https://archive.vn/R1uMf
Lockdown sceptics like me were demonised but we were right
The Telegraphs expos has shone a light on the over-zealous Covid >regulations and cruelty that politicians and their egos inflicted on us
By
Allison Pearson
4 March 2023 7:00am
National Covid Memorial wall
Dont tell me thousands more would have died if we hadnt locked down >because thousands more are dying because we had lockdown... Will they be >putting their names on the National Covid Memorial wall? CREDIT: Leon >Neal/Getty Images
It almost seems as if we dreamt it. So surreal was that period, so
dementedly bonkers in many ways, so full of strange unease, so randomly >cruel, so wrong. Desperately wrong. I felt it at the time, and I was
attacked for saying so. I nearly lost my mind as I absorbed the pain of
all the devastated people who wrote to me. (I remember shouting down the >phone at a GP practice manager in the West Country on behalf of an
elderly reader who had been stuck in her house alone for almost a year
and was desperate for a Covid jab.)
I was spied on, reported, publicly denounced, called a murderer, banned
and shadow banned. At times, it felt like we were living in East Germany >under the Stasi. Our blessed, free country had become an island of
hysterics, snitches and obsessive Dettol wipers. Driving in my car one >morning to take the dog for a walk in woods two miles up the road, I
thought, Am I allowed to do this?
Am I allowed to do this? Dear God. Where had Britain gone?
And now, vindication. So much that we conspiracy theorists suspected
turns out to be true, from the Wuhan Covid-19 lab leak (racist back in
2020 but now highly likely says the FBI) to Matt Hancocks imaginary >protective ring around care homes to the brutal collateral reckoning
for lockdown. Vindication is bittersweet, alas, because you cannot mend
all the people they broke (over a million children with mental health >problems, millions more awaiting hospital treatment where do you
begin?) nor bring back those who died without a loved one to gentle
their passing.
And dont tell me thousands more would have died if we hadnt locked
down because thousands more are dying because we had lockdown. Men and
women in their thirties, forties and fifties with families; fit, younger >people whom the virus could not harm, now presenting with incurable
cancers. Will they be putting their names on the National Covid Memorial >wall? They should.
Human beings have an astonishing capacity to forget, especially when >something is embarrassing to look back on or when it makes us feel a bit >stupid.
READERS EXPERIENCES
Tom McLelland
The Memorial Wall will doubtless end up as the only meaningful tribute
to those who lost loved ones. Amidst all the politicking, journalism,
evasion of responsibility and self-serving, those who died must never be >forgotten, including Jeannie McLelland, my wife of 52 years, a nurse who
did her best to make others well but ended up failed by those
politicians now trying to escape blame, and sadly, yes, the NHS to which
she had given so much of her working life.
The tingle of a remembered shame, George Eliot called it. But we
should force ourselves to remember, I think. The Lockdown Files, drawing
on the WhatsApp messages vouchsafed to the superb investigative
journalist Isabel Oakeshott by Matt Hancock, the former health secretary
of state, and published this week by The Daily Telegraph, are an >extraordinary aide-memoire to the madness we all lived through. They
also provide a remarkable insight into the behaviour of those running
the country at the time. What a bunch of arrogant, clueless, emotionally >stunted authoritarians they turn out to be for the most part.
The biggest shock revealed by The Telegraph scoop is quite how often our >leaders, who always claimed to be guided by the science, were making >decisions on the hoof.
Astonished, we read conversation after conversation where, it becomes
clear, that decisions affecting the suffering of the elderly entombed in
care homes, of children shut out of schools and playgrounds is filtered >through the prism of something called Comms.
READERS EXPERIENCES
Richard Halsted
My mother died of Covid. It said on her death certificate. I was not
allowed to see her. She died of isolation and lack of care.
So, when Boris Johnson asks his top team whether masks in schools are >necessary, Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, replies: No strong >reason against in corridors etc, and no strong reason for. The downsides
are in the classroom because of the potential to interfere with teaching. >But Lee Cain, the PMs director of Comms, is not happy. Scotland has
just confirmed masks in schools so England is under pressure to follow
suit lest Nicola Sturgeon gain the advantage. Why do we want to have
the fight on not having masks in certain school settings? asks Cain.
Oh, I dont know, Lee. Maybe because imposing an unevidenced and
alienating NPI (non-pharmaceutical intervention) on vulnerable
adolescents is a really bad idea? Perhaps because forcing children into >futile masks for protection against a virus they largely dont need >protecting against is just a repugnant piece of political power play.
Perhaps because, with their young worlds turned upside-down, the
reassurance of seeing smiling faces would have been really nice.
Finally, as that WhatsApp conclave of geniuses somehow failed to
foresee, permitting masks in school corridors would be the gateway to
the teaching unions demanding (and getting) masks in classrooms.
(While the big boys club was throwing kids under the devolution bus, a
group of mums who founded an organisation called Us For Them to stick up
for childrens rights, were fighting furiously to get the school mask >mandates withdrawn under threat of pre-action letters. They succeeded,
twice. So often during the pandemic, it took the defiance of ordinary
men and women parents, publicans, restaurateurs, shop owners, small >business people to restore some sense to the senseless edicts.)
READERS EXPERIENCES
Paul S.
My business lost thousands due to Covid restrictions, HMRC aren't
getting any more out of me. I'm livid.
The Lockdown Files reveal that Matt Hancock and other key players often
had a callous disregard for everything except their own egos. (Look at
Simon Case, the countrys most senior civil servant, gleefully joking
about the prospect of seeing some of the faces of those moving from >first-class plane seats into shoe-box hotel rooms. Never mind the >inconvenience and expense for legitimate travellers, many of them trying
to reach terrified relatives before suddenly being forced into
quarantine by a government with a whim of iron.)
