You may have questioned the veracity of government pandemic interventions: it might have been masks, the rule of six or the 10 o’clock curfew; it may have been the modelling that finally tipped you over the edge. But without dissenters to the Government’s pandemic policies, it would have taken much longer to exit lockdowns, and if China is anything to go by, we might not yet have re-emerged.
With the publication of Matt Hancock’s diaries, we’re discovering the true extent of the Government’s suppression strategies and those behind them.
In July 2020, we wrote in the Spectator about whether face masks help. The article was motivated by the rollout of mask mandates at the end of the month. We expressed the uncertainty in the evidence-base and the setting of policy based on “opinions, radical views and political influence”.
This article went largely unchallenged. However, this all changed in November 2020, when we further published on the only European community trial of masks and the update of our Cochrane Review that found no significant effect for facemask wearers.
The Danish trial done during the pandemic joined 16 other trials carried out over the years at times of variable respiratory agents’ circulation in showing no significant effect, either if compared to not wearing masks at all or wearing other types of face coverings, irrespective of setting.
Despite hundreds of positive comments, the article got censored by Facebook. It led to a vitriolic campaign of denigration with sundry personal attacks, personal losses of posts, complaint procedures to our institutions, smear campaigns and the setting up of websites backed by ministers to attack dissenting academics and journalists.
But we now learn from Isabel Oakeshott’s piece that the attacks were partly orchestrated by Hancock, who harnessed the full power of the state to silence ‘dissenters’.
As far as Hancock was concerned, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach was mad and dangerous and needed to be shut down.
These were the actions of the Right Honourable Minister, the Health Secretary. Make of that what you will, but actions considered acceptable in a communist state were now mainstream and, as it seems, acceptable at the heart of Government.
According to Oakeshott’s piece, the origins of mask mandates in the community were Dominic Cummings’s obsession with masks and a desire to please Ms. Sturgeon. However, the most important figures “Hancock, Whitty and Johnson knew full well that non-medical masks do very little to prevent transmission of the virus”. You could readily translate this to the fact that there was no high quality evidence to support mandates, as we pointed out in July 2020.
The taking down of the Spectator article by Facebook was just the start of the campaign. You could say we were naïve, but we didn’t realise we were enemy number one, along with some of our academic and journalist colleagues within a democratic state that used all its powers to silence those seen to peddle ‘radioactive’ views when in fact, all we were doing was looking at the available evidence – something we have done for decades across a range of healthcare interventions.
Fact-checking sites published critiques of our Spectator article. What they didn’t tell you is Facebook now funded them. Also, the Government didn’t tell you they were cosying up to social media sites to harness their influence. Oakeshott again:
Hancock reveals that his special adviser was speaking to Twitter about ‘tweaking their algorithms’. Later he personally texted his old coalition colleague Nick Clegg, now a big cheese at Facebook, to enlist his help.
In the U.S., Anthony Fauci is being deposed (required to give evidence) for his part in attacking scientists. A U.S. District Judge granted the request to depose Fauci, amongst others, because the Biden administration actively worked with social media companies to censor ‘disfavored’ viewpoints, likely in violation of First Amendment rights.
Yet in the U.K., the former minister gets to be a celebrity. Attempts to uncover the truth through Freedom of Information requests for meetings between Hancock and Clegg go unanswered. Backbench MPs should be outraged; instead, there is silence – those at the heart of the decision-making have moved on to better things.
An anonymous BBC journalist stated to an All-Party Parliamentary Group of MPs and Peers how bad the situation was:
I am having to give this evidence anonymously because of the climate of fear within the newsroom of ‘going against the narrative’. When the daily death toll was read out – something we had never done for any other disease – my worry about the impact of the fearmongering on our audience increased. I raised my concerns with senior colleagues and the reply came back that suggested anyone who thinks differently from the editorial agenda is a ‘dissenter’ and lacks credibility regardless of their peer-reviewed and accredited experience, qualifications and education.
Alas, this is not all. According to the UKHSA, the official scientific rationale for mask mandates in the community is based on a review last updated in the summer of 2021 of 28 studies, two of which are trials and the rest studies of abysmal quality. The review, identified through a Parliamentary Question, is in two parts: the main body and supplementary tables reporting the data. The problem is that the review is full of errors: the two parts do not match and appear to have been written separately and not even proofread.
