7.2.21
Dear Sir/Madam
I write with regard to the Covid crisis. Please understand that I am not denying that Covid exists nor the tragic circumstances for many families who have lost loved ones. Nor am I denying the sensitive coverage by the BBC of many who have suffered either directly or indirectly in this crisis. However I do believe the presponse of the authorities and media has been grossly disproportionate.
It is evident to me that the BBC is far too complicit in pushing the narrative that lockdowns are the only way of dealing with the pandemic, followed by the vaccination roll out of course, and in effect you have been operating as the propaganda arm of the government for the last ten months. I have listened to you consistently and there has been no deviation from the official line. I would have thought it more serving of the general public for the main news channel in the country to have a far more circumspect approach, wondering at the very least if there might be a better way of dealing with Covid, and yet there appears to be a frightening level of group think which is unwilling to debate or air sufficiently any other viewpoint.
The government could be forgiven at the beginning of the pandemic for taking a full lockdown approach given the fact that we had not experienced a serious plague for 100 years and what was happening across the world in countries like Italy and the US. However it was evident pretty quickly that the vast majority of deaths were of those over 65 with comorbidities. We had the opportunity then to reevaluate the lockdown policy and debate whether there was a better way. It surely would have been a far more common sense approach to have concentrated on protecting the vulnerable and get the rest of society back to normal as quickly as possible. Instead despite some easing of restrictions in the summer the government imposed mask wearing and doubled down on the lockdown approach with the tier system and further lockdowns in the autumn and into 2021. The BBC just went along with this as if it was the undisputedly correct approach.
It is obvious to anyone with an ounce of discernment that shutting down society to deal with Covid is an incredibly blunt and brutal instrument whose negative effects are incalculable – separating people from one another, splitting families, isolating an enormous number of single households in this country, putting on hold treatment for other health issues, excess deaths from those who had heart, cancer or other issues that were never dealt with, destroyed businesses and consequently broken lives, disrupted education for millions of children (I am a teacher and strongly oppose the union policy of keeping children put of school). The list goes on. Despite any government intentions it could be argued that this was an anti-human and some would say even wicked thing to do in the name of a public health crisis.
This is especially galling in view of the fact that although hospitals have been under pressure the numbers of deaths in historical terms have not been that great, although each death is obviously awful for many families. But be honest, how many deaths have been of fit and healthy people who are not overweight and do not have secondary conditions? Very few. This is where the media have blown the crisis out of all proportion and together with government have projected an unhealthy level of fear over society which in turn has led to an unhealthy level of control which we are now struggling to get out of. This would be considered by many people to be unforgivable.
In the late summer of 2020 an opportunity was given through the Great Barrington Declaration which was supported by over 50000 medical practitioners to change course by concentrating on protecting the vulnerable and releasing the rest of society to get back to normal, a perfectly common sense approach which would have avoided the continuing collateral damage to the economy and society. But it was cast aside by the powers that be who continued with arguably their ruinous lockdown approach. Can you please explain to me why we as a society cannot concentrate on protecting the vulnerable if we can produce reams of directives to regulate every other possible area of society? The proposal could have received at least considerably more debate.
On top of this are the problems with the data. The BBC feeds us with a daily figure of the number of deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test. Yet neither you nor the government nor anyone else, even medical experts can tell us how many of these people actually died of Covid and how many with Covid. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to surmise that the majority of those people died mainly of other causes given that they were old, such as heart problems, cancer, pneumonia, kidney failure, so on and so forth, and Covid was simply another condition whose extra weight and burden especially to those of great age overcame the patient. In addition is the problem of the high rate of testing with false positives with the popular Covid PCR test, which muddies the waters even further.
Given that what we know about the virus most people under 65 are under little threat from the virus, we then have the issue of social distancing. This whole idea of people being asymptomatic is fraught with difficulty. The idea that we have to socially distance because we might or might not have a virus is a rather tenuous basis for a major public policy. Even if someone had the virus what sort of virus load would they carry especially if they were asymptomatic, and honestly how much threat would they really be to most people they come into contact with, bearing in mind that they might be much more careful with older relatives? The human body is an incredible and wonderful creation and has the ability to develop immunity to viruses through natural means. Surely allowing healthy and younger people to mix normally could go some way to building up a natural immunity to this virus.
There are also disturbing conflicts of interest in this whole affair. We are told for instance that Professor Patrick Vallance has a shareholding of £600000 in GSK which was contracted to develop vaccines. The BMJ put out an article in December concerning the interests of doctors, scientists and academics advising the government on how to manage the pandemic. The article made the point that Downing St has shown little concern that advisors to the coronavirus vaccine task force have financial interests in pharmaceutical companies receiving government contracts. We should be mindful that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’ and that these issues are worth questioning. Chris Whitty is on the Interim Board of CEPI (coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) which evidently unites players in biotechnology, Big Pharma and health charities, government agencies, etc to push global immunisation which fits in nicely with a lockdown strategy. These issues are worth querying by both governments and journalists?
Historically my understanding is that national lockdowns have never been used before as a tool of public policy. I am sure that public health policy up to recently would never have entertained such an extreme method to deal with a virus, especially given that we have had very serious flu outbreaks within our lifetime and also potential scares with new viruses which never caused many deaths and certainly didn’t move the authorities to lock down a whole society, and especially as this virus is little threat to anyone apart from the old. The way the government is micromanaging people’s lives is serious government overreach into areas it should have nothing to do with, especially as they are illegitimately taking over the management of risk from private individuals and families into the realms of the State, again something unprecedented in human history. The only type of governmental system that would take such drastic action would be an extreme communist or socialist regime, as we saw with China leading the way.
We now have an impressive rollout of the vaccination programme and the medical and scientific community must be congratulated for all their superb work in producing a way out of the grip of this situation. For many people this has been the holy grail. However we have again been fed a narrative that this is the only realistic way out with an underplaying of alternatives. What about an emphasis on development of other treatments that could be another pathway for people, as has happened with HIV for which there is no vaccine but nevertheless the development of amazing new treatments?
There is also evidence that this is a man made virus which adds another level of intrigue to the plot. It is not beyond the realms of imagination that there is another agenda at work in all this and that unscrupulous people would like to use this virus to bring down nations for their own very suspect purposes. It is little wonder that there are so many doubters over this whole affair as both the government and media have left themselves with too many own goals. People are discerning, you can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time. It is no surprise that people turn to conspiracy theories or ideas that players behind the scenes are engineering this crisis for their own ends, whether for love of money, desire for global government or whatever. You cannot blame people for asking hard questions.
I would like to see a far more open debate in the mainstream media over these issues and a much more critical approach to the efficacy and suitability of lockdown, given that this crisis could go on somewhat longer than people would hope. This would give you more credibility with many who question what is going on at the moment and undermine any accusations that it is in your interests to push this agenda.
I would suggest respectfully that we are being ‘played’ in this Covid crisis by a very powerful spirit of manipulation and control, and both the government and mainstream media are party to this and to a degree are under that spirit. It would be in the interests of everybody to have a far more open debate about the whole issue which would go some way to allay the fears and questions of many.
CS Lewis, one of our greatest thinkers said something very prescient many years ago: ‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’
I humbly suggest that you have to govern for the welfare of 65m people and that we have lost sight of that in this crisis, allowing coronavirus to rule us rather than keeping it in a more realistic perspective.
Thank you for reading this letter, and I look forward to more balance in the lockdown debate,
Yours faithfully