In the first three parts, I have attempted to outline the harms inflicted upon children by government policies designed to combat Covid 19. In Part 1, I examined the educational, developmental and physical impact on children. Part 2 was dedicated to setting out the various government policies which particularly affected children, and this was followed by an examination of whether these policies worked or were necessary. In Part 3, I examined government policies through a wider lens and again assessed whether they had worked. In this, the final part, I will draw a range of conclusions.
Robert Halfon MP, Chairman of the House of Commons education select committee, has described the closing of schools as “the biggest and most catastrophic mistake the Government made during Covid”. He also said when evaluating the evidence he had heard for the measure: “What is frightening is that […] there was very little consideration given to the disadvantage that pupils would face from school closures.”
Surely, we elect and pay politicians to assess fully the impact of policies they introduce?
In Part 3, I examined the wider impact of government policies on the economy, social issues, health and education. Research findings by Johns Hopkins University neatly summarise that impact. In the write-up, the following question is raised: “What does the evidence tell us about the effects of lockdowns on mortality?” The answer was given as follows:
We provide a firm answer to this question: The evidence fails to confirm that lockdowns have a significant effect in reducing COVID–19 mortality. The effect is little to none. […] [L]ockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID–19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.
In March 2020, the Dutch Government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis which concluded that health damage from lockdown would be six times greater than the benefit. Furthermore, Dr David Bell, in ‘A Critique of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission’, calls the response “a travesty of public health and science”. He adds:
A virus that mainly targets people over 75 years of age was addressed with a public health response that targets the children and the economically productive, cementing long-term poverty and inequity.
Sadly, as former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur has documented in scrupulous detail, the harms that lockdowns would cause were all well-known and reported at the time when they were first adopted as policy in early 2020. These included accurate estimates of mass deaths due to delayed medical operations, a mental health crisis, drug overdoses, an economic recession, global poverty, hunger, and starvation.
The Swiss Policy Research group succinctly evaluates governments’ responses in its analysis comparing the death tolls in over 50 countries (including the UK) that had locked down, shut down playgrounds, forced children to wear face masks and closed schools. It concludes that all have been hit worse than Sweden, which largely didn’t impose restrictions on children. SPR writes that this means “almost every single government intervention in Austria—and almost everywhere else” (in particular, lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, mass testing, contact tracing as well as ‘vaccine passports’) “has been entirely ineffective […] while having caused almost unprecedented social and economic harm.”
A well researched and agreed Pandemic Plan was in place at the WHO. It contained many interesting evidence-based recommendations, which had stood the test of time, such as acknowledgement that:
- there was no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza;
- active contact tracing is not recommended in general because there is no obvious rationale for it in most member states;
- home quarantine of exposed individuals to reduce transmission is not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure;
- the strength of evidence on workplace closure is very low because the identified studies are all simulation studies;
- no scientific evidence was identified for the effectiveness of travel advice against pandemic influenza; and
- entry and exit screening for infection in travellers is not recommended.
The question to be asked is: Why was this discarded so hastily and many of its key recommendations reversed?
The aforementioned Dr Bell has this to say on the new plan:
As the new pandemic preparedness and response narrative is poorly defensible on rational criteria, criticism and opposition must be dealt with and dismissed by other means. This is being achieved through the creation of a dogma around mass Covid–19 vaccination sufficiently separated from reality as to render the normal processes of debate irrelevant. If the gap between pandemic messaging and reality can be kept sufficiently wide, few passengers can step off, and this lucrative gravy train becomes unstoppable. Small lies can be argued against; big lies become matters of faith. [Emphasis added] […] This required coordination and adherence to a single simple message, a message repeated incessantly to stifle external opinion; a slogan so ridiculous that it becomes inarguable. In other words, it required propaganda.
“No-one is safe until everyone is safe” was the WHO’s COVAX motto. As a maxim, it meets all the above criteria. Most people want to be safe—and to achieve industry aims, the public must be convinced that others, not just themselves, are the key to their personal safety. They must support the blame or coercion being applied to these others. However, the brilliance of “No-one is safe until everyone is safe” lies not just in its appeal to self-preservation and its divisiveness, but in its simple stupidity.