Childrens wellbeing? Forget it. Hancock, we learn, launched a
disgraceful rearguard action to close schools when Gavin Williamson, >then-education secretary, was, to his credit, battling to keep them
open. In one WhatsApp, Hancock talks of preventing a policy car crash
when the kids spread the disease in January. Had the health secretary >consulted widely with proper epidemiologists, instead of obsessing over
his willy-waving, 100,000-tests-a-day target, he might have learnt that >youngsters getting the virus was not a problem provided the vulnerable
were protected. (In fact, kids getting Covid was a positive because the >resolution of the crisis lay in achieving widespread immunity not in
endless, extortionate and increasingly pointless testing.) Keeping
children out of education for another two months (until March 2021)
turned out to be the real car crash.
One of the few people to emerge with any credit from this fiasco is
Boris Johnson. His large, freedom-loving spirit was a poor fit for the
narrow groupthink that took over No?10. Frequently, the prime minister
was the only one asking the questions any normal person would want
answering. When he finds out that the risk of the over-65s dying from
Covid is akin to the danger of perishing while going down stairs, he
points out, And we dont stop older people from using stairs. Later,
he said that if he was an 80-year-old and had to choose between
destroying the economy and risking my exposure to a disease that I had a
94 per cent chance of surviving I know what I would prefer.
READERS EXPERIENCES
Brendan Harris
My elderly dad fell ill during the Christmas lockdown and was admitted
to hospital in London. I was living in Italy so I flew back immediately, >making a false declaration on my Covid travel documents because wanting
to be at my dying parents bedside wasnt a valid reason.
At St Marys hospital they refused to let me in so I dodged security and >followed a nurse through the doors. I made it. I sat with dad, held his
hand, made sure he wasnt alone in his last days. The duty nurse turned
a blind eye because she had some humanity.
Boris was bang on. By pausing society, we may have bought a bit more
life for those of 82.4 years (the average age of Covid death) and over,
but what the hell were we doing to the rest of the population? To even
pose such a question was to elicit the shrieked response, You want
people to die! But how many self-isolating octogenarians would rather
have taken a relatively small risk and enjoyed the company of family and >friends in the twilight of their days? The state denied them the dignity
of that choice. (The prime minister should, of course, have had the
courage of his convictions and cancelled the second lockdown when he
twigged it was based on out-of-date data.)
Ironically, Downing Street had become a prisoner of the publics fear.
That sense of dread which, as Laura Dodsworth points out in her
definitive book, State of Fear, was itself created by government
scientists using a battery of weapons from distorted statistics,
nudges and misleading adverts on TV to control the public in order to
make them comply with lockdown requirements. So people were convinced
that Covid was a uniquely ruthless killer.
Another name that kept leaping out at me from The Lockdown Files was
Helen Whateley, then-social care minister. Perhaps its because Helen
was a rare female voice at the centre of power, and the mother of three
young children, that she kept urging more compassion on her gung-ho
boss. Couldnt kids be excluded from the totally random Rule of Six so
more families could see grandparents? No, said Matt Hancock it didnt
work with the Comms, which needed to be kept simple so the plebs
wouldnt think they had any leeway with the rules. Restrictions on
visitors to care homes were inhumane, Whately said, warning the health >secretary against preventing husbands seeing wives for months and
months. The elderly were at risk of just giving up because they had
been isolated for so long. Too bad. Hancock did nothing to alleviate the >misery experienced by tens of thousands as they enacted a pitiful
pantomime of intimacy through care-home windows and Perspex screens.
(Visits to care homes and hospitals only returned to something like
normality in July 2021 and, appallingly, many are still fortresses.)
READERS EXPERIENCES
John Stobart
My lovely wife died of cancer within 12 weeks of its diagnosis all
within the lockdown. We couldn't have visits by her friends to see her
nor could we have a proper funeral, just a miserable pinched affair of
eight people who had to stay well apart listening to recorded hymn
singing. Rage? Yes I feel rage and always will.
My wife's name was Anne Stobart and we had been married for 43 years
having first met at university in the 1970s.
I supported the first mini-lockdown. Three weeks to flatten the curve >(squash the sombrero in Boriss ebullient phrase) seemed fair enough
when we were dealing with a novel virus. But, as time went on, and the >restrictions bit deeper, I began to shout at the TV during the Downing
Street press briefings. Why did no one ask why having a substantial
meal with alcohol in a pub protected you against Covid in a way that >standing at the bar eating a bag of crisps did not? Robert Jenrick, the >communities secretary at the time, explained that a Cornish pasty on
its own would not constitute a substantial meal, unless it came on a
plate, to a table, with a side of chips or salad. This gave rise to one
of the great dilemmas of the pandemic: The Scotch Egg Question. Food
minister George Eustice said a scotch egg probably would count as a >substantial meal, but a No?10 spokesman hastily over-ruled that
deplorable, devil-may-care attitude, sternly insisting that bar snacks
do not count.
Grown men, our democratically elected representatives no less, actually
said ludicrous things like that with a straight face. On the basis of no >scientific evidence whatsoever. It was farcical.
The farce insulted our intelligence, but it was the cruelty I abhorred. >Common sense and basic human decency had been overridden, leading to the >isolation of the most vulnerable (the very people we were meant to be >saving); so many lonely deaths, so many families damaged, so many >self-harming teenagers. Every day, my Telegraph inbox filled up with >devastating stories. A 14-year-old boy who, pre-lockdown had been fit
and sporty, admitted with anorexia to a psychiatric unit because he was
so terrified of the weight hed put on. The five-year-old who developed >nervous tics. A dad-to-be pleading to be let in to the maternity unit
where his wife was miscarrying their first child.
