Who are the Covidiots now?

A new word entered the lexicon in the early days of the Covid scandal – ‘Covidiot’. Initially defined as those who endangered the lives of others, the term fast became applied to anyone who questioned the official Covid narrative. Anyone who dared suggest that we may have gone a teensy bit over the top with a 24-month social and economic lockdown; that wearing masks was pretty useless; that children would suffer greatly if they could not attend school and play with their pals; that people might die of cancer because they were unable to be screened or treated; that vaccines which were barely effective at curbing Covid were being rolled out with undue haste; that inflation would rise to pre-Thatcherite levels; and that the combined might of these measures would eventually lead to untold excess deaths from the collective fallout of undiagnosed illness, loneliness and isolation, poverty and vaccine related harms. If those were the Covidiots, then I am proud to have been one; we were ridiculed mercilessly, but who is laughing now?

Journalists who refused to toe the Covid line such as Toby Young were demonised; Lord Jonathan Sumption, one of the finest legal minds in the UK was mocked for suggesting that lockdown was an affront to basic freedoms of association, speech and movement; eminent cancer specialist Dr Karol Sikora was called a crank for urging an end to restrictions facing the NHS for fear of an ‘epidemic’ of cancer related deaths; Oxford Professor Carl Henegan, the pre-eminent evidence-based expert in the UK, was suspended from Twitter for suggesting that things were not as bad as they were being presented; and Professor Sunetra Gupta, also of Oxford and an eminent epidemiologist was heavily criticised for co-signing the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing that our strategy should be focused on the vulnerable. Lesser mortals such as myself were ‘reported’ to our university by the chief executive of the city council and had to ‘account for our activities’, while others lost their jobs.

And where are we now? I doubt even the most hardline Covid sceptic could have predicted being 100% right across the board. If this had been an accumulator bet the bookies may have had to call it off. Need we delve into the details? (Editor: oh yes please!). OK then, here goes: we have a national health service (aka the NHS) that is moribund and whose only advice seems to be that if you are ill, don’t bother them with it; excess deaths are at a record high as a result of all the above; the vaccines are known—beyond dispute—to be potentially harmful, leading to blood clots, cardiac inflammation, neurological problems such as Bell’s palsy, amputation, lifelong disability and, if you really hit the jackpot, death; inflation is high and rising with the genuine prospect to middle income families being beyond the breadline, searching for crumbs under the table; we now know beyond any reasonable doubt that masks were an expensive waste of time, but try telling that to the people who made millions out of importing and selling them; children have suffered greatly with many unable to get to school as they have not yet learned to walk and even if they got there could not communicate with the other kids. On the point of the Great Barrington Declaration, we did precisely the opposite to their sage advice: we warehoused vulnerable older people in ill-equipped and understaffed nursing homes to clear out NHS wards as backdrops for the production of high quality Tik-Tok videos, with the result that these older people died in their thousands. Meantime, those barely vulnerable to the virus had their lives made a misery, their incomes reduced, coupled with the possibility of ending up behind bars for the night if they took to the streets to express their dismay.

Now that Rishi the Rat has blown the gaff on the processes leading to the national disaster of lockdown: the lack of any debate, zero calculation of likely harms; and deliberate silencing of dissent, I expect that the apologies will be forthcoming any day now from Messrs Cummings, Johnson, Vallance, Whitty, Hancock and the hundreds of MPs who were negligent in their responsibility to the British public. What’s that you say? If I expect that I must be a bigger Covidiot than you thought?

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.