For the slogan to be true, the vaccine proffered must be transmission-blocking only. It must not protect the vaccinated individual—otherwise, his safety will not be dependent on the vaccination of others.
Dr Bell concludes, somewhat chillingly:
Despite its massive internal contradictions, disproportionate cost, coercion, and requirement for its promoters to live obvious lies, COVAX and the entire mass-vaccination paradigm has created a strong model for the success of the wider pandemic preparedness project. If truth in public health can be so readily dispensed with, and those working in the field so willingly corralled, this creates a self-perpetuating cycle—we can expect to see more outbreaks, health emergencies and pandemics declared, more vaccines rolled out, and more wealth concentrated as a result. An unstoppable cycle burying truth under a growing fog of fear and falsehood.
(Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics with the WHO).
WHO stands culpable by dint of the statements of Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said: “Vaccinating all those most at risk is the single best way to save lives, protect health systems and keep societies and economies open.” The WHO media department states this as the basis for mass vaccination, whilst admitting that Covid–19 vaccines “have not substantially reduced transmission.”
And again according to Dr Bell,
Indeed, countries with the current highest transmission rates, such as New Zealand, are among the most vaccinated. If a vaccine does not reduce transmission, and severe Covid–19 is concentrated in a small segment of the sick and elderly, then mass vaccination of already-immune people cannot have an influence on ‘keeping society open.’ This is achieved by not closing it.
Where is the attempt to balance the minuscule risk to young people from Covid against the widespread potential for harm?
So the policies did not work and were in fact unnecessary and caused immense harm. But will anyone be held accountable or responsible?
It also worryingly seems that people who question policy or ask for answers are either ignored or cancelled. This even includes world-class scientists, medics and Nobel Prize winners. Letters to politicians, civil servants and press calls go unanswered—is this accountable democracy? Under the concerning sub-heading Control through erasing dissenting voices, the HART Group writes:
Presumably based on the assumption that eliminating people before dissent is expressed is a more effective censorial method than controlling their information output, throughout the Covid era there appears to have been a systematic state-driven attempt to discredit or cancel those brave individuals expressing views that are inconsistent with the dominant restrict-and-jab narrative.
The article continues:
Since March 2020, anyone who has expressed a contrary Covid opinion in a public space will likely have attracted criticism involving accusations of being ‘right wing’, fascist or a ‘conspiracy theorist’. Efforts by powerful players to destroy reputations and livelihoods through smearing and character assassination have been commonplace. Arguably the most high-profile example of this egregious practice is in regards to the targeting of the main authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a multi-signatory document arguing for an alternative to the blanket lockdowns. In leaked e-mails […] powerful state officials refer to the illustrious authors of the document as ‘fringe epidemiologists’ while describing the need for a ‘quick and devastating public takedown’ of their arguments.”
In a democracy, it is surely a human right to raise genuine concerns with the decision-makers and to be able to expect answers rather than censorship. In this series of articles, I have raised genuine concerns, with evidence, as to the effectiveness of government policies and the harm they have caused. Do I still have the right to raise these concerns and the right to obtain answers, or has accountable democracy been redefined?
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong,” opined Voltaire.
Is it?
Epilogue
“I’ll see you in the car park,” muttered a friend’s doctor when my friend sought a face-to-face appointment with him.
Why do we need to say the same thing over and over again?
My concern is that if we do not recognise the harms and try to hold the people responsible accountable, there is a danger that we could do, and indeed might accept the same thing again.
Professor Carl Heneghan articulates this clearly:
We believe that we must record as much as possible of what went on for posterity, hoping that the catastrophic mistakes are not repeated in future. In this way, the suffering will not have been in vain.
The effects of lockdown, now becoming clearer by the day, should never be forgotten.
Indeed and it seems to me that the finance, the people and the philosophy that led to such disastrous policies are all still in place, for as Professor Jay Bhattacharya says:
We are going to lock down again, with the next pandemic—guaranteed—if the current configuration of power, public health and politics stands.
So it remains vital to continue to inform the public and attempt to hold those responsible accountable.
