My mother has a sweet habit of keeping all my cuttings – columns, reviews of books. In the unlikely event that anyone should ever need to lay their hands on a Pearson opus from 1999, they will find it neatly filed in a bungalow in Carmarthenshire.
A couple of weeks ago, Mum alerted me to a piece by Janice Turner in The Times on the subject of motherhood. Turner, whose writing mum admires, kindly mentioned the impact my novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, had on shaping policy for working women with children.
Mum was pleased, but also worried that Janice had rather taken the shine off the compliment by adding that Pearson used to be good before “her latter swerve into populism and Covid conspiracies”.
Let it go, I thought. Janice Turner was hardly unique in doing nothing to challenge lockdown and other Covid measures which have left Britain both broke and broken. Most of our trade, journalism, either fell shamefully silent during that period or actively egged on the Government to close schools for longer, to have people arrested for sunbathing, to introduce vaccine passports and other authoritarian measures which it is the job of a free press to challenge. Or so I thought.
The few of us who continued to ask, “Why?” after the imposition of frankly bonkers rules (or was it “guidance”, Matt Hancock?) were routinely reviled, even threatened. Peter Hitchens, Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer and I were some of the names on a so-called fact-checking website convened by Neil O’Brien, the Conservative MP for Harborough, which set out to shame “Covid cranks and dangerous conspiracy theorists”.
It got worse. Sceptics like me who wondered, for example, why fathers were banned from attending the births of their own babies or why one devastated daughter was told off for not wearing a mask and gloves as she went to kiss the brow of her dying father and was marched smartly out of the room before Dad took his last breath, were called “murderers”.
Challenging Professor Sunetra Gupta, probably our greatest epidemiologist (and world-renowned expert in coronaviruses), who said that the old and the vulnerable must be protected while everyone else got on with their lives, O’Brien claimed that moving away from lockdowns would lead to “hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths”.
He and his ilk have gone very quiet now that there are, indeed, thousands of unnecessary deaths. Among people, many of them distressingly young, who had early cancer symptoms but couldn’t see a doctor after the NHS effectively became a Covid-only service. People who got scared and depressed and drank or ate themselves to death.
Teenagers cut off from friends who took their own sweet lives or plunged down a dark well into mental illness. The shattering cost of all this is slowly beginning to occur to even the most ardent lockdown cheerleaders. “Looking back, I think we failed our children during the pandemic,” mused Susanna Reid last week.
The Good Morning Britain presenter was commenting on a study which found that children in England face the worst exam results in decades and a lifetime of lower earnings because of school closures during Covid. National GCSE results will steadily worsen until 2030, when it is expected that “fewer than 40 per cent of pupils [will] get good grades in maths and English”.
A devastating picture of educational decline, I’m sure you’ll agree, especially when compared to Sweden where no school for 16-year-olds and under was closed and Swedish educational attainment is as good as ever.
Anyway, I thought it might be instructive to revisit some of the conspiracy theories, of which Turner accuses me, and see how they worked out:
Allison Conspiracy Theory No 1: Schools must not be closed, I argued. Children are at no risk from Covid and teachers are in one of the lowest-risk professions. It will do incalculable damage to kids’ education as well as their mental and physical health. Reality: UK schools were closed for longer than in any other country except Italy. By 2023, one in five children and young people aged eight to 25 had a probable mental disorder. The Mental Health of Children and Young People in England report found that 20.3 per cent of eight to 16-year-olds now suffer mental health problems. An “explosion of tics” was seen during lockdown, believed to be caused by anxiety. Children are “becoming more violent at school because lockdown delayed their development and created a background of fear”.
Oh, and as I also predicted, children’s immune systems are in trouble. According to Nature, social isolation during the pandemic had lasting effects on the composition of microbes in a baby’s gut. (Could that spell lifelong health problems for lockdown infants?) Researchers claim children are now more vulnerable to other infections, in part due to reduced interactions during, yes, lockdown. The number of under-18s on the waiting list for paediatric care in England soared to 423,500 last year, the highest on record. Of those, 23,396 have been forced to wait over a year for their appointment.