The events are now clear. Policies affecting millions were decided on whims, independent scientists were persecuted, and grossly substandard work was cooked up to justify an evidence-free policy if anyone bothered to look.
Yes, this is the U.K. In the absence of dissenters, only the people can ask questions and change the status quo. We pity and express solidarity with our colleagues who have lost their jobs, suffered threats and undergone the hairdryer treatment – however, we’d like them to keep going as they are doing.
At the outset, we expressed the uncertainty in the evidence-base. Little has changed – the pandemic intervention policies were largely based on bad science, opinions and political views.
Dr. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack blog, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
English is not my native language, but shameful is not the first word that comes to my mind when I think about this and all other such censorship.
Anti-democratic, unconstitutional, criminal, murderous and, above all, unscientific come to my mind well before shameful.
Prosecute/Hancock/Sturgeon/Cummings/Johnson/Whitty/Vallance&co
‘…As far as Hancock was concerned, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach was mad and dangerous and needed to be shut down…’
If that is true, then the arrogance of the man is off the scale. He has ZERO medical qualifications; he studied NO biology beyond GCSE and NO chemistry beyond GCSE, if he even went that far with them (assuming wikipedia is accurate).
How can it be that we get ‘Health Ministers’ telling us all what to do for our own health, mandating what medicines we put in our bodies, who have no knowledge of human biology or chemistry beyond GCSE? That’s one aspect of all this sorry mess that makes me angry – it’s so unbelievably wrong and seems like sheer lunacy when on the other hand renowned epidemiologists who DARE to disagree with him get censored.
I agree with you entirely; any reasonable person would. But if we vote in evil, narcissistic Eton tosspots who get to pick cabinets of incompetent yes-men, then can we be surprised that when faced with a moderate challenge they end up trashing the country. Our ‘not fit for purpose’ system of governance virtually ensures that we are perpetually in ‘accident waiting to happen’ mode.
Unfortunately it just demonstrates how much power supercilious, venal idiots such as Wancock can wield when they have the the full support of an overwhelming government propaganda campaign behind them; driven by an ideologically suspect SAGE.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels
Well said! I said similar things when Hancock derided those who issued the Great Barrington declaration in parliament. Hancock is a distasteful imbecile who had no place in any position of power or society in general. Its time our leaders put people in cabinet positions with some knowledge of the subject they are supposed to be advising or legalising on. Boris Johnson obviously had no idea about this.
Part of the problem is so many people are mentally shot by all this. I’ve just listened to this interview between Steve Kirsch and some NZ radio guy – a thoroughly unpleasant individual that would benefit from a good slap tbh. https://rumble.com/v2063a5-steve-kirsch-on-the-the-platform-with-sean-plunket-12.12.22.html. It’s a perfect example of how views going against the mainstream narrative are being dealt with by the sheep.
The thing that struck me though was his irrational fury. He’d had a heart attack shortly after taking the vaxx apparently, and Steve pointed out “how do you know it’s not the vax that caused it?”. The moron had no sensible reply. In fact he had no sensible reply to anything that Steve said, instead just concentrating on throwing abuse at him. I think this piece of festering sh*t – and I believe there are many, many others like him – deep down know there is something wrong, but they cannot allow themselves to come to terms with the mistake they’ve made, so cocksure they are of their own intelligence. These people are the real danger as they’ve allowed their government to whip them into an uncontrollable fit of hatred against a minority group. Sound familiar?
The Elon Musk thing is interesting though, let’s see how that play out.
I’ve got really good friend who’s the same. He’s obviously not a festering piece of shit (nicely put) he’s great, but he’s had one of his oldest friends, early 50s, die of a heart attack recently. I’ve had a couple of people I know die of heart attacks too.
He’s had two Covid jabs, I haven’t had any but when I get on to the subject, he refuses to talk about it. He’s got kids and he’s quietly terrified of what he might have done to his health I suspect. The only good thing is he’s not having any more. At least I got that one out of him..