But surely, most people now know the harms caused to children by the governments’ Covid policies: these are well documented. It is well known that lockdowns and school closures did not work; the Cochrane Review ended the discussion as to whether masks work; and surely people know that concepts such as asymptomatic transmission—which, together with the PCR test, drove the narrative—have been shown to be totally flawed. In addition, the Lockdown Files, the release of former Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s messages, revealed corruption and incompetence at the heart of government decision-making.
And after all, it is obvious that the pandemic was produced by shifting the goalposts, as Simon Elmer has described for UK Column. Here is how it was done:
Step 1—change the definition of what constitutes a case
There is the medically inaccurate equation of a positive test for SARS–CoV–2 with a ‘case’ of Covid–19. This ignores what Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and one of the most referenced scientists in German medical history, described as the ‘traditional distinction’ in infectiology between infection with a virus and its replication into a disease identified by its clinical symptoms and not by a fatally flawed test.
Despite that distinction being well-established in medicine, this fundamentally flawed equation has been accepted without question, adopted without commentary, and repeated without qualification by every medical body in the UK, and used by the Government to fabricate the vast number of so-called ‘cases’ of Covid–19 on which the biosecurity state has been built with nothing more than traces of a dead virus.
Step 2—apply a hugely sensitive test to produce huge volumes of cases
On 17 January 2020, as part of its recommended protocols for RT–PCR tests, the ECDC published the Corman-Drosten paper. Among the numerous flaws in its destructive protocols, the authors recommended using 45 cycles of thermal amplification of swab samples for SARS–CoV–2, which, as numerous studies have confirmed, is many times higher than the number of cycles (no more than 24) at which the specific coronavirus can be identified, infectious virus reliably detected, or its replication into a disease confirmed.
Despite this, these protocols were unquestioningly adopted and repeated across the world, including in the UK. On 16 March 2020, the National Health Service, in its Guidance and standard operating procedure: Covid–19 virus testing in NHS laboratories, recommended a cycle threshold of 45, with anything below 40 to be regarded as a ‘confirmed’ positive. On 28 September, it was estimated that, at even 35 cycles of amplification, 97% of the positives in an RT-PCR test are false. Yet, as late as October 2020, in Understanding cycle threshold (Ct) in SARS–CoV–2 RT-PCR: A guide for health protection teams, Public Health England (now the UK Health Security Agency) continued to advise those administering the tests in this country that ‘a typical RT–PCR assay will have a maximum of 40 thermal cycles’, while also conceding that such tests are ‘not able to distinguish whether infectious virus is present’.
Step 3—instruct the doctors to register as deaths from Covid anyone who tests positive with Covid
On 20 April 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued the International Guidelines for Certification and Classification (coding) of Covid–19 as cause of death. These instructed medical practitioners that, if Covid–19 is the ‘suspected’ or ‘probable’ or merely ‘assumed’ cause of death, it must always be recorded in Part 1 of the death certificate as the ‘underlying cause’ of death. In contrast, co-morbidities such as cancer, heart disease, dementia, diabetes or chronic respiratory infections other than Covid–19 should only be recorded in Part 2 of the death certificate as a ‘contributing’ cause.
To clear up any confusion this may cause to a doctor filling out the death certificate of an 80-year-old patient who has died of cancer but tested positive for SARS–CoV–2 post mortem, the WHO instructed medical professionals:
Always apply these instructions, whether they can be considered medically correct or not.
Spelling this out more fully, statistician Professor Norman Fenton states:
In the early part of the pandemic, doctors were incentivised to diagnose SARS–CoV–2, where the symptoms are indistinguishable from flu, for symptoms which would have hitherto been attributed to Influenza-like-illnesses (ILIs). That incentive was achieved by a combination of authoritative diktat by the WHO, who mandated that a respiratory death could be certificated as Covid–19 deaths on the flimsiest of grounds, and the all-pervasive fear caused by the ceaseless propaganda about a novel and deadly virus. And this despite the fact that the UKHSA (Health Security Agency) had ruled that SARS–CoV–2 was not a High Consequence Infectious Disease.
And surely people know that all this was pushed by a deliberate fear agenda—designed, as former minister Hancock put it, “to scare the pants of people to ensure compliance”.
And people must be aware by now that alternative scientific and medical voices exist and have been silenced, as I myself experienced, by the BBC, LinkedIn and YouTube.
