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“I’m Not a Covid Conspiracy Theorist. I was Right”

by Will Jones
2 May 2024 7:18 PM

The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson has been accused of “swerving into conspiracies” by the Times’s Janice Turner. In her latest column, Pearson robustly defends her record on Covid and lockdowns against detractors like Turner who still haven’t noticed that sceptics got it right and the conformists were consistently wrong. Here’s an excerpt.

Janice Turner was hardly unique in doing nothing to challenge lockdown and other Covid measures which have left Britain both broke and broken. Most of our trade, journalism, either fell shamefully silent during that period or actively egged on the Government to close schools for longer, to have people arrested for sunbathing, to introduce vaccine passports and other authoritarian measures which it is the job of a free press to challenge. Or so I thought. 

The few of us who continued to ask, “Why?” after the imposition of frankly bonkers rules (or was it “guidance”, Matt Hancock?) were routinely reviled, even threatened. Peter Hitchens, Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer and I were some of the names on a so-called fact-checking website convened by Neil O’Brien, the Conservative MP for Harborough, which set out to shame “Covid cranks and dangerous conspiracy theorists”. 

It got worse. Sceptics like me who wondered, for example, why fathers were banned from attending the births of their own babies or why one devastated daughter was told off for not wearing a mask and gloves as she went to kiss the brow of her dying father and was marched smartly out of the room before Dad took his last breath, were called “murderers”.

Challenging Professor Sunetra Gupta, probably our greatest epidemiologist (and world-renowned expert in coronaviruses), who said that the old and the vulnerable must be protected while everyone else got on with their lives, O’Brien claimed that moving away from lockdowns would lead to “hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths”. 

He and his ilk have gone very quiet now that there are, indeed, thousands of unnecessary deaths. Among people, many of them distressingly young, who had early cancer symptoms but couldn’t see a doctor after the NHS effectively became a Covid-only service. People who got scared and depressed and drank or ate themselves to death. 

Teenagers cut off from friends who took their own sweet lives or plunged down a dark well into mental illness. The shattering cost of all this is slowly beginning to occur to even the most ardent lockdown cheerleaders. “Looking back, I think we failed our children during the pandemic,” mused Susanna Reid last week. 

The Good Morning Britain presenter was commenting on a study which found that children in England face the worst exam results in decades and a lifetime of lower earnings because of school closures during Covid. National GCSE results will steadily worsen until 2030, when it is expected that “fewer than 40% of pupils [will] get good grades in maths and English”. 

A devastating picture of educational decline, I’m sure you’ll agree, especially when compared to Sweden where no school for 16-year-olds and under was closed and Swedish educational attainment is as good as ever. 

Worth reading in full.

Tags: Allison PearsonConspiracy TheoriesCOVID-19Fact checkLockdownLockdown Sceptic

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