Camilla Tominey, an Associate Editor of the Telegraph, was one of the few mainstream journalists who warned that the cost of lockdowns might outweigh the benefits – and was duly rounded on by her more ’compassionate’ colleagues and accused of putting profits before people. In today’s paper, she asks if it’s time for the lockdown zealots to apologise to the sceptics, given that we’ve been proved right.
When journalists like me… 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% 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.
Worth reading in full – although it’s a pity Camilla doesn’t go further and allow for the possibility that the current spike in excess deaths may be partly caused by vaccine injuries. She could have made the point that those raising the alarm about the mRNA Covid vaccines should not be cast as beyond the pale and banned from social media platforms, as many lockdown sceptics were, but debated openly in the public square.
Stop Press: The highest-rated comment beneath Camilla’s piece, by Big Dude, reads as follows:
I hope history properly, and severely judges the excessive lockdowns, the manufactured panic, the false virtue signalling, the Health Sec who abandoned our health, the snitchy curtain twitching busy body neighbours, the petty pumped up local officials who shut country parks, those who predicted there would be mass death from Bournemouth beaches, the police forces assuming powers of dictators, the mask lovers, the BBC, the Guardian, James O’Brien, the scientists and medics who abandoned science but in some cases got even more letters after their names, yes you, Whitty, Vallance, Michie, Ferguson, the preening, pompous preposterous leaders, Starmer, that Scottish woman, the increasingly ridiculous heads of Canada and NZ.
Perhaps one day, some of them may even apologise, and if not, should they remain in the public eye, they should be respectfully reminded at every opportunity what they have done.
Stop Press 2: Prof Robert Dingwall says lockdowns are to blame for the recent rise in excess deaths.
Stop Press 3: A reader has sent in this quote from Alexander Hamilton. When it comes to a public apology, the lockdown sceptics probably shouldn’t hold their breath.
To retract an error even in the beginning is no easy task. Perseverance confirms us in it and rivets the difficulty; but in a public station, to have been in an error, and to have persisted in it, when it is detected, ruins both reputation and fortune. To this we may add that disappointment and opposition inflame the minds of men and attach them still more to their mistakes.
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