Lest we forget
But even if “everyone” knows, is anyone responsible? Could it happen again?
Are the people, the finance and the philosophy that drove those policies still in place? Has any public health official admitted the errors and the huge damage they caused?
No, according to Professor Jay Bhattacharya speaking to Peter Robinson.
The sight of the House of Commons chamber emptying when Andrew Bridgen MP stood up to represent those injured by the vaccine and report that it was government policies around Covid that destroyed livelihoods, education and the mental health of so many is not encouraging.
What are the authorities saying about future pandemics and their response to them? Has it been acknowledged by those in power that the measures were wrong and caused and are still causing huge harms—or is there still an undercurrent maintaining that these policies are appropriate?
This article series has sought to remind us of the damage, and this epilogue examines whether the climate exists for the same thing to happen again.
Don’t hug your sister, who had been depressed, or your cousin, recently bereaved. Don’t visit your wife of fifty years in her care home, don’t hold the hand of your father dying alone in hospital. Don’t enjoy a walk in the country because it was more than five miles from your home, or sit on a park bench having coffee with a friend. Why were my businesses closed, my children denied education, my baby surrounded by fear-engendering mask-wearers, my relative buried alone? Why was I coerced into having an injection to save my job? And even more importantly, were GPs really instructed to shut their surgery door? And what to say of churches being closed to the lonely and fearful, those in need of spiritual support?
MunsonDenny has worded the pain:
Their final days together—my mum, locked in her death cell [in] uncare home during lockdown before she was culled with Midazolam and oxycodone, and father, who died from aggressive cancer after receiving booster jab last year. Both old, both expendable to government.
As Dr Peter McCullough put it, these were:
unprecedented lockdowns, devastating economic damage, families separated from loved ones, huge violations of personal freedoms, the greatest organised crime in history.
All measures, lockdowns, social distancing masks were introduced despite there already being plenty of data in the public domain—and in the hands of officials.
I documented the timeline for what was known here, here and here.
So why, if the information is already in the public domain, does it need to be said again?
Because, as I pointed out earlier and as Professor Ioannidis said as Covid panic was winding down,
Decisions were putting our children as a shield to protect us—the whole debate was for protecting adults from the dangerous children, creating a sense in children that they are dangerous.
As he says, we did the worst thing that one can do:
We destroyed our kids—and we can do it again.
So has there been an acknowledgement at government, media and public level that the measures not only did not work, but caused huge harms and were totally disproportionate—or is there still a climate in which the same policies could be reintroduced? Is there still a belief that they were needed and that the policies such as lockdowns, masks and mass vaccination were both necessary and efficient?
As I wrote in the previous part, none of the policies pursued by government worked, even if they were necessary—and they certainly weren’t necessary for children.
No-one has admitted their mistakes, taken responsibility and been held accountable.
Not just Covid
This goes beyond Covid policies; it hits at our fundamental democratic freedoms.
Lionel Shriver’s column in the Spectator reveals a searing critique of the West’s pandemic response and the mockery it made of our supposedly ‘inalienable’ rights:
We are forever changed. The British people […] have henceforth to live with the fact that civil liberties can be cancelled at a moment’s notice. Which is why indulging our aversion to all things Covid with a wilful amnesia is a mistake [...] given the perfect absence of any correlation whatsoever between the severity of the restrictions and Covid mortality rates, it is probable that this plethora of interventions that made our lives hell while making a mockery of representative government made not the slightest difference in the death toll [...]
Yet meanwhile, the WHO is promoting two agreements whereby countries will “undertake to follow” this unaccountable supranational organisation’s “recommendations”, including imposing lockdowns, vaccine mandates and passports, border closures, and mask-wearing (never mind how ineffective) all over the heads of nation states.
As currently conceived, these agreements would make WHO edicts not merely advisory but compulsory. Thus, the WHO could soon be able to shut down the whole world over a pathogen that turns out to be as dangerous as cheese mould—just in case.
Could it happen again?
Is David Bell right when he says:
Understanding the reasons for society’s loss of grip during Covid matters, because the intent of those who profited from Covid is to do it all again. They are building an international bureaucracy whose sole purpose is to identify more ‘novel’ viruses, claim they are an existential threat, and repeat what we have just been through over and over again.