Conspiracy Theory No 2: With the help of a senior source inside NHS England, Planet Normal, the podcast I present with Liam Halligan, was able to point out that many of the graphs for hospital admissions shown at No 10 press briefings were deliberately alarmist. The Guardian took me to task for this heresy. It tutted:
“On 29 December, Pearson wrote, ‘ICU occupancy is 78 per cent today. Remarkably low for this time of year’ and that ‘winter 2020 is the lowest hospital bed occupancy for 10 years’.”
Reality: Those figures may be surprising but they were, and they remain, correct. While many ICUs dealt heroically with large numbers of Covid patients, the NHS was never in danger of collapsing, as we were told. Entire departments were empty, excess capacity in the paid-for private sector and the Nightingale hospitals was never used.
Meanwhile, hospital admissions for Covid were misrepresented by bundling together patients who were actually admitted for Covid, patients admitted for some other condition who happened to test positive for Covid, and patients unlucky enough to contract Covid while in hospital. Stay at Home to Save the NHS turns out to have been a very bad deal for the British public who now face hospital waiting lists in excess of eight million. More than 250 people a week could be dying because of long waits in A&E. Why did no one tell us that would happen? Oh.
Conspiracy Theory No 3: I said vaccine mandates were both discriminatory (creating social lepers) and pointless because the Covid jabs neither completely prevented infection nor transmission.
Reality: When it was belatedly admitted that the Covid vaccines neither completely stopped infection nor prevented transmission, I recall no apology to those of us who had been called “Granny Killers” and accused of “peddling misinformation”.
Nor, by the way, was I ever “anti-vax”. I had two AstraZeneca jabs and consider myself jolly lucky not to have had any of the side-effects suffered by some. As I argued at the time, mandatory Covid vaccines being brought in for care home workers in 2021 was a catastrophe in the making. Thousands upon thousands of workers left their jobs. It created a staffing crisis which is now responsible for bed-blocking in hospitals because elderly patients have no care home place to go to. The Government revoked the mandate by March 2022. Too late. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Conspiracy Theory No 4: Children and young people must not have the Covid vaccine.
Reality: I got myself into hot water for pointing out that it was morally wrong and deeply suspicious when an initially hesitant MHRA approved the Covid vaccine for youngsters. Where were the medical ethics? Although Covid vaccines mitigate serious symptoms in elderly and vulnerable people, they should never have been offered to the younger, healthier population where there was nearly all risk and practically no benefit.
Reported cases of myocarditis, more common in young males under 25, are worrying and highly credible. Only this week, I read about a preliminary scientific paper which investigates a hypothesis that increased fits in babies and small children are related to the jab.
Dear God. I could go on, and on, and on. I have left out the impact on our economy of spending £70 billion on furlough (as Halligan, a brilliant economist, suggested, millions did indeed get used to enforced indolence and free money and decided they liked it well enough not to return to work).
Altogether, we printed a boggling £450 billion to pay for the whole futile farrago; our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will still be picking up the tab long after Covid-19 has taken its rather undistinguished place in history.
“A third-division pandemic”, Professor Gupta calls it. Even recalling that list of horrific collateral damage makes me upset. How unforgivably cruel those draconian restrictions were. The playgrounds bolted up, when each one of us should have been outside where it was really hard to catch Covid. The tiny children at the mercy of their abusers; murdered. The lonely and confused who died in nursing homes thinking they were unloved, forgotten. FOR WHAT?
Yes, of course I got some things wrong, but nowhere near as much as the Government and the entire political, medical and scientific establishment. What we now know for certain is our country is weaker, poorer, sicker; our younger generation has taken a battering and recovery is uncertain. FOR WHAT?
Janice Turner insults me for my “Covid conspiracies”. What ignorance and complacency. Almost every “conspiracy theory” I wrote between spring 2020 and winter 2022 turned out to be correct, tragically. And is more vindicated by the day. Who are the murderers now?
