Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford and his colleague Dr. Tom Jefferson have written in the Telegraph about their treatment at the hands of the censors in the Government and on social media during the pandemic.
Responding to the news that the Government’s sinister Counter-Disinformation Unit amassed posts from Telegram about Prof. Heneghan, they write that “the Government lost its way by seeking to silence pandemic critics”. Here’s an excerpt.
An analysis from researchers at Johns Hopkins University reported that the lockdown in the spring of 2020 saved a meagre 1,700 lives in England and Wales. This pales in comparison with the Office for National Statistics report, which indicates that 23% of all deaths in Great Britain, amounting to 153,008 out of 672,015, were apparently avoidable in 2020.
So what caused all these deaths, how could they have been avoided, and were the draconian restrictions of no value? What matters is not whether you believe these results, but that they can be aired and discussed without the impending threat of censorship. During lockdowns, such a study would have been counter to the Government’s narrative, heretical to policy and subject to suppression.
A year ago, one of our articles reported that the death toll might be lower than thought, leading to a Twitter takedown. After reviewing 800 responses to freedom of information requests, it was clear there were several flaws in how deaths were recorded.
When we pointed this out, the account @carlheneghan was ‘locked’ because it was “violating the policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19”.
Throughout the pandemic lockdowns, sceptics were vilified: Neil O’Brien MP and a gaggle of self-appointed fact-checkers attempted to publicly discredit sceptics through his COVID-19 FAQ website – as if it was the authority on all things pandemic.
Facebook also had its day when it suppressed one of our articles questioning the evidence base supporting masks. The U.K.’s Department of Health and Social Care Technical Report on the COVID-19 pandemic informed us we learnt little during the pandemic; there are substantial gaps in the evidence base for non-pharmaceutical interventions that remain unfilled, they said.
The Lockdown Files revealed that masks were introduced in English secondary schools because the Prime Minister thought it wasn’t worth an argument with Nicola Sturgeon. The driver behind community mask mandates lay with the obsession of Dominic Cummings.
We also got flip-flopping of advisers from one Government policy to the next. Face mask rules changed 10 times – why? Lacking evidence, it became too easy to make it up as you went along. But as time passed, it became harder to justify the Rule of Six, the 10 o’clock curfew, the closure of schools, or the Covid rules that changed more than 200 times in 2020.
However, these attempts to silence dissenters were surpassed by the Government’s efforts to censor individuals who publicly criticised their Covid policies.
Last August, Big Brother Watch asked one of us to submit a freedom of information request to the Cabinet Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. What we got back was surprising and disturbing: pages highlighting the Government had monitored our writings and online activities for some time. Other journalists, human rights campaigners, members of the public and members of parliament were also under the Government’s watchful eye.
The Counter-Disinformation Unit’s tactics included looking at posts from “popular channels” on Telegram, a platform we didn’t use. It’s likely these were groups, but it’s not clear to us how they were identified or how they gathered the material.
The effect of these tactics is chilling. They raise serious questions about the true extent of the Government operations – who and what was captured within their spying net.
Heneghan and Jefferson finish by asking if readers “genuinely believe the pandemic is over and we can all move on”.
“Is it necessary to implement a Pandemic Preparedness Treaty signing away most of the rights earned in the past 400 years,” they ask. “What will happen to free speech when unelected officials declare the next pandemic?” A very good question.
Worth reading in full.
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