This relies entirely on people believing the false premise that the threat of deadly pandemics is increasing, that they are killing more than before, and that they are an existential threat to all of us regardless of age and underlying health. We are, rather, being asked to believe many obvious lies [...] We need to build understanding and resilience to withstand such manipulation.
What is the narrative now? Is an atmosphere of continuing threat being pursued?
President Biden has said:
We need more many to plan for the second pandemic. There’s gonna be another pandemic, we have to think ahead.
Does this blunt ukase from the White House set the context, then, for the views of Bell and Shiver, for future world policies controlled by the WHO?
What powers are the WHO proposing for themselves, then?
The International Health Regulations amendments contain the most important aspects of the WHO’s pandemic preparedness initiative. The proposals are as follows:
- Expand the definitions of pandemics & health emergencies, including the introduction of ‘potential’ for harm rather than actual harm.
- Change the recommendations of the IHR from ‘non-binding’ to mandatory instructions that the States undertake to follow and implement.
- Solidify the Director General’s ability to independently declare emergencies.
- Set up an extensive surveillance process in all States, which WHO will verify regularly through a county review mechanism.
- Enable WHO to share country data without consent.
- Give WHO control over certain country resources, including requirements for financial contributions
- Ensure national support for promotion of censorship activities by WHO to prevent contrary approaches and concerns from being freely disseminated.
- Change existing IHR provisions affecting individuals from non-binding to binding, including border closures, travel restrictions, confinement (quarantine), medical examinations and medication of individuals. The latter would encompass requirements for injection with vaccines or other pharmaceuticals.
So here we have an unelected external body with total power, vested in one man, to declare a pandemic and order lockdowns, vaccinations and other restrictions.
The WHO recorded just one mild ‘pandemic’ per generation for the past 100 years, yet it seems that the public still provides fertile ground for the removal of civil liberties under the guise of health protection.
Worryingly, Lionel Shriver’s column continued:
Most ordinary people still believe that lockdowns, and the accompanying bramble of insensible, ever-changing and medically illiterate Covid restrictions, saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the UK, millions in the US, and tens if not hundreds of millions worldwide.
And according to the Daily Mail, millions of Brits are still taking Covid tests and wearing masks well into 2023, three years after the nation was plunged into its first lockdown, as zero-Covid fanatics renew their call for ‘mitigation’ measures such as mask mandates amid a rise in infections.
According to a recent YouGov poll, 37% of the public think the Government’s infection-control measures weren‘t strict enough, compared to just 19% who thought they were too strict.
Despite the evidence and the data, many articles in the legacy press continue to proclaim both the success of, and the necessity for, the policies of restrictions. For example, the Wall Street Journal has published this:
[...] and yet, deadly as it was, the pandemic could have been deadlier. Three interventions saved lives: vaccination, measures to reduce infections (especially closures of indoor activities and mask-wearing) and medical care (including hospital care and antiviral medications). Millions of lives were saved in the three years of the pandemic, but millions more were needlessly lost. And the world is far from ready for the next one.
So wrote Tom Frieden in March 2023, in an article entitled What worked against Covid—masks, closures and vaccines (there is no question mark in that headline!).
And Jeffrey Tucker reports, these views from a former head of the CDC were being touted as late as March 2023 again in the Wall Street Journal: “closures, vaccines, and masks were all effective and must be deployed again.”
There has indeed been continuous and considerable media pressure to push bird flu as another pandemic.
“Fears bird flu could trigger next pandemic”, say the Independent and the Mail.
And the restrictions could be needed sooner than we think, the Daily Telegraph reports (a claim reiterated in the Mail):
Some 130 million birds now are understood to have died from the latest variant of bird flu, which has already jumped to mammals with a human fatality in Cambodia.
We can imagine what could very well happen next: Public Health England starts to do some “scenario”-planning for it becoming a human pandemic, with a bias towards the worst case. SAGE is exhumed. Professor Neil Ferguson comes up with some doom graphs. The whole merry-go-round could easily start again.