My mother has a sweet habit of keeping all my cuttings – columns, reviews of books. In the unlikely event that anyone should ever need to lay their hands on a Pearson opus from 1999, they will find it neatly filed in a bungalow in Carmarthenshire.
A couple of weeks ago, Mum alerted me to a piece by Janice Turner in The Times on the subject of motherhood. Turner, whose writing mum admires, kindly mentioned the impact my novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, had on shaping policy for working women with children.
Mum was pleased, but also worried that Janice had rather taken the shine off the compliment by adding that Pearson used to be good before “her latter swerve into populism and Covid conspiracies”.
Let it go, I thought. Janice Turner was hardly unique in doing nothing to challenge lockdown and other Covid measures which have left Britain both broke and broken. Most of our trade, journalism, either fell shamefully silent during that period or actively egged on the Government to close schools for longer, to have people arrested for sunbathing, to introduce vaccine passports and other authoritarian measures which it is the job of a free press to challenge. Or so I thought.
The few of us who continued to ask, “Why?” after the imposition of frankly bonkers rules (or was it “guidance”, Matt Hancock?) were routinely reviled, even threatened. Peter Hitchens, Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer and I were some of the names on a so-called fact-checking website convened by Neil O’Brien, the Conservative MP for Harborough, which set out to shame “Covid cranks and dangerous conspiracy theorists”.
It got worse. Sceptics like me who wondered, for example, why fathers were banned from attending the births of their own babies or why one devastated daughter was told off for not wearing a mask and gloves as she went to kiss the brow of her dying father and was marched smartly out of the room before Dad took his last breath, were called “murderers”.
Challenging Professor Sunetra Gupta, probably our greatest epidemiologist (and world-renowned expert in coronaviruses), who said that the old and the vulnerable must be protected while everyone else got on with their lives, O’Brien claimed that moving away from lockdowns would lead to “hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths”.
He and his ilk have gone very quiet now that there are, indeed, thousands of unnecessary deaths. Among people, many of them distressingly young, who had early cancer symptoms but couldn’t see a doctor after the NHS effectively became a Covid-only service. People who got scared and depressed and drank or ate themselves to death.
Teenagers cut off from friends who took their own sweet lives or plunged down a dark well into mental illness. The shattering cost of all this is slowly beginning to occur to even the most ardent lockdown cheerleaders. “Looking back, I think we failed our children during the pandemic,” mused Susanna Reid last week.
The Good Morning Britain presenter was commenting on a study which found that children in England face the worst exam results in decades and a lifetime of lower earnings because of school closures during Covid. National GCSE results will steadily worsen until 2030, when it is expected that “fewer than 40 per cent of pupils [will] get good grades in maths and English”.
A devastating picture of educational decline, I’m sure you’ll agree, especially when compared to Sweden where no school for 16-year-olds and under was closed and Swedish educational attainment is as good as ever.
Anyway, I thought it might be instructive to revisit some of the conspiracy theories, of which Turner accuses me, and see how they worked out:
Allison Conspiracy Theory No 1: Schools must not be closed, I argued. Children are at no risk from Covid and teachers are in one of the lowest-risk professions. It will do incalculable damage to kids’ education as well as their mental and physical health. Reality: UK schools were closed for longer than in any other country except Italy. By 2023, one in five children and young people aged eight to 25 had a probable mental disorder. The Mental Health of Children and Young People in England report found that 20.3 per cent of eight to 16-year-olds now suffer mental health problems. An “explosion of tics” was seen during lockdown, believed to be caused by anxiety. Children are “becoming more violent at school because lockdown delayed their development and created a background of fear”.
Oh, and as I also predicted, children’s immune systems are in trouble. According to Nature, social isolation during the pandemic had lasting effects on the composition of microbes in a baby’s gut. (Could that spell lifelong health problems for lockdown infants?) Researchers claim children are now more vulnerable to other infections, in part due to reduced interactions during, yes, lockdown. The number of under-18s on the waiting list for paediatric care in England soared to 423,500 last year, the highest on record. Of those, 23,396 have been forced to wait over a year for their appointment.
