The recent ITV drama Mr. Bates vs The Post Office has, quite rightly, highlighted a grave miscarriage of justice. The fact that it was a drama rather than documentary has been suggested as a reason why it has resonated with the general public in the way that it has. The empathy created for the individuals by the actors could not have been achieved with a documentary.
The most telling thing for me is that the ITV executives who decided to commission and broadcast the drama must have been confidently assured by their legal team that there would be no legal ramifications despite the painting of The Post Office, Fujitsu, Paula Vennells and Angela Van den Bogerd in a very bad light. Indeed quite the opposite has happened.
Private Eye has, to its credit, been covering this story for some time but has never had the reach that the ITV drama has had.
It is interesting, when conversing with people, how so many were completely unaware of this scandal prior to the broadcast. It made me ask the follow-up question of how much they new about the tainted blood scandal which Private Eye has also covered over the years. Predictably no one I spoke to was aware of this either.
For those that don’t know, in the 1970s and 1980s, 4,689 people with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders were infected with HIV and hepatitis viruses through the use of contaminated clotting factors. Some of those unintentionally infected their partners, often because they were unaware of their own infection.
The haemophilia society covers the story on its website.
The basic story is that blood products administered by the NHS were bought from America where the blood had knowingly originally been sourced from drug addicts and was contaminated with hepatitis and HIV.
There appear to have been attempts to cover up the story and even though there was a full public inquiry, compensation has been slow, with many victims dying before receiving a penny and family members who had to give up careers to care for loved ones not being eligible for any of the compensation that their now-deceased relative would be entitled to. Perhaps a TV drama could help here.
No doubt there are many more similar stories of high level obfuscation and cover-up but the current elephant in the room has to be the Covid vaccines. There are so many cases of people’s health deteriorating following vaccination, the apparent increase in heart-related collapses of athletes, football matches and other events being stopped for someone in the crowd to receive medical attention. I don’t recall a match being stopped for that reason prior to the vaccine rollout. Was it happening but people just didn’t notice? I doubt it.
In 2020 we saw the initial panic over Covid but there is no sign of an unusual number of people dying from blood clots or heart attacks. There wasn’t any increase in myocarditis, particularly in the young, until the vaccine rollout. Now as more and more people are shunning the vaccines, cases of these conditions appear to be dropping again.
It may take decades but I do predict that the truth will come out regarding the Covid vaccines, although I doubt Private Eye will be ahead of the game on this one considering its slavish following of the establishment line over the last few years.
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