A close friend was ticked off by a nurse for not wearing plastic gloves
and a mask when she stroked her fathers brow as he lay dying. What
possible harm could her bare hand on his dear forehead have done, her
kiss on his cheek? None. Yet simple human comfort was overruled by
Covid-19 guidance for a healthcare in-patient setting. With such scary
ease did we lose our moral bearings and slip into monstrosity.
Then there was dear Robert Styler, barred from visiting Josephine, his
wife of 60 years, in her care home. Josie got confused and upset seeing
her husband on FaceTime. Why, Robert wanted to know, was he, who was >self-isolating, not allowed to enter the premises to comfort the mother
of his children while the staff traipsed in and out from busy family
homes? On the Planet Normal podcast, Liam Halligan and I campaigned for >Robert and Josie to be reunited. And they were. One last dinner (and
dance) before Josephine died. I wept for them. And for all the other
Roberts and Josephines. At times, I felt almost unhinged by all that
sorrow. And now, through all those casual, bantering WhatsApp messages,
we can see the political expediency which lay behind huge decisions that >caused so much individual suffering. So, yes, I raged against the dying
of the light of reason. I couldnt bear it.
Robert and Josephine in happier times at their golden wedding aniversary >CREDIT: Andrew Crowley
To speak out, however, was to be demonised as a Covidiot and worse.
The Left of the Labour Party, still smarting from the recent defeat of
Jeremy Corbyn, redirected all its fire-breathing zealotry into advancing
the cause of zero Covid, the better to undermine the hated Tories. I >regularly found myself under attack, and trending (not in a good way) on >Twitter. Once, it was for the heresy of suggesting that we should allow
young people to get Covid and build up natural immunity which could then
help protect their grandparents. Prior to the pandemic, that had been an >uncontroversial precept of epidemiology. As Martin Kulldorff, former >professor at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the Great
Barrington Declaration, observed drily this week at a Covid hearing in
the House of Representatives, I guess we knew about it [natural
immunity] since 430 B.C. the Athenian plague until 2020. And then we >didnt know about it for three years, and now we know about it again.
I was nave enough to be shocked when I discovered that a Conservative
MP, Neil OBrien, had set up (at the behest, it was alleged, of certain >ministers) a McCarthyite website to monitor the work of journalists like
me who took a sceptical attitude to lockdown. How could that be
happening in a free society? While I undoubtedly got certain things
wrong, especially in the early days, I was repulsed by the way that Matt >Hancock assumed the moral high ground, bulldozing over any criticism of
his own highly questionable decisions. Intoxicated by his new
totalitarian powers. Mr Hancock, I felt, was getting away with murder.
So when Matt Hancock accused Isabel Oakeshott of a massive betrayal
for handing over his WhatsApp messages to The Telegraph, I laughed.
The Covid Inquiry, which began this week, with a dismaying lack of
lockdown sceptics among its core participants had better buck up its
ideas, or else. (At first, the inquiry wasnt even going to consider the >damage done to children, if you can believe it.
Michael Ejercito wrote:I am wonderfully hungry!
https://archive.vn/R1uMf
Lockdown sceptics like me were demonised – but we were right
The Telegraph’s exposé has shone a light on the over-zealous Covid
regulations and cruelty that politicians and their egos inflicted on us
By
Allison Pearson
4 March 2023 • 7:00am
National Covid Memorial wall
‘Don’t tell me thousands more would have died if we hadn’t locked down >> because thousands more are dying because we had lockdown... Will they be
putting their names on the National Covid Memorial wall?’ CREDIT: Leon
Neal/Getty Images
It almost seems as if we dreamt it. So surreal was that period, so
dementedly bonkers in many ways, so full of strange unease, so randomly
cruel, so wrong. Desperately wrong. I felt it at the time, and I was
attacked for saying so. I nearly lost my mind as I absorbed the pain of
all the devastated people who wrote to me. (I remember shouting down the
phone at a GP practice manager in the West Country on behalf of an
elderly reader who had been stuck in her house alone for almost a year
and was desperate for a Covid jab.)
I was spied on, reported, publicly denounced, called a murderer, banned
and shadow banned. At times, it felt like we were living in East Germany
under the Stasi. Our blessed, free country had become an island of
hysterics, snitches and obsessive Dettol wipers. Driving in my car one
morning to take the dog for a walk in woods two miles up the road, I
thought, “Am I allowed to do this?”
Am I allowed to do this? Dear God. Where had Britain gone?
And now, vindication. So much that we “conspiracy theorists” suspected >> turns out to be true, from the Wuhan Covid-19 lab leak (“racist” back in >> 2020 but now highly likely says the FBI) to Matt Hancock’s imaginary
“protective ring” around care homes to the brutal collateral reckoning >> for lockdown. Vindication is bittersweet, alas, because you cannot mend
all the people they broke (over a million children with mental health
problems, millions more awaiting hospital treatment – where do you
begin?) nor bring back those who died without a loved one to gentle
their passing.
And don’t tell me thousands more would have died if we hadn’t locked
down because thousands more are dying because we had lockdown. Men and
women in their thirties, forties and fifties with families; fit, younger
people whom the virus could not harm, now presenting with incurable
cancers. Will they be putting their names on the National Covid Memorial
wall? They should.
Human beings have an astonishing capacity to forget, especially when
something is embarrassing to look back on or when it makes us feel a bit
stupid.
READERS’ EXPERIENCES
Tom McLelland
The Memorial Wall will doubtless end up as the only meaningful tribute
to those who lost loved ones. Amidst all the politicking, journalism,
evasion of responsibility and self-serving, those who died must never be
forgotten, including Jeannie McLelland, my wife of 52 years, a nurse who
did her best to make others well but ended up failed by those
politicians now trying to escape blame, and sadly, yes, the NHS to which
she had given so much of her working life.