And the solutions? The legacy press informs us:
Vaccine makers say they’re “standing ready”' for human bird flu pandemic: Moderna, GSK and CSL Seqirus all prepare to roll out H5N1 shots as fears mount about zoonotic spillover. Vaccine makers have undertaken trials of avian flu shots in humans, just in case.
And all this despite a 2023 study confirming that vaccine mandates were useless.
So there is a continuation of the pressurising of people to get vaccinated to combat a virus from which almost everyone recovers naturally: Anthony Fauci said on MSNBC that as Covid–19 continues to develop, “it will likely require Americans to take yearly vaccine shots in the same way the flu does.”
While a major funder of the WHO, Bill Gates urged, “Vaccinate the world in six months.”
And the CDC recently added Covid vaccines to the American childhood vaccine schedule—for babies as young as six months old, while the FDA approved a submission to authorise a fourth Covid injection for infants, meaning that a ten-month-old baby could have four Covid shots for "best protection".
And it is the same in the UK where, according to Steve Russell, NHS director of vaccinations and screening:
The Covid vaccine still has a crucial role to play in protecting those at greatest risk of severe illness from the virus, including those with a weakened immune system as well as all aged 75 and above.
The UK's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation confirmed in spring 2023, “All over-75s, care home residents and vulnerable people to get top-up jab offer from mid-April.” The Spring Covid booster roll-out started with five million eligible. Also, Covid injections were to vulnerable babies for the first time in 2023, as British health chiefs recommended two Pfizer doses for 60,000 at-risk infants aged between six months and four years old.
Meanwhile, the NHS declares in a banner heading:
“Why vaccination is safe and important”
The NHS piece continues:
Vaccines are the most effective way to prevent infectious diseases.
Locally to me, a BBC Northern Ireland headline announced that Covid boosters were available in Northern Ireland from 12 April 2023 and that testing policies for entry into care homes remained unchanged:
Guidance about testing for Covid–19 in healthcare buildings and care homes is not due to change.
And the WHO recommends vaccinating “pregnant persons”—including an additional dose if more than six months have passed since the last dose—to protect both them and the foetus, while allegedly helping to reduce the likelihood of hospitalisation of infants for Covid–19.
Other major policies remain in readiness. China has warned of future lockdowns and the Washington Post warned US citizens to expect the same:
In the name of “zero Covid”, 1.4 billion Chinese citizens confronted a grim reality—a third year of strict lockdowns, relentless testing [...]
In March 2023, a British primary school closed because of a Covid–19 outbreak. This even though it is well established by now that lockdowns were an almost complete failure as a strategy to suppress or contain the flu-like novel coronavirus: in most cases, lockdowns failed both to “flatten the curve” in the short term and to reduce cumulative excess mortality in the long term. Indeed, no-lockdown states achieved a perfectly average or even a below-average pandemic excess mortality compared to their regional peers.
As Lord Sumption, writing in the Telegraph, has noted about the harms of the lockdown policies:
The first was the catastrophic social and economic cost. Messrs Whitty and Vallance accepted in their evidence to a Parliamentary committee that this was a serious issue but added that it was not their job to think about it. It turned out to be no one’s job. There never was a proper cost-benefit analysis.
The second problem was that lockdowns were indiscriminate whereas the virus was selective. This is the critical point in the view of many reputable epidemiologists. The groups at significant risk of serious illness or death were the old and those suffering from certain underlying health problems. For the overwhelming majority of the population, including almost all of those who were economically active, the symptoms could be relatively mild.
And what about that most visible of governments’ policies? Despite the overwhelming evidence regarding their lack of effectiveness and the harms they do, masks continue to be promoted by health institutions. One headline has encapsulated the folly: UKHSA Ignores Its Own Published Evidence to Tell GB News That ‘Masks Work’.
As Professor Heneghan gave a live interview on GB News about his findings of the UKHSA review, one of the two anchors, Philip Davies MP, noted having received the following communiqué from the UKHSA. Dr Renu Bindra, Deputy Director of Public Health Clinical Response at the UKHSA, said:
The current evidence on face coverings suggests that all types of face coverings are, to varying extents, effective in reducing transmission of respiratory viruses in both healthcare and community settings. N95 respirators are likely to be the most effective, followed by surgical masks, and then non-medical masks, although optimised non-medical masks made of two or three layers might have similar filtration efficiency to surgical masks.