One battle-front which is worth monitoring is coroner’s inquests. These occasionally discuss the sudden death of young men shortly after a covid vaccination. Was it caused by a blood clot? Was the blood clot attributable to the vaccination or by chance? Was the death due to poor interpretation of scans? Do coroners tend to shield doctors, the NHS, the Ministries and the Government from criticism of blunders and cover-ups? Do they collude in the cover-ups or expose them? How many deaths from clots actual trigger an inquest, rather than merely a few notes on a death certificate, which can then be interpreted as “of” or “with” according to the political hue of subsequent statistician’s employer?
Its worth searching for Matt le Tisier’s information on this which he identified earlier than most, although it is not easy to find now because he has suffered the same fate as most people with views and information contrary to dishonest big pharma and the governments that support them and also our hopeless mainstream media. There once was a time when we had top class journalists who identified problems with distorted data and unjustifiable restrictive illegal actions by governments – where are they now? Are there no journalists in the current crop with any guts? There is now some reporting on these issues by GB News, but too many people are relying on their news from the BBC which either deliberately buries information or is run by people with no appetite for reporting anything controversial even when it is proved to be the truth.
From distant past experience of inquests and related inquiries I am sensitized to situations in which the coroner is able to use or abuse their position in order either expose or to cover up malfeasance or misfeasance in public office; the same goes for the behaviour of judges in civil actions, senior police officers and possibly some criminal cases. If the obvious superficial circumstances of a death or its initial investigations point at least to a mistake by a senior unelected public sector employee or entire organisational unit, then the decisions made tend towards turning a blind eye. If the “mistake” looks more and more like negligence, misfeasance or malfeasance in public office or corruption, then the process moves towards a cover-up, secrecy orders, banning of press presence, or bogus appeals to confidentiality, ultimately leading towards infeasibly high-cost legal proceedings, drifting towards the Supreme Court.
My sensitization has become re-activated and extended during the Covid Scandal. The extension is this: what happens if people in the public sector can reasonably be judged to be acting in accordance with “The Will Of Parliament” (or “The Will of the EU”), yet by most informed observers are acting in a highly unethical manner and, at senior level, have set up all manner of systems which, though unchallenged in the courts, frankly, violate much of the ECHR and cultural traditions or religious convictions? At the very least, such people, if they have a functioning moral compass, will experience severe cognitive dissonance if they stay silent (possibly even leading to suicide and coroner’s cover-ups); yet they will be financially crushed if they publish their dissent. I don’t see this phenomenon (of secret agendas and crushing of dissent from elite rule) as being unique to Covid or even recent: it goes back back decades, even before the refusal of the Blair regime to incorporate Article 13 of the ECHR into UK law. Doubtless historians will trace it back to the 1950s and the Treaty of Rome.
Sadly, I agree with other commentators who point out that there will never be Nuremberg Courts for the perpetrators of the Covid Coup (pace Reiner Fuellmich) and its successors yet to be rolled out, for the simple reason that such courts can be set up only by the victors, who, realistically, are the global elite who control national governments.
Meanwhile, coroners will prefer to passively collude with the cover up by refusing to lift up stones for fear of what may crawl out.
Well here is one coroner who reported that a young man died as a direct result of the vaccine. I doubt if the media will give it much attention, on past form.
Everything that I hear and read about Matt Hancock confirms my view that he longer deserves to be a living breathing member of the human race.
I will second that.
I remember the day the 77th Brigade descended on the Daily Telegraph comments section and came gunning for us Lockdown Sceptics.
They were all obviously a bit dim, led by the brave squaddie Adam Hill.
All they could come up with were ad hominem ‘far right’ ‘granny killer’ shtick.
I think the 77th eventually ‘had a word’ with the Telegraph comments moderation team and began to ban mine and other sceptical accounts on spurious grounds for ‘spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation’.
It seems we were right all along
I used to have some fun and get some good reaction with my OldMcDonaldTrump account.
I’m a subscriber to The Telegraph, and was previously a frequent commenter…until I was banned for the crime of stating that Andrew Pollard, the Chief Investigator on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine trials, along with being the Chair of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), had conflicts of interest.