“The tingle of a remembered shame,” George Eliot called it. But we
should force ourselves to remember, I think. The Lockdown Files, drawing
on the WhatsApp messages vouchsafed to the superb investigative
journalist Isabel Oakeshott by Matt Hancock, the former health secretary
of state, and published this week by The Daily Telegraph, are an
extraordinary aide-memoire to the madness we all lived through. They
also provide a remarkable insight into the behaviour of those running
the country at the time. What a bunch of arrogant, clueless, emotionally
stunted authoritarians they turn out to be for the most part.
The biggest shock revealed by The Telegraph scoop is quite how often our
leaders, who always claimed to be guided by “the science”, were making >> decisions on the hoof.
Astonished, we read conversation after conversation where, it becomes
clear, that decisions affecting the suffering of the elderly entombed in
care homes, of children shut out of schools and playgrounds is filtered
through the prism of something called “Comms”.
READERS’ EXPERIENCES
Richard Halsted
My mother died of Covid. It said on her death certificate. I was not
allowed to see her. She died of isolation and lack of care.
So, when Boris Johnson asks his top team whether masks in schools are
necessary, Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, replies: “No strong
reason against in corridors etc, and no strong reason for. The downsides
are in the classroom because of the potential to interfere with teaching.” >> But Lee Cain, the PM’s director of Comms, is not happy. Scotland has
just confirmed masks in schools so England is under pressure to follow
suit lest Nicola Sturgeon gain the advantage. “Why do we want to have
the fight on not having masks in certain school settings?” asks Cain.
Oh, I don’t know, Lee. Maybe because imposing an unevidenced and
alienating NPI (non-pharmaceutical intervention) on vulnerable
adolescents is a really bad idea? Perhaps because forcing children into
futile masks for protection against a virus they largely don’t need
protecting against is just a repugnant piece of political power play.
Perhaps because, with their young worlds turned upside-down, the
reassurance of seeing smiling faces would have been really nice.
Finally, as that WhatsApp conclave of geniuses somehow failed to
foresee, permitting masks in school corridors would be the gateway to
the teaching unions demanding (and getting) masks in classrooms.
(While the big boys’ club was throwing kids under the devolution bus, a
group of mums who founded an organisation called Us For Them to stick up
for children’s rights, were fighting furiously to get the school mask
mandates withdrawn under threat of pre-action letters. They succeeded,
twice. So often during the pandemic, it took the defiance of ordinary
men and women – parents, publicans, restaurateurs, shop owners, small
business people – to restore some sense to the senseless edicts.)
READERS’ EXPERIENCES
Paul S.
My business lost thousands due to Covid restrictions, HMRC aren't
getting any more out of me. I'm livid.
The Lockdown Files reveal that Matt Hancock and other key players often
had a callous disregard for everything except their own egos. (Look at
Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, gleefully joking
about the prospect of seeing “some of the faces of those moving from
first-class plane seats” into shoe-box hotel rooms. Never mind the
inconvenience and expense for legitimate travellers, many of them trying
to reach terrified relatives before suddenly being forced into
quarantine by a government with a whim of iron.)
Children’s wellbeing? Forget it. Hancock, we learn, launched a
disgraceful “rearguard action” to close schools when Gavin Williamson, >> then-education secretary, was, to his credit, battling to keep them
open. In one WhatsApp, Hancock talks of “preventing a policy car crash
when the kids spread the disease in January”. Had the health secretary
consulted widely with proper epidemiologists, instead of obsessing over
his willy-waving, 100,000-tests-a-day target, he might have learnt that
youngsters getting the virus was not a problem provided the vulnerable
were protected. (In fact, kids getting Covid was a positive because the
resolution of the crisis lay in achieving widespread immunity not in
endless, extortionate and increasingly pointless testing.) Keeping
children out of education for another two months (until March 2021)
turned out to be the real car crash.
One of the few people to emerge with any credit from this fiasco is
Boris Johnson. His large, freedom-loving spirit was a poor fit for the
narrow groupthink that took over No?10. Frequently, the prime minister
was the only one asking the questions any normal person would want
answering. When he finds out that the risk of the over-65s dying from
Covid is akin to the danger of perishing while going down stairs, he
points out, “And we don’t stop older people from using stairs”. Later, >> he said that if he was an 80-year-old and had to choose “between
destroying the economy and risking my exposure to a disease that I had a
94 per cent chance of surviving I know what I would prefer”.
READERS’ EXPERIENCES
Brendan Harris
My elderly dad fell ill during the Christmas lockdown and was admitted
to hospital in London. I was living in Italy so I flew back immediately,
making a false declaration on my Covid travel documents because ‘wanting >> to be at my dying parent’s bedside’ wasn’t a valid reason.
At St Mary’s hospital they refused to let me in so I dodged security and >> followed a nurse through the doors. I made it. I sat with dad, held his
hand, made sure he wasn’t alone in his last days. The duty nurse turned
a blind eye because she had some humanity.
Boris was bang on. By pausing society, we may have bought a bit more
life for those of 82.4 years (the average age of Covid death) and over,
but what the hell were we doing to the rest of the population? To even
pose such a question was to elicit the shrieked response, “You want
people to die!” But how many self-isolating octogenarians would rather
have taken a relatively small risk and enjoyed the company of family and
friends in the twilight of their days? The state denied them the dignity
of that choice. (The prime minister should, of course, have had the
courage of his convictions and cancelled the second lockdown when he
twigged it was based on out-of-date data.)