Conspiracy Theory No 2: With the help of a senior source inside NHS England, Planet Normal, the podcast I present with Liam Halligan, was able to point out that many of the graphs for hospital admissions shown at No 10 press briefings were deliberately alarmist. The Guardian took me to task for this heresy. It tutted:
“On 29 December, Pearson wrote, ‘ICU occupancy is 78 per cent today. Remarkably low for this time of year’ and that ‘winter 2020 is the lowest hospital bed occupancy for 10 years’.”
Reality: Those figures may be surprising but they were, and they remain, correct. While many ICUs dealt heroically with large numbers of Covid patients, the NHS was never in danger of collapsing, as we were told. Entire departments were empty, excess capacity in the paid-for private sector and the Nightingale hospitals was never used.
Meanwhile, hospital admissions for Covid were misrepresented by bundling together patients who were actually admitted for Covid, patients admitted for some other condition who happened to test positive for Covid, and patients unlucky enough to contract Covid while in hospital. Stay at Home to Save the NHS turns out to have been a very bad deal for the British public who now face hospital waiting lists in excess of eight million. More than 250 people a week could be dying because of long waits in A&E. Why did no one tell us that would happen? Oh.
Conspiracy Theory No 3: I said vaccine mandates were both discriminatory (creating social lepers) and pointless because the Covid jabs neither completely prevented infection nor transmission.
Reality: When it was belatedly admitted that the Covid vaccines neither completely stopped infection nor prevented transmission, I recall no apology to those of us who had been called “Granny Killers” and accused of “peddling misinformation”.
Nor, by the way, was I ever “anti-vax”. I had two AstraZeneca jabs and consider myself jolly lucky not to have had any of the side-effects suffered by some. As I argued at the time, mandatory Covid vaccines being brought in for care home workers in 2021 was a catastrophe in the making. Thousands upon thousands of workers left their jobs. It created a staffing crisis which is now responsible for bed-blocking in hospitals because elderly patients have no care home place to go to. The Government revoked the mandate by March 2022. Too late. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Conspiracy Theory No 4: Children and young people must not have the Covid vaccine.
Reality: I got myself into hot water for pointing out that it was morally wrong and deeply suspicious when an initially hesitant MHRA approved the Covid vaccine for youngsters. Where were the medical ethics? Although Covid vaccines mitigate serious symptoms in elderly and vulnerable people, they should never have been offered to the younger, healthier population where there was nearly all risk and practically no benefit.
Reported cases of myocarditis, more common in young males under 25, are worrying and highly credible. Only this week, I read about a preliminary scientific paper which investigates a hypothesis that increased fits in babies and small children are related to the jab.
Dear God. I could go on, and on, and on. I have left out the impact on our economy of spending £70 billion on furlough (as Halligan, a brilliant economist, suggested, millions did indeed get used to enforced indolence and free money and decided they liked it well enough not to return to work).
Altogether, we printed a boggling £450 billion to pay for the whole futile farrago; our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will still be picking up the tab long after Covid-19 has taken its rather undistinguished place in history.
“A third-division pandemic”, Professor Gupta calls it. Even recalling that list of horrific collateral damage makes me upset. How unforgivably cruel those draconian restrictions were. The playgrounds bolted up, when each one of us should have been outside where it was really hard to catch Covid. The tiny children at the mercy of their abusers; murdered. The lonely and confused who died in nursing homes thinking they were unloved, forgotten. FOR WHAT?
Yes, of course I got some things wrong, but nowhere near as much as the Government and the entire political, medical and scientific establishment. What we now know for certain is our country is weaker, poorer, sicker; our younger generation has taken a battering and recovery is uncertain. FOR WHAT?
Janice Turner insults me for my “Covid conspiracies”. What ignorance and complacency. Almost every “conspiracy theory” I wrote between spring 2020 and winter 2022 turned out to be correct, tragically. And is more vindicated by the day. Who are the murderers now?