Like so much media these days, The Telegraph is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, see this Global Health Security webpage on The Telegraph website: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/global-health-security-site/
It states:
And they laughed…
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also provided funding for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine trials, see for example: https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(21)00432-3.pdf
Can we really expect The Telegraph to provide critical analysis of Covid-19 jab policy, when it is conflicted by its funding sources, and censors people like myself making factual comments about the conflicts of interest of Andrew Pollard?
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also provides funding to the BBC, see for example:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/about/funding/
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants/2019/08/opp1202266
In 2010 The Guardian launched its global development website with the Gates Foundation: https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/guardian-launches-global-development-site
The Guardian’s Global development website is still ‘supported by’ the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development
There you go, three examples in the UK – the Gates Foundation’s financial influence over the BBC, The Telegraph, and The Guardian.
Perhaps this explains the dearth of critical analysis of the Gates Foundation’s influence over international vaccination policy, including the Covid-19 debacle.
Bill Gates gained his fortune by ripping off other peoples work beyond his abilities at the outset. He was never a “nice Man” and is now using his money to try to control what we think. If you are a Telegraph subscriber you must realise his money is only there to influence the Telegraph’s output. I believe he has an even bigger stake in the Guardian, how many other things is he trying to use his fortune to influence?
Re Gates and The Telegraph, eh, yes, that’s why I’m raising the connection…and re the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine funding…
I’ve read the complete article and the amazing conclusion is that Oakeshott seems to believe Hancock was honestly trying to do his very best to handle a complicated and dangerous situation. That’s despite this nugget:
As far as Hancock was concerned, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach was mad and dangerous and needed to be shut down.
That’s absolutely not how members of the government are supposed to be treating the population in a so-called democracy, not even the parts of the population who happen to disagree with government policy. Assuming the statement is accurate, it stands to reason that Hancock himself was the person who was mad and dangerous here who therefore needed to be shut down. More so, because he was also (according to the article) trying to remote-control Boris Johnson to ensure that the so-called prime minister wouldn’t interfere with the general, ie, not at all health related, policy decisions of the so-called health secretary.
Until and Unless people wake up and demand that people like Hancock are bought to criminal trial for crimes against humanity, they will try and get away with it again. We can see the fledgling tyrants flexing their muscles in Canterbury and Oxford, in the arrogant hypocrisy of Justin Trudeau supporting Chinese protesters when ho arranged police brutality, freezing of bank accounts etc against the truckers. These people are playing the classic tyrants game, they commit crimes then lie and tell us they never happened, meanwhile they continue to tyranise. They have to be stopped and the only way to do it is to refuse to obey, and to call them out.
Not just lying and denying, but projecting onto dissenters the very crimes they have, and continue to commit.
This was precisely the tactic used to attack “climate deniers”, but carried out with “Covid” at Johnson’s “Warp Speed”.
And I should remind that no-one denies that climate changes, always has, always will. And the actual measured changes in my long lifetime have been trivial but factually beneficial.
There’s been an orchestrated effort to shut down people questioning vaccination policy and practice, it’s been going on for years.
Key organisations involved in this campaign against ‘vaccine hesitancy’ include the Vaccine Confidence Project, led by anthropologist Heidi Larson.
Check out the VCP’s Partners & Funders webpage, which includes the CDC, Imperial College London, the World Health Organization, GlaxoSmithKline, Innovative Medicines Initiative, Johnson & Johnson, Merck etc: https://www.vaccineconfidence.org/partners-funders
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has also provided funding to the Vaccine Confidence Project in the past, as noted in my rapid response published on The BMJ in February 2019, which included reference to conflicts of interest of the VCP not being disclosed when co-director of the VCP, Pauline Paterson, appeared on a BBC Newsnight program ‘Why the anti-vaccination movement is wrong’. See my BMJ rapid response: ‘Pharma-led chorus’ dominates the public narrative on vaccination.
Another organisation that stifles dissent about vaccination policy and practice is the Center for Countering Digital Hate: https://counterhate.com/topic/anti-vaxx-misinformation/
See more background here: https://counterhate.com/about/
The CCDH claims to be “a not-for-profit non-governmental organization (NGO) that is funded by philanthropic trusts and members of the public”.
