As far as Hancock was concerned, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach [to Covid] was mad and dangerous and needed to be shut down. His account shows how quickly the suppression of genuine medical misinformation – a worthy endeavour during a public health crisis – morphed into an aggressive government-driven campaign to smear and silence those who criticised the response. Aided by the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health harnessed the full power of the state to crush individuals and groups whose views were seen as a threat to public acceptance of official messages and policy. As early as January 2020, Hancock reveals that his special adviser was speaking to Twitter about ‘tweaking their algorithms’. Later he personally texted his old coalition colleague Nick Clegg, now a big cheese at Facebook, to enlist his help. The former Lib Dem deputy prime minister was happy to oblige.
Such was the fear of ‘anti-vaxxers’ that the Cabinet Office used a team hitherto dedicated to tackling Isis propaganda to curb their influence. The zero-tolerance approach extended to dissenting doctors and academics. The eminent scientists behind the so-called Barrington Declaration, which argued that public health efforts should focus on protecting the most vulnerable while allowing the general population to build up natural immunity to the virus, were widely vilified: Hancock genuinely considered their views a threat to public health.
[…]
Hancock, Whitty and Johnson knew full well that non-medical face masks do very little to prevent transmission of the virus. People were made to wear them anyway because Dominic Cummings was fixated with them; because Nicola Sturgeon liked them; and above all because they were symbolic of the public health emergency.
– Isabel Oakeshott, laying out a damning narrative of the government’s response to Covid. Strangely, the linked article’s very feeble final paragraph seems at odds with the listed litany of woe Matt Hancock and his ilk were responsible for.
January? That’s a month before the virus reached our shores, and a good two months before the official story says Boris changed his mind on lockdown. Fascinating.
As my father used to say of the other two partners in his firm, large-ish cheeses in “opposing” political parties, they have more in common with each other than they do with me.
‘Hancock’ and ‘genuine’ are not words I associate. I think any explanations we offer for the extreme ease with which he joined the censors will not need that word. Hancock is like many a politician: good at believing things, less so at genuinely believing them.
That would explain a certain casualness in obeying the rules. However Johnson could have disobeyed them all he liked and still been prime minister today if he had never imposed them, as far as the public is concerned.
One could of course ask whether the ‘elite’ determination to impose them on us regardless meant he would have risked losing office more in the way the way Truss did. My guess is not provided his poll numbers stayed healthy – he could have made the first lockdown no more the three weeks it was billed as, and/or genuinely ended it and not had the second. (Even if the elite had managed to oust him over such things, he would have been brilliantly placed for a come-back now if he’d been sacked for trying to imitate Sweden.)
For a man whom I kind of relied on (in a certain sense) to want to be PM, it was a strange thing to do. There again, it was a strange thing for Dominic Cummings to do, to be so resistant to the EU consensus yet so gullible to the pandemic consensus. Was it because it was garnished with the name of ‘science’ despite having none of the attributes?
Yeah, but they meant well, and that’s the important thing don’tyaknow?
They meant to ‘protect the NHS’. That was a big political driver at the time – may have helped bully Johnson into the second lockdown – but (FWIW) my current experience in Scotland is that my non-political acquaintance speak with casual harshness of the post-pandemic loss-of-function of the NHS.
Niall Kilmartin wrote:
‘They meant to ‘protect the NHS’ . . . .
and yet, as I understand from news reporting, the NHS is (once again? Still?) teetering on the brink, with outbreaks of almost-medieval diseases that were thought rendered meaningless fifty years ago, shortages of the most-basic medications, overwhelmed hospitals, a chronic lack of primary-care capacity, and more than 5 million people waiting in line for medical care. And much of this was repeatedly and specifically predicted as the entirely-logical outcomes of the government’s pandemic responses. They ‘saved the NHS’ for next week, by crippling it for years to come, maybe forever – there will come a point (maybe it is already here) when the backlog of medical care delayed becomes so vast that the NHS will end up killing more people than it saves. Truly, to paraphrase a probably-apocryphal statement, ‘we had to destroy the population, in order to protect the NHS’.
llater,
llamas
I can’t agree that the suppression of “genuine medical misinformation” is a “worthy endeavour.” The usual argument applies that no one should be trusted to decide what should be suppressed as “misinformation,” and in the event it turns out that medical truths were suppressed as “misinformation” and that examples of actual misinformation were officially endorsed as truths.