Ironically, Downing Street had become a prisoner of the public’s fear.
That sense of dread which, as Laura Dodsworth points out in her
definitive book, State of Fear, was itself created by government
scientists “using a battery of weapons from distorted statistics,
‘nudges’ and misleading adverts on TV to control the public in order to >> make them comply with lockdown requirements”. So people were convinced
that Covid was a uniquely ruthless killer.
Another name that kept leaping out at me from The Lockdown Files was
Helen Whateley, then-social care minister. Perhaps it’s because Helen
was a rare female voice at the centre of power, and the mother of three
young children, that she kept urging more compassion on her gung-ho
boss. Couldn’t kids be excluded from the totally random “Rule of Six” so
more families could see grandparents? No, said Matt Hancock – it didn’t >> work with the Comms, which needed to be kept simple so the plebs
wouldn’t think they had any leeway with the rules. Restrictions on
visitors to care homes were “inhumane”, Whately said, warning the health >> secretary against “preventing husbands seeing wives for months and
months”. The elderly were at risk of “just giving up” because they had >> been isolated for so long. Too bad. Hancock did nothing to alleviate the
misery experienced by tens of thousands as they enacted a pitiful
pantomime of intimacy through care-home windows and Perspex screens.
(Visits to care homes and hospitals only returned to something like
normality in July 2021 and, appallingly, many are still fortresses.)
READERS’ EXPERIENCES
John Stobart
My lovely wife died of cancer within 12 weeks of its diagnosis all
within the lockdown. We couldn't have visits by her friends to see her
nor could we have a proper funeral, just a miserable pinched affair of
eight people who had to stay well apart listening to recorded hymn
singing. Rage? Yes I feel rage and always will.
My wife's name was Anne Stobart and we had been married for 43 years
having first met at university in the 1970s.
I supported the first mini-lockdown. Three weeks to flatten the curve
(“squash the sombrero” in Boris’s ebullient phrase) seemed fair enough >> when we were dealing with a novel virus. But, as time went on, and the
restrictions bit deeper, I began to shout at the TV during the Downing
Street press briefings. Why did no one ask why having a “substantial
meal” with alcohol in a pub protected you against Covid in a way that
standing at the bar eating a bag of crisps did not? Robert Jenrick, the
communities secretary at the time, explained that “a Cornish pasty on
its own” would not constitute a substantial meal, “unless it came on a >> plate, to a table, with a side of chips or salad”. This gave rise to one >> of the great dilemmas of the pandemic: The Scotch Egg Question. Food
minister George Eustice said a scotch egg “probably would count” as a
substantial meal, but a No?10 spokesman hastily over-ruled that
deplorable, devil-may-care attitude, sternly insisting that “bar snacks
do not count”.
Grown men, our democratically elected representatives no less, actually
said ludicrous things like that with a straight face. On the basis of no
scientific evidence whatsoever. It was farcical.
The farce insulted our intelligence, but it was the cruelty I abhorred.
Common sense and basic human decency had been overridden, leading to the
isolation of the most vulnerable (the very people we were meant to be
“saving”); so many lonely deaths, so many families damaged, so many
self-harming teenagers. Every day, my Telegraph inbox filled up with
devastating stories. A 14-year-old boy who, pre-lockdown had been fit
and sporty, admitted with anorexia to a psychiatric unit because he was
so terrified of the weight he’d put on. The five-year-old who developed
nervous tics. A dad-to-be pleading to be let in to the maternity unit
where his wife was miscarrying their first child.
A close friend was ticked off by a nurse for not wearing plastic gloves
and a mask when she stroked her father’s brow as he lay dying. What
possible harm could her bare hand on his dear forehead have done, her
kiss on his cheek? None. Yet simple human comfort was overruled by
“Covid-19 guidance for a healthcare in-patient setting”. With such scary >> ease did we lose our moral bearings and slip into monstrosity.
Then there was dear Robert Styler, barred from visiting Josephine, his
wife of 60 years, in her care home. Josie got confused and upset seeing
her husband on FaceTime. Why, Robert wanted to know, was he, who was
self-isolating, not allowed to enter the premises to comfort the mother
of his children while the staff traipsed in and out from busy family
homes? On the Planet Normal podcast, Liam Halligan and I campaigned for
Robert and Josie to be reunited. And they were. One last dinner (and
dance) before Josephine died. I wept for them. And for all the other
Roberts and Josephines. At times, I felt almost unhinged by all that
sorrow. And now, through all those casual, bantering WhatsApp messages,
we can see the political expediency which lay behind huge decisions that
caused so much individual suffering. So, yes, I raged against the dying
of the light of reason. I couldn’t bear it.
Robert and Josephine in happier times at their golden wedding aniversary
CREDIT: Andrew Crowley
To speak out, however, was to be demonised as a “Covidiot” and worse.
The Left of the Labour Party, still smarting from the recent defeat of
Jeremy Corbyn, redirected all its fire-breathing zealotry into advancing
the cause of “zero Covid”, the better to undermine the hated Tories. I >> regularly found myself under attack, and trending (not in a good way) on
Twitter. Once, it was for the heresy of suggesting that we should allow
young people to get Covid and build up natural immunity which could then
help protect their grandparents. Prior to the pandemic, that had been an
uncontroversial precept of epidemiology. As Martin Kulldorff, former
professor at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the Great
Barrington Declaration, observed drily this week at a Covid hearing in
the House of Representatives, “I guess we knew about it [natural
immunity] since 430 B.C. – the Athenian plague – until 2020. And then we >> didn’t know about it for three years, and now we know about it again.” >> I was naïve enough to be shocked when I discovered that a Conservative
MP, Neil O’Brien, had set up (at the behest, it was alleged, of certain
ministers) a McCarthyite website to monitor the work of journalists like
me who took a sceptical attitude to lockdown. How could that be
happening in a free society? While I undoubtedly got certain things
wrong, especially in the early days, I was repulsed by the way that Matt
Hancock assumed the moral high ground, bulldozing over any criticism of
his own highly questionable decisions. Intoxicated by his new
totalitarian powers. Mr Hancock, I felt, was getting away with murder.