Meanwhile, as spring turned to summer, the Mail reported Professor Stephen Griffin of the self-described Independent SAGE group as urging the public to wear masks on public transport. Shortly thereafter, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) updated the guidance on the use of masks in educational settings and on air ventilation and filtration in public buildings. Masks are now advised for children over the age of two, and public buildings have new standards for air hygiene.
To return to Britain, one NHS Mental Health Trust was insisting on mandatory masking even in 2023. The Sussex Partnership Foundation Trust (SPFT) remained committed to forcing mask wearing, reminding its staff of the requirements that:
In all clinical areas (including inpatient wards and in the community) all staff are to wear masks, and mask wearing for patients and visitors is to be encouraged.
The WHO pursued similar policies. Ian Miller has reported that “Despite years of failure, WHO unbelievably recommends permanent masking”, yet the effect of masks is approximately zero.
And in line with the policy of promoting masks well into 2023, attempts have been made to misinterpret and rubbish the highly-regarded publication, the Cochrane Review, which found no evidence supporting mask-wearing.
The initial legacy media response to this was silence, but—after coverage by free media platforms—the Washington Post, The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Forbes felt obliged to continue the rebuttals:
Cochrane Says Review Does Not Show That ‘Face Masks Don’t Work’ Against Covid–19
The lead author himself, Professor Tom Jefferson, begged to differ.
“There is just no evidence that [masks] make any difference,” he told journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”
And what about N95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks? Jefferson responded:
Makes no difference—none of it [...] current better quality evidence shows no effect of masks, any type, any setting, or any population.
Worse still, there has been no attempt to recognise even the possibility that they cause harms. The CDC refuses to recognise the potential harm. In a piece published in May 2022, former clinical psychologist Dr. Gary Sidley laid out the multiple areas where masks cause harm. These include:
- impairing communication;
- increasing risks of falls for the elderly and frail;
- aggravating respiratory problems;
- exposing the wearer to micro-plastics and other contaminants; and
- retraumatising those who have suffered abuse in the past.
In his wide-ranging and large list of potential pitfalls, perhaps the most worrying area for harm is that of exacerbating mental health conditions. As Dr. Sidley explains:
Many people already tormented by recurrent panic attacks, involving catastrophic thoughts of imminent death and feelings of breathlessness, will find masks very difficult to tolerate.
And the WHO continues to peddle what was possibly the greatest myth of all.
Yet, according to the data analysing organisation, Pandata,
- there is no evidence that asymptomatic people are significant drivers of transmission of SARS–CoV–2; and
- there is no evidence that isolating asymptomatic people who have a positive test for Covid provides any benefit.
WhatsApp exchanges between Johnson, Whitty, Valance and Hancock show these main players in Whitehall Covid policy knew early on that Covid was not a significant threat to the vast majority of the population. We now know that on 29 February 2020, Whitty said on WhatsApp:
For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument, 1%) mortality, a vaccine has to be very safe, so the safety studies can’t be shortcut. So important for the long run.
There have been a series of policy failures, which I identified in the last part.
Here are the ten biggest falsehoods—according to Dr Scott Atlas, ones known for years to be false, not recently learned nor proven to be so—that are promoted by America’s (and other countries’) public health leaders, elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics:
1. The SARS–CoV–2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu, by orders of magnitude.
2. Everyone is at significant risk of dying from this virus.
3. No-one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.
4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.
5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-Covid medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.
6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.
7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.
8. Teachers are at especially high risk.
9. Covid vaccines stop the spread of the infection.
10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.
Without retraction, and with the continual propaganda from major players, why wouldn’t they do the same thing again?
“I believe”, says Scott Atlas (and so do I), that
only public accountability will prevent the repetition of this heinous destruction by those in power, they have to admit error and apologise [for the] ongoing enormous damage to our children. We need a public admission of error. These people are still in power. They will do it again.”
Abraham Lincoln, basing his thoughts on John Wycliffe, defined democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.
Is that what we have at the moment? It doesn’t feel like it.
This series has since been extended to cover non-Covid issues.
Article image: The Triumph of Folly, Pieter Quast, 1643 (public domain)
