An amnesty to end the vaccine wars?

and the self-righteousness that went to enforcing those grim years of tyranny.”

Then Harrington gets to what is surely the crux of the dispute: what happened is of more than just historical interest because it influences how we will deal with such events in the future.

“The very foundation of moral authority is a shared trust in the integrity of scientific consensus … Covid has left us in no doubt that there is a great deal of grey area between ‘science’ and ‘moral groupthink’.”

Not all medical scientists were oblivious to this “grey area”. In a series of webinars I conducted at the very beginning of the Covid crisis with Professor Robin Wood, Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Cape Town, he presciently and repeatedly warned against the “fear-driven” responses of the WHO and the South African government and the “cherry-picking” of data.

Wood, internationally known for his work on the transmission of infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis and HIV/Aids, was one of few South African scientists who also dared to criticise the WHO.

He picked out WHO’s delayed response to declaring a pandemic, its refusal to countenance evidence that the outbreak might have originated in a Wuhan laboratory, its muddled masking policies, exaggerated concerns about youth mortality, and its insistence that the virus was not spread through the air but by physical contact.

When I spoke with Wood this week, there was no sense of vindication on his part at being proved correct. Instead, he bemoans the pressure on leaders to “do something”. Regrettably, this doesn’t mean being open-minded. Instead, it often means “ignoring the evidence or dogmatically trying to fit it into preconceived policies”.

“I can understand the growing public scepticism, the lack of confidence in the existing medical system and the global institutions that are supposed to manage our existence. In my view, if a new pandemic comes along, we are less well equipped to deal with it than ever before.”