So when Matt Hancock accused Isabel Oakeshott of a “massive betrayal”
for handing over his WhatsApp messages to The Telegraph, I laughed.
The Covid Inquiry, which began this week, with a dismaying lack of
lockdown sceptics among its “core participants” had better buck up its >> ideas, or else. (At first, the inquiry wasn’t even going to consider the >> damage done to children, if you can believe it.
In the interim, the only *healthy* way to eradicate the COVID-19
virus, thereby saving lives, in the UK & elsewhere is by rapidly ( http://bit.ly/RapidTestCOVID-19 ) finding out at any given moment,
including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly contagious
(i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to http://WDJW.great-site.net/ConvinceItForward (John 15:12) for them to
call their doctor and self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of
stopping this pandemic. Thus, we're hoping for the best while
preparing for the worse-case scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations
and others like the Omicron, Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu &
Delta lineage mutations combining via slip-RNA-replication to form
hybrids like http://tinyurl.com/Deltamicron that may render current
COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no longer effective.
Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry ( http://tinyurl.com/RapidOmicronTest
) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.
So how are you ?
HeartDoc Andrew, in the Holy Spirit, boldly wrote:
Michael Ejercito wrote:
https://archive.vn/R1uMf
Lockdown sceptics like me were demonised but we were right
The Telegraphs expos has shone a light on the over-zealous Covid
regulations and cruelty that politicians and their egos inflicted on us
By
Allison Pearson
4 March 2023 7:00am
National Covid Memorial wall
Dont tell me thousands more would have died if we hadnt locked down
because thousands more are dying because we had lockdown... Will they be >>> putting their names on the National Covid Memorial wall? CREDIT: Leon
Neal/Getty Images
It almost seems as if we dreamt it. So surreal was that period, so
dementedly bonkers in many ways, so full of strange unease, so randomly
cruel, so wrong. Desperately wrong. I felt it at the time, and I was
attacked for saying so. I nearly lost my mind as I absorbed the pain of
all the devastated people who wrote to me. (I remember shouting down the >>> phone at a GP practice manager in the West Country on behalf of an
elderly reader who had been stuck in her house alone for almost a year
and was desperate for a Covid jab.)
I was spied on, reported, publicly denounced, called a murderer, banned
and shadow banned. At times, it felt like we were living in East Germany >>> under the Stasi. Our blessed, free country had become an island of
hysterics, snitches and obsessive Dettol wipers. Driving in my car one
morning to take the dog for a walk in woods two miles up the road, I
thought, Am I allowed to do this?
Am I allowed to do this? Dear God. Where had Britain gone?
And now, vindication. So much that we conspiracy theorists suspected
turns out to be true, from the Wuhan Covid-19 lab leak (racist back in >>> 2020 but now highly likely says the FBI) to Matt Hancocks imaginary
protective ring around care homes to the brutal collateral reckoning
for lockdown. Vindication is bittersweet, alas, because you cannot mend
all the people they broke (over a million children with mental health
problems, millions more awaiting hospital treatment where do you
begin?) nor bring back those who died without a loved one to gentle
their passing.
And dont tell me thousands more would have died if we hadnt locked
down because thousands more are dying because we had lockdown. Men and
women in their thirties, forties and fifties with families; fit, younger >>> people whom the virus could not harm, now presenting with incurable
cancers. Will they be putting their names on the National Covid Memorial >>> wall? They should.
Human beings have an astonishing capacity to forget, especially when
something is embarrassing to look back on or when it makes us feel a bit >>> stupid.
READERS EXPERIENCES
Tom McLelland
The Memorial Wall will doubtless end up as the only meaningful tribute
to those who lost loved ones. Amidst all the politicking, journalism,
evasion of responsibility and self-serving, those who died must never be >>> forgotten, including Jeannie McLelland, my wife of 52 years, a nurse who >>> did her best to make others well but ended up failed by those
politicians now trying to escape blame, and sadly, yes, the NHS to which >>> she had given so much of her working life.
The tingle of a remembered shame, George Eliot called it. But we
should force ourselves to remember, I think. The Lockdown Files, drawing >>> on the WhatsApp messages vouchsafed to the superb investigative
journalist Isabel Oakeshott by Matt Hancock, the former health secretary >>> of state, and published this week by The Daily Telegraph, are an
extraordinary aide-memoire to the madness we all lived through. They
also provide a remarkable insight into the behaviour of those running
the country at the time. What a bunch of arrogant, clueless, emotionally >>> stunted authoritarians they turn out to be for the most part.
The biggest shock revealed by The Telegraph scoop is quite how often our >>> leaders, who always claimed to be guided by the science, were making
decisions on the hoof.
Astonished, we read conversation after conversation where, it becomes
clear, that decisions affecting the suffering of the elderly entombed in >>> care homes, of children shut out of schools and playgrounds is filtered
through the prism of something called Comms.
READERS EXPERIENCES
Richard Halsted
My mother died of Covid. It said on her death certificate. I was not
allowed to see her. She died of isolation and lack of care.
