Neville Hodgkinson

by Neville Hodgkinson Lockdown Sceptics contributor Guy de la Bédoyère gave powerful testimony this week about the inhumanity inherent in the global hysteria surrounding COVID-19.  Following his post here on Tuesday reporting the death in a care home at the weekend of his 100-year-old mother-in-law, BBC Radio 4’s World at One listeners heard him describe coolly but movingly the tragedy of her last days and months.   She did not die of Covid and did not have dementia.  She was mentally alert to the end, and acutely aware of what she had been denied through the brutal isolation, as Guy put it, imposed by lockdown laws for the sake of keeping her ‘safe’.   In her last year of life she never saw her four great-grandchildren, had only one or two fleeting visits from grandchildren, and was unable to hug or hold her one surviving child.   It was a “hideous punishment”, Guy wrote.  “That it has come to this, that we as a society and led by the Government and its scientific advisers with the willing acquiescence of organisations and individuals have done so much to commit the ultimate act of betrayal towards people at the end of their lives will surely go down in history as one of the most ignoble and demeaning aspects of this tragic year.” Since the...

by Neville Hodgkinson Gibraltar’s 34,000 residents are unwitting participants in the battle against COVID-19 that may hold lessons for the rest of the world – on the one hand, as a success story, and on the other, as a tragic mystery. Since the start of a vaccination programme on January 9th, about two thirds of the tiny British enclave’s population has received the Pfizer/BioNTech jab. Only 3.5% declined it, and with a new delivery being rolled out, Dr Krish Rawal, acting Medical Director of the Gibraltar Health Authority, said this week that community protection could be close and “a normal summer” expected. The mystery, however, is that with 83 deaths related to the disease so far, Gibraltar currently has the highest COVID-19 death rate in the world. The first was only registered in mid-November last year. By January 6th the toll rose to 10, and by January 18th it had more than quadrupled to 45, prompting Chief Minister Fabian Picardo to tell a news conference: This is now the worst loss of life of Gibraltarians in over 100 years. Even in war, we have never lost so many in such a short time. The fact that some of these deaths occurred at the same time as the vaccine rollout led to claims on social media that the jab could be...

by Neville Hodgkinson HIV-infected H9 T-cell An awesome, sinister sense of déjà vu grows by the day. Suddenly, a second variant of the COVID-19 virus is said to be rampaging across Britain, just in time to create utter seasonal chaos and ensure that the loving spirit of Christmas does not obscure the fear we are all supposed to be experiencing. It was much the same 35 years ago, when a panic over AIDS was being talked up by scientists to global proportions and an HIV variant, HIV-2, suddenly caught the headlines. The new purported villain added to the fear and led to an era in which any ideas or evidence as to the cause of AIDS that did not keep HIV centre stage were ruled out of order. That was despite some experts, including top-ranking Nobel prize-winning scientists at the heart of the fight against AIDS, trying to let us know that HIV had never been established as the cause of the syndrome. They showed that both predictions of spread, and tests claiming to show infection with the virus, were invalid. As now, an epidemic of inappropriate testing led to a false impression of a pandemic. Models predicting near-universal spread bore no relation to actual illness and death, which remained confined to relatively small sections of the population who had...

by Neville Hodgkinson No one likes to be a party pooper, but the gung-ho atmosphere surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine rollout calls for some response. Health Secretary Matt Hancock was clearly delighted to announce a UK first, and the mainstream media have given loyal support – perhaps encouraged by the full-page advertisements currently being run in newspapers by HM Government and the NHS (along with Facebook, which claims to be playing its part by distributing “authoritative” COVID-19 information). The NHS exhibited a smiling 90-year-old grandmother as the first patient to receive the “life-saving jab”, telling the world: “If I can have it at 90, then you can have it too." But the following account, by a nurse at a care home in the UK where residents and staff became among the first to receive the vaccine last week, gives pause for thought. The nurse’s First message, to a friend who also happens to be a Lockdown Sceptics reader, said: We received the COVID vaccine today. I have a fever, for which I took paracetamol, and pain and swelling at the site of the injection. One of my staff went home. She was the same as me, shivering and feverish.It is very awful. I am feeling so low. We’ll need to get out of this. I will inform the manager. We have...

by Neville Hodgkinson Charts and graphs can sometimes convey more of what is going on than millions of words. Here is one such, from the latest report by the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre. It shows how many patients, as a daily average, were in critical care for each month over the past five years. The figures cover England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The vertical columns show the monthly totals for 2020, and the four horizontal lines show the totals for the previous four years. We can see clearly that after the huge spike that occurred in April, caused by COVID-19’s arrival, the monthly totals are either about the same, or less, than in all the previous years. That includes October, when the UK was already being told we were in a second wave of the epidemic and must face drastic new restrictions in our lives to save the NHS from being overrun. The October figure shows an increase in patients in critical care whose illness was attributed to Covid, but nowhere near that of the April peak. And it hasn’t continued to rise: latest figures show a decline in both admissions and deaths where Covid was involved. Total deaths are running at about a fifth higher than the five-year average, though how much of that is attributable...

by Neville Hodgkinson As a veteran medical and science correspondent, I have a special reason for tearing my hair out (what is left of it) at the damage being done to democracy, social cohesion and above all our health by the global hysteria surrounding COVID-19. Similar mistakes were made when hysteria over the immune system failure that came to be called AIDS swept the world during the late 1980s – and 35 years on, the mistakes remain largely unacknowledged and uncorrected, with some of the perpetrators now driving the new panic. I feel especially frustrated because as medical correspondent at The Sunday Times from 1985-89, I helped to spread alarm over AIDS in the first place. Later I spent several years as science correspondent at the same paper, trying to draw attention to efforts by a small group of experts, including top-ranking Nobel prize-winning scientists at the heart of the fight against AIDS, to let us know that the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was never scientifically established as the cause of the syndrome. These efforts were shouted down almost universally. The HIV theory caused a generation of young people to falsely equate sex with death. Yet no apology, no inquiry by the scientific community, no mass media analysis of how we could have got it so wrong, has ever...