Matt Hancock is a Monkey. But Who Was the Organ Grinder?

I find the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Lockdown Files’ revelations about Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages simultaneously reassuring and disturbing.

Reassuring, because over the many months I analysed Covid related data for Lockdown Sceptics (as this site was then called) I often had periods of self-doubt. Official announcements by politicians and senior civil servants were so discordant with publicly available information, I assumed I must be missing something, or misinterpreting the figures. Worse, I worried about inadvertently misleading our readership. Recent revelations suggest that my analyses were roughly correct – I’m not claiming any credit because the answers were hiding in plain sight. Anyone with a modicum of common sense and a basic training in biological sciences could have seen it – and many did.

On the other hand, the message trails are disturbing for what they tell us about the nature of decision making in government. It is easy to be misled by taking Hancock’s adolescent WhatsApp messages at face value. Vain, shallow and self-obsessed, he was the perfect mark for manipulation by erstwhile ‘advisors’. A political marionette parroting lines fed to him by others and a convenient fall guy when it all went wrong. I don’t think Hancock is the major villain in the lockdown piece. He’s too lightweight to have dreamt all that up on his own.

Lest anyone misinterpret my view, I don’t think the WEF or the ‘Illuminati’ were behind the lockdown catastrophe. But I do think there were plenty of adults in the room – and that many of them perceived personal advantage in maintaining the Covid fictions and the theatre that went with it.

Hancock’s WhatsApp exchanges suggest a consistent policy of official exaggeration to justify excessive population control measures, certainly from the autumn of 2020. This isn’t news, but it corroborates what I wrote at the time. Here are just a few examples:

WhatsApp Exchanges between Boris Johnson, Whitty, Valance and Hancock show these main players knew early on that Covid was not a significant threat to the vast majority of the population. We now know that on February 29th 2020 Whitty said on WhatsApp: “For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1%) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut. So important for the long run.”

I agree with that statement. I think most doctors would concur. Even at the time, the infection fatality rate (IFR) was rarely estimated above 1% except in people over 65 and we now know from the work of John Ioannidis and others that those IFRs were significant over-estimates.

Why did Dr Whitty change his mind? He subsequently vocally and repeatedly advocated for the entire U.K. population to be vaccinated with a drug that had not undergone standard safety studies and in particular for young people to be vaccinated for a disease that was in no way a danger to them. What brought about his volte face?

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