What the disdain for a brave scientist tells us about the great Covid-19 whitewash
THE Covid Inquiry should be treated as severely as the people of this country were treated by the Government during the Great Panic of 2020-21. All involved should be told to go home and stay there. They should be free to do some daily exercise, but otherwise not permitted to bother us again. We will lose nothing by this. We all know that their report will say – as I predicted long ago – that ‘we’ did not ‘lock down’ soon enough or hard enough.
It is perfectly obvious that they are not interested in any serious consideration of the possibility that the whole thing was a ghastly mistake, made in a condition of outright panic by people unqualified to run a parish council.
How do we know this? We know it because of the inquiry’s treatment of Professor Carl Heneghan, one of the few courageous and uncrushable scientists who stood out against the national closedown policy at the time.
Prof Heneghan is a practising GP, closely in touch with the actual daily workings of the NHS, as well as being a distinguished academic.
In 2013, the Health Service Journal listed him as one of the 100 top clinical leaders, which its editor described as ‘a list of people who excel in their own professional specialism but whose impact extends beyond their immediate sphere’.
YET during the long months when fanatics and zealots demanded the stoppage of the entire country on the basis of what are now obviously false assumptions, Prof Heneghan’s distinction counted for little.
You might think that after Sweden’s far more successful handling of Covid, achieved by following ideas similar to Prof Heneghan’s, his status might now have risen.
You might think that the Covid Inquiry would treat him as something of a star turn,
someone to be listened to with care and respect.
But no, as he himself puts it in a rather frightening article in The Spectator: ‘I gave evidence at the inquiry last week. I had submitted a 74-page statement on what I thought it should discuss. Instead, the main topic was rude words in old WhatsApp messages.’
He described how ‘the KC questioning me launched into an attack on my credentials. I’m a clinical epidemiologist and author of 450 peer-reviewed publications’.
The minds which were closed at
the start of the panic are still as closed as ever. The establishment, which turned a drama into a crisis, which bankrupted the country, wrecked the education of millions of children and students, mangled the NHS and launched the biggest attack on personal freedom in modern times, has learned nothing and remembered nothing from the disaster.
Quite soon, they will do it all again. It will not be exactly the same, but very similar. For it will be based on the same impulse, to distil fear into power.