COVID-19 almost certainly reached the UK in December 2019. There were no specific tests for it until late February so we’ll never really know for sure. There were several suspicious pneumonia cases in December 2019 and January 2020, including a choir in Bradford, and Public Health England has said that it cannot rule out the presence of COVID-19 in the UK in December 2019.
I started a job in early February 2020 and travelled to the office by public transport, one person on the bus asked the driver if he thought COVID-19 was a serious situation. At the time I was already we aware of COVID-19 and mentioned COVID-19 to my colleague who was, amazingly enough, not aware of it yet. I tend to read pretty widely so I had been aware of it in December 2019 when the early reports of a strange illness in Wuhan emerged, but I would have thought most people would have heard of it by early February.
Mr Hancock seems to have actually believed in all this stuff – that the lockdowns were a good idea, that there was no Early Treatment (“medical misinformation”), that the Covid injections are “safe and effective”, and so on.
In a way this makes “Bonking Hancock” less bad than Mr Johnson – who knew that a pack of lies were being pushed by the international establishment, but went along with the lies. Went along with the lies because he thought the establishment would remove him as Prime Minister if he did not go along with the lies – and then (in spite of his going along with the lies) they-removed-him-anyway.
Technically Mr Hancock does not seem to be liar on this stuff – as he actually believes.
@Paul Marks
Hancock didn’t
that masks worked but was happy, or at least content, to mandate them and to publish
to support that compulsion.
You can’t be a little bit pregnant or a little bit of a lying liar.
End of frothing at the mouth.
My assumption is that The Bureaucracy is afraid the demos will elect a government that will rein in The Bureaucracy and it is prepared to destroy civilization to prevent that from happening.
That being said, I doubt it is truly aware that that is the inevitable consequence of its actions, there is no controlling intelligence, it’s just individual bureaucrats defending themselves and their departments.
Clovis Sangrail – I know that Mr Johnson did not believe a word he said, but where is the evidence that Mr Hancock did not believe this stuff? He seems to be a very stupid man – so perhaps (perhaps) he believed it.
Roue le Jour.
We are up against Hegel – yes Hegel.
The idea that the bureaucracy should be independent of political control, that it is the manifestation of reason in the world, comes from Hegel.
The odd thing about Britain is that we follow ideas here without knowing their source – for example someone will say that we can build in a traditional style because such a building would be a “pastiche” and against “the spirit of the age” – but if you ask them, “why should we follow Hegel on such things?” they look blank – as if they did not know that the “spirit of the age” stuff comes from Hegel.
The founder of the British Civil Service was Sir Charles Trevelyan – under his rule the population of Ireland fell by a third.
This was not some cunning plot (as Irish Nationalists believe to this day) – he did not want vast numbers of people to die, he was just USELESS.
But he talked-a-good-game – just as “experts” today talk-a-good-game.
And the British establishment thought Trevelyan was wonderful – in short, even in the late 1840s the establishment was crap.
The policies that are being followed will lead to disaster – is it intentional?
I do not know – as you say Roue le Jour, I doubt that there is any controlling intelligence. Just lots and lots of “experts” and officials, who are filled with utterly false ideas.
This is what “system collapse” looks like, lots and lots of powerful officials and “experts” with very bad ideas, false beliefs.
And, I might as well give Central Office some rope to hang me with, that includes both the First Lord of the Treasury and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Yes – Hancock may not have believed in the mask fetish, but he may (perhaps) have believed in the other nonsense. That the lockdowns were a good idea, that there was no Early Treatment, that the injections were “safe and effective” – and so on.
All the stuff that Mr Johnson knew was rubbish – but said anyway, because he was frightened the establishment would remove him as Prime Minister if he did not push their lies.
And then they removed him as Prime Minister anyway.