In the past I’ve written to the CCDH requesting information about the ‘philanthropic trusts’ from which it receives funding, but received no response.
I have just read your letter to the BMJ. Excellent work and thank you.
Not surprisingly many of the ‘pharma chorus’ companies are themselves funded by Bill and Melinda. No surprises there then.
Thanks hp.
Re challenging the Covid jabs, please also consider my BMJ rapid responses published in 2020, i.e.
Is it ethical to impede access to natural immunity? The case of SARS-CoV2
Is it ethical to vaccinate children to protect the elderly?
In regard to crushing dissent about the grossly disproportionate and ill-targeted Covid-19 response, also consider the report – COVID-19 vaccine deployment: Behaviour, ethics, misinformation and policy strategies, published by the Royal Society and British Academy in October 2020.
This report called for dissent about the Covid vaccine products to be suppressed, even calling for criminal prosecutions for ‘spreading misinformation’ – but who defines what is misinformation?
The report was prepared by Melinda Mills, Nuffield Professor of Sociology, University of Oxford.
Advice on the report was provided by people such as David Salisbury, former Director of Immunisation, UK Department of Health; Heidi Larson of The Vaccine Confidence Project/LSTHM; Roy Anderson of Imperial College London, and others.
It wasn’t disclosed in the report that both the Royal Society and British Academy are seriously conflicted via their funding, e.g. at the time, the Royal Society was receiving funding from AstraZeneca, the manufacturer of the Oxford vaccine, and from GlaxoSmithKline, another vaccine manufacturer which was involved with Covid-19 vaccine products. The British Academy was receiving funding from the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), which was responsible for the Vaccine Taskforce (VTF), which was “set up to drive forward the development and production of a coronavirus vaccine as quickly as possible, bringing together government, academia and industry”.
See my email dated 4 December 2020 to Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society, Venki Ramakrishnan, previous President of the Royal Society 2015-2020; and David Cannadine, then President of the British Academy, challenging their failure to disclose conflicts of interest: https://vaccinationispolitical.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/failure-to-disclose-conflicts-of-interest-covid-19.pdf
It’s very interesting now to consider their report’s call for criminal prosecutions for ‘spreading misinformation’, because I suggest most of the ‘misinformation’ has come from jab manufacturers, bureaucrats, politicians, academics, doctors, and the mainstream/corporate media, including the likes of the BBC and others.
Midazolam Matt’s bio on gov uk:
https://www.gov.uk/government/people/matthew-hancock
He was well versed in ‘digital’ and technological interference through his previous posts in government.
The slimy, fawning toad described Nick Clegg as Zuckerberg’s ‘Man on Earth’ before his meeting in 2020, set up to plan how to silence those who saw through the fake covid narrative.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/14/hancock-anti-vaccine-myths-on-facebook-put-lives-at-risk
Note the ending in his bio – “… and succumbed to frostbite en route to the Pole. He retains all his fingers.”
That’s fortunate for him as he deludedly clings on to any semblance of being a rational, honest, trustworthy and decent individual.
People who have any regard for Boris Johnson should realise he ran this government operating as a totalitarion communist state. Most thinking people knew Hancock was a lying a…hole, but his activities could only have carried on if agreed at the top. I said at the time when these things became known, that there ws no place for a Tory government operating in this way in what was once a freedom loving democratic country. Any politician remaining in the Tory party should realise how this makes them part of a despicable outfit and should leave now, or actually should have left sooner. I hope nobody is stupid enough to vote Tory in the next election and that party deserves to be finished forever. Surely the recent act of undemocratically appointing globalist leaders including an incompetent previous chancellor and a Chinese communist party supporting new chancellor should be enough to make the Tories a pariah party for anyone with intelligence. The good things in the history of the Tory party should not count for anything after these digraceful recent actions which should now make them unelectable.
Every time a picture of China appears, everyone is always wearing a face-covering. That this deplorable practice is not preventing repeated outbreaks of Covid is never mentioned. Could it be that far from being protective, they actually weaken the immune system and cultivate germs? Which seems a reasonable consequence of oxygen deprivation, carbon dioxide inhalation and wearing a filthy rag over the airways. If something I were doing seemed to have the opposite intended effect, I think I would review it. There must be more to it.