A BBC Reckoning for the Covid Lockdowns is Overdue
Trust in the BBC has been collapsing for years. For many, it finally died during Covid when the national broadcaster took on the role of chief cheerleader for the lockdowns, with no dissent allowed, says Toby in the Telegraph. A reckoning is long overdue.
Here’s an excerpt.
My trust in the BBC collapsed some time before the leak of of Michael Prescott’s report for the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee. To be precise, it was during the Covid pandemic when the Corporation decided its job was producing pro-lockdown propaganda rather than scrutinising the government’s pandemic response. The effect was to prolong the most disastrous public policy in the history of these islands.
I won’t dwell on why ordering people to stay in their homes and closing non-essential businesses was such a mistake. To take just one example, the IMF estimates the total cost of the UK government’s COVID-19 measures was £410 billion, or £6,067 per person.
This partly accounts for why the British economy is in such a parlous state and why Rachel Reeves has so little room for manoeuvre. For instance, the main reason she can’t borrow more to plug the hole in the public finances is because we maxed out the country’s credit card during the pandemic, with public sector net debt ballooning from £1.8 billion at the end of March 2020 to £2.35 billion by March 2022. This entirely foreseeable cost of the lockdown was just one of many that the BBC decided to overlook, alongside the widening of the attainment gap, the increase in domestic violence, the deterioration of mental health, the rise in undiagnosed cancers and the neglect of care home residents.
The BBC’s editors and producers, like a majority of the lanyard class, seemed to take it for granted that these costs would be more than outweighed by the benefits, even though there was precious little evidence that locking people in their homes would stop the spread of the virus. Indeed, the evidence soon began to point the other way: Sweden, which imposed much more moderate restrictions, had the second lowest excess mortality in Europe between March 2020 and July 2022.
Such was the BBC’s enthusiasm for the lockdown policy, it pumped out nightly “Covid porn”, with Clive Myrie and other correspondents filing reports from “the frontline” where doctors and nurses struggled to contain the deadly virus. It’s no wonder the government’s draconian response commanded such widespread public support. This news footage gave the impression that anyone who breached the social distancing rules was at serious risk of dying. This was not the reality: in 2021 the global infection fatality rate was reckoned by John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford, to be 0.27%.
The Beeb went further, Toby continues, using its Trusted News Initiative to take the propaganda global and bring pressure to censor social media across the world.
Worth reading in full.
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