So, when Boris Johnson asks his top team whether masks in schools are
necessary, Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, replies: No strong
reason against in corridors etc, and no strong reason for. The downsides >>> are in the classroom because of the potential to interfere with teaching. >>> But Lee Cain, the PMs director of Comms, is not happy. Scotland has
just confirmed masks in schools so England is under pressure to follow
suit lest Nicola Sturgeon gain the advantage. Why do we want to have
the fight on not having masks in certain school settings? asks Cain.
Oh, I dont know, Lee. Maybe because imposing an unevidenced and
alienating NPI (non-pharmaceutical intervention) on vulnerable
adolescents is a really bad idea? Perhaps because forcing children into
futile masks for protection against a virus they largely dont need
protecting against is just a repugnant piece of political power play.
Perhaps because, with their young worlds turned upside-down, the
reassurance of seeing smiling faces would have been really nice.
Finally, as that WhatsApp conclave of geniuses somehow failed to
foresee, permitting masks in school corridors would be the gateway to
the teaching unions demanding (and getting) masks in classrooms.
(While the big boys club was throwing kids under the devolution bus, a
group of mums who founded an organisation called Us For Them to stick up >>> for childrens rights, were fighting furiously to get the school mask
mandates withdrawn under threat of pre-action letters. They succeeded,
twice. So often during the pandemic, it took the defiance of ordinary
men and women parents, publicans, restaurateurs, shop owners, small
business people to restore some sense to the senseless edicts.)
READERS EXPERIENCES
Paul S.
My business lost thousands due to Covid restrictions, HMRC aren't
getting any more out of me. I'm livid.
The Lockdown Files reveal that Matt Hancock and other key players often
had a callous disregard for everything except their own egos. (Look at
Simon Case, the countrys most senior civil servant, gleefully joking
about the prospect of seeing some of the faces of those moving from
first-class plane seats into shoe-box hotel rooms. Never mind the
inconvenience and expense for legitimate travellers, many of them trying >>> to reach terrified relatives before suddenly being forced into
quarantine by a government with a whim of iron.)
Childrens wellbeing? Forget it. Hancock, we learn, launched a
disgraceful rearguard action to close schools when Gavin Williamson,
then-education secretary, was, to his credit, battling to keep them
open. In one WhatsApp, Hancock talks of preventing a policy car crash
when the kids spread the disease in January. Had the health secretary
consulted widely with proper epidemiologists, instead of obsessing over
his willy-waving, 100,000-tests-a-day target, he might have learnt that
youngsters getting the virus was not a problem provided the vulnerable
were protected. (In fact, kids getting Covid was a positive because the
resolution of the crisis lay in achieving widespread immunity not in
endless, extortionate and increasingly pointless testing.) Keeping
children out of education for another two months (until March 2021)
turned out to be the real car crash.
One of the few people to emerge with any credit from this fiasco is
Boris Johnson. His large, freedom-loving spirit was a poor fit for the
narrow groupthink that took over No?10. Frequently, the prime minister
was the only one asking the questions any normal person would want
answering. When he finds out that the risk of the over-65s dying from
Covid is akin to the danger of perishing while going down stairs, he
points out, And we dont stop older people from using stairs. Later,
he said that if he was an 80-year-old and had to choose between
destroying the economy and risking my exposure to a disease that I had a >>> 94 per cent chance of surviving I know what I would prefer.
READERS EXPERIENCES
Brendan Harris
My elderly dad fell ill during the Christmas lockdown and was admitted
to hospital in London. I was living in Italy so I flew back immediately, >>> making a false declaration on my Covid travel documents because wanting >>> to be at my dying parents bedside wasnt a valid reason.
At St Marys hospital they refused to let me in so I dodged security and >>> followed a nurse through the doors. I made it. I sat with dad, held his
hand, made sure he wasnt alone in his last days. The duty nurse turned
a blind eye because she had some humanity.
Boris was bang on. By pausing society, we may have bought a bit more
life for those of 82.4 years (the average age of Covid death) and over,
but what the hell were we doing to the rest of the population? To even
pose such a question was to elicit the shrieked response, You want
people to die! But how many self-isolating octogenarians would rather
have taken a relatively small risk and enjoyed the company of family and >>> friends in the twilight of their days? The state denied them the dignity >>> of that choice. (The prime minister should, of course, have had the
courage of his convictions and cancelled the second lockdown when he
twigged it was based on out-of-date data.)
Ironically, Downing Street had become a prisoner of the publics fear.
That sense of dread which, as Laura Dodsworth points out in her
definitive book, State of Fear, was itself created by government
scientists using a battery of weapons from distorted statistics,
nudges and misleading adverts on TV to control the public in order to
make them comply with lockdown requirements. So people were convinced
that Covid was a uniquely ruthless killer.
Another name that kept leaping out at me from The Lockdown Files was
Helen Whateley, then-social care minister. Perhaps its because Helen
was a rare female voice at the centre of power, and the mother of three
young children, that she kept urging more compassion on her gung-ho
boss. Couldnt kids be excluded from the totally random Rule of Six so >>> more families could see grandparents? No, said Matt Hancock it didnt
work with the Comms, which needed to be kept simple so the plebs
wouldnt think they had any leeway with the rules. Restrictions on
visitors to care homes were inhumane, Whately said, warning the health >>> secretary against preventing husbands seeing wives for months and
months. The elderly were at risk of just giving up because they had
been isolated for so long. Too bad. Hancock did nothing to alleviate the >>> misery experienced by tens of thousands as they enacted a pitiful
pantomime of intimacy through care-home windows and Perspex screens.
(Visits to care homes and hospitals only returned to something like
normality in July 2021 and, appallingly, many are still fortresses.)
READERS EXPERIENCES
John Stobart
My lovely wife died of cancer within 12 weeks of its diagnosis all
within the lockdown. We couldn't have visits by her friends to see her
nor could we have a proper funeral, just a miserable pinched affair of
eight people who had to stay well apart listening to recorded hymn
singing. Rage? Yes I feel rage and always will.
