dying of it if you were under 60 was less than 0.5 per cent. Who
wouldn’t now take those odds compared to being diagnosed with cancer, circulatory or cardiovascular related conditions and being made to wait
months for post-pandemic treatment?
None of this has come as a surprise to those running organisations like
the British Heart Foundation or the Stroke Foundation, which had
predicted a sharp rise in deaths because “people haven’t been having
their routine appointments for the past few years now”.
And let’s not even get started on the mental health toll taken by the Government’s panic-mongering. Or the negative effect that work from home edicts have had on our already sedentary lifestyles, alcohol intake and waistlines. Not to mention the adverse impact on the education of a
Covid generation whose schools and universities should, in hindsight,
never, ever have been shut.
The World Health Organisation said at the time that the Great Barrington Declaration “lacked scientific basis”, but nearly three years on from
the start of the pandemic there has been precious little analysis of
whether the raft of Covid restrictions either served the collective good
– or actually saved lives in the round – compared with the lives that
are now being lost as a result.
These numbers aren’t just statistics – they are people’s husbands,
wives, brothers, sisters, daughters and sons. The appalling truth is
that a lot of these people would probably still be here today were it
not for the lockdowns; lockdowns which seemingly did little to stop tens
of thousands of people dying of Covid in the UK.
We stayed at home to “protect the NHS”. It turns out the NHS isn’t there now to protect us.
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