My wife's name was Anne Stobart and we had been married for 43 years
having first met at university in the 1970s.
I supported the first mini-lockdown. Three weeks to flatten the curve
(squash the sombrero in Boriss ebullient phrase) seemed fair enough
when we were dealing with a novel virus. But, as time went on, and the
restrictions bit deeper, I began to shout at the TV during the Downing
Street press briefings. Why did no one ask why having a substantial
meal with alcohol in a pub protected you against Covid in a way that
standing at the bar eating a bag of crisps did not? Robert Jenrick, the
communities secretary at the time, explained that a Cornish pasty on
its own would not constitute a substantial meal, unless it came on a
plate, to a table, with a side of chips or salad. This gave rise to one >>> of the great dilemmas of the pandemic: The Scotch Egg Question. Food
minister George Eustice said a scotch egg probably would count as a
substantial meal, but a No?10 spokesman hastily over-ruled that
deplorable, devil-may-care attitude, sternly insisting that bar snacks
do not count.
Grown men, our democratically elected representatives no less, actually
said ludicrous things like that with a straight face. On the basis of no >>> scientific evidence whatsoever. It was farcical.
The farce insulted our intelligence, but it was the cruelty I abhorred.
Common sense and basic human decency had been overridden, leading to the >>> isolation of the most vulnerable (the very people we were meant to be
saving); so many lonely deaths, so many families damaged, so many
self-harming teenagers. Every day, my Telegraph inbox filled up with
devastating stories. A 14-year-old boy who, pre-lockdown had been fit
and sporty, admitted with anorexia to a psychiatric unit because he was
so terrified of the weight hed put on. The five-year-old who developed
nervous tics. A dad-to-be pleading to be let in to the maternity unit
where his wife was miscarrying their first child.
A close friend was ticked off by a nurse for not wearing plastic gloves
and a mask when she stroked her fathers brow as he lay dying. What
possible harm could her bare hand on his dear forehead have done, her
kiss on his cheek? None. Yet simple human comfort was overruled by
Covid-19 guidance for a healthcare in-patient setting. With such scary >>> ease did we lose our moral bearings and slip into monstrosity.
Then there was dear Robert Styler, barred from visiting Josephine, his
wife of 60 years, in her care home. Josie got confused and upset seeing
her husband on FaceTime. Why, Robert wanted to know, was he, who was
self-isolating, not allowed to enter the premises to comfort the mother
of his children while the staff traipsed in and out from busy family
homes? On the Planet Normal podcast, Liam Halligan and I campaigned for
Robert and Josie to be reunited. And they were. One last dinner (and
dance) before Josephine died. I wept for them. And for all the other
Roberts and Josephines. At times, I felt almost unhinged by all that
sorrow. And now, through all those casual, bantering WhatsApp messages,
we can see the political expediency which lay behind huge decisions that >>> caused so much individual suffering. So, yes, I raged against the dying
of the light of reason. I couldnt bear it.
Robert and Josephine in happier times at their golden wedding aniversary >>> CREDIT: Andrew Crowley
To speak out, however, was to be demonised as a Covidiot and worse.
The Left of the Labour Party, still smarting from the recent defeat of
Jeremy Corbyn, redirected all its fire-breathing zealotry into advancing >>> the cause of zero Covid, the better to undermine the hated Tories. I
regularly found myself under attack, and trending (not in a good way) on >>> Twitter. Once, it was for the heresy of suggesting that we should allow
young people to get Covid and build up natural immunity which could then >>> help protect their grandparents. Prior to the pandemic, that had been an >>> uncontroversial precept of epidemiology. As Martin Kulldorff, former
professor at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the Great
Barrington Declaration, observed drily this week at a Covid hearing in
the House of Representatives, I guess we knew about it [natural
immunity] since 430 B.C. the Athenian plague until 2020. And then we >>> didnt know about it for three years, and now we know about it again.
I was nave enough to be shocked when I discovered that a Conservative
MP, Neil OBrien, had set up (at the behest, it was alleged, of certain
ministers) a McCarthyite website to monitor the work of journalists like >>> me who took a sceptical attitude to lockdown. How could that be
happening in a free society? While I undoubtedly got certain things
wrong, especially in the early days, I was repulsed by the way that Matt >>> Hancock assumed the moral high ground, bulldozing over any criticism of
his own highly questionable decisions. Intoxicated by his new
totalitarian powers. Mr Hancock, I felt, was getting away with murder.
So when Matt Hancock accused Isabel Oakeshott of a massive betrayal
for handing over his WhatsApp messages to The Telegraph, I laughed.
The Covid Inquiry, which began this week, with a dismaying lack of
lockdown sceptics among its core participants had better buck up its
ideas, or else. (At first, the inquiry wasnt even going to consider the >>> damage done to children, if you can believe it.
In the interim, the only *healthy* way to eradicate the COVID-19
virus, thereby saving lives, in the UK & elsewhere is by rapidly (
http://bit.ly/RapidTestCOVID-19 ) finding out at any given moment,
including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly contagious
(i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
http://WDJW.great-site.net/ConvinceItForward (John 15:12) for them to
call their doctor and self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of
stopping this pandemic. Thus, we're hoping for the best while
preparing for the worse-case scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations
and others like the Omicron, Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu &
Delta lineage mutations combining via slip-RNA-replication to form
hybrids like http://tinyurl.com/Deltamicron that may render current
COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no longer effective.
Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry ( http://tinyurl.com/RapidOmicronTest
) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.
So how are you ?
I am wonderfully hungry!
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