BBC misrepresented Covid risk, UK inquiry told

Epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse has told that UK Covid Inquiry that the BBC spread "misinformation" about the risk of Covid, which he suspects was done as "a justification for locking down the entire population." 

 

BBC ‘misrepresented’ Covid risk to boost lockdown support, inquiry told | The Telegraph | Simon Johnson: 

January 25, 2024 - "The BBC was allowed to 'misrepresent' the risk posed by Covid to most people to boost public support for lockdown, the UK Covid Inquiry has heard. Prof Mark Woolhouse, an eminent epidemiologist and government adviser, lambasted the corporation for having 'repeatedly reported rare deaths or illnesses among healthy adults as if they were the norm'. He said this created the 'misleading impression' among BBC News viewers at the start of the pandemic that 'we are all at risk'.... 

"In reality, he said it was known at the time that the risk of dying from Covid was 10,000 times higher in the over-75s than the under-15s. But Prof Woolhouse told the inquiry the BBC did not correct its reporting, saying: 'I suspect this misinformation was allowed to stand throughout 2020 because it provided a justification for locking down the entire population.'

"Prof Mark Woolhouse, a member of the Scottish Government COVID-19 Advisory Group, also claimed hundreds of people may have died after being told not to 'bother' the NHS. He told the inquiry people were misled about how the crisis would unfold. And he said orders to stay at home and cease outdoor activity were not needed.

"He said further evidence of this was provided by a briefing dated March 22, 2020, by a sub-group of the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that focused on the public’s behaviour. This stated that 'a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group... the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging'.

"Prof Woolhouse said the 'misperception' created by the BBC’s coverage that everyone was at risk was a 'barrier to targeting interventions at the vulnerable minority who truly were at high risk from Covid'. In his written submission to the inquiry about the impact north of the Border, he said: 'I fear that the Scottish Government’s pandemic response was compromised as a result.' He also concluded that lockdown had been 'least effective at protecting the most vulnerable precisely because of their need to have contacts with health care and social care workers - self-isolation was not an option.' The expert added: “This should have been recognised from the outset.”

"Prof Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, was an adviser to the Scottish Government during the pandemic, although his submission said his advice was often not heeded by Nicola Sturgeon. He also sat on the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, which was another sub-group of SAGE.... [He is also the author of a book on the pandemic, The Year the World Went Mad. - gd.] 

"Last year, The Telegraph spoke to current and former BBC journalists who described a 'climate of fear' existing in the corporation during the pandemic, with experienced reporters 'openly mocked' if they questioned the wisdom of lockdowns.... Some complained to senior managers about the BBC’s blinkered stance but were ignored. Others communicated via secretive WhatsApp groups to share their frustrations, like members of a resistance movement.

"Prof Woolhouse said the public was 'not given accurate information' about Covid in the early stages of the pandemic. 'Some media sources - notably the BBC television news - did repeatedly misrepresent the risk posed by Covid,' he said. 'One example is that they gave the impression that hospitals were being overwhelmed during the first wave. Some (mainly in London) were, but overall hospital bed occupancy was at an all-time low during that period. A second example is that they routinely reported deaths of healthy young adults, thereby giving the impression that these were common. In reality, such deaths were extremely rare; the great majority of Covid deaths occurred in the elderly, frail and infirm.' He concluded: 'Possibly, this kind of coverage was an attempt to back up government public health messaging; for example, the hugely misleading claim that "we are all at risk".'

"A BBC spokesperson said: 'We reported on the pandemic in line with the BBC’s rigorous editorial standards – using a range of official and scientific sources. We reported on events in the UK and across the world as they happened - featuring ongoing analysis from a range of medical and scientific experts, as well as a range of voices and opinions, including those sceptical of lockdowns.'" 

Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/25/covid-inquiry-bbc-misrepresented-risk-pandemic/

BBC INFLATED risk to Brits to IMPOSE lockdown measures | GB News | January 26, 2024: 

Lockdown narrative called into question

Why more and more experts say lockdown didn't prevent people dying of Covid - and call it a 'monumental mistake on a global scale' | Mail on Sunday - Jo MacFarlance: 

March 26, 2022 - "It was 'a simple instruction' to the British people, said the Prime Minister: 'You must stay at home.' With that sombre televised address, shown on March 23, 2020 – two years ago last week – the country was plunged into its first national lockdown. After weeks of surging Covid infections, and horrified by the staggering scale of hospitalisations and deaths in Spain and Italy, the Government had concluded there was no option but to issue an unprecedented order ... a legal mandate that permitted people to leave their homes only for specific purposes: to shop for basic supplies, for medical purposes, for exercise or for work. This lasted seven weeks, and led to some of the most heartbreaking and damaging moments of the pandemic. 

"And it wasn't the last. In November 2020 there was a second national lockdown, lasting four weeks. And then, in January 2021 came the big one: a lockdown that lasted almost three months. The true toll won't be known for some time. However the general scientific consensus, rarely challenged, is that these measures were a necessary evil that saved lives. But just how true is that? While there is no doubt that robust measures were necessary against a new and devastating virus, was lockdown truly the only route through those dark days of the pandemic, or the right one?...

"Professor Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, ... has recently published a book, The Year The World Went Mad, about the UK's pandemic policy failures. Speaking this week on The Mail on Sunday's Medical Minefield podcast, Prof Woolhouse said: 'I think that lockdown will be viewed by history as a monumental mistake on a global scale, for a number of reasons. The obvious one is the immense harm the lockdown, more than any other measure, did in terms of the economy, mental health and on the wellbeing of society. Clearly things needed to be done to bring waves of infection under control. But many analyses suggest that lockdown itself didn't have a huge impact on reducing the health burden. That was achieved in other ways.'

"Analysing the effect of any single Covid measure is difficult, and researchers have managed it with varying degrees of success. In the UK, 'lockdown' refers specifically to the stay-at-home order. But some studies also include school and border closures, business closures and curfews in their definition of lockdown....

"One paper that did attempt to tease out the benefits of individual measures, published last month, found stay-at-home orders reduced global Covid deaths by just 2.9 per cent. By comparison, business closures cut deaths by ten per cent and school closures by nearly five per cent. The authors, economists linked to Johns Hopkins University in the US, have been accused of bias – one has repeatedly equated lockdown measures with fascism – and 'cherry-picking' papers to suit their hypothesis. 

"'If you start with a premise and select studies which are likely to back that premise, you don't come to an objective answer,' says epidemiologist and Government adviser Dr Raghib Ali, at the University of Cambridge. But intriguingly, Dr Ali and others also admit the researchers have a point....

"Another study ... published in Science in February last year, found 'stay at home' measures reduced Covid transmission by an average of 13 per cent on top of other measures such as closing schools and non-essential shops, and banning small gatherings. The study, which looked at evidence from 41 countries around the world, concluded this was a 'small effect' and meant 'some countries could control the epidemic while avoiding stay-at-home orders'. It also found something intriguing: lockdowns could, in a worst-case scenario, actually increase transmission of the virus by up to five per cent. This may be an effect of allowing it to spread within households, experts say.

"Prof Woolhouse has argued that, if the aim was partially to protect society's most vulnerable, lockdowns failed. 'We focused on this idea that if we stopped the virus transmitting among everybody, that this would somehow be sufficient to protect those who were at risk,' he says. 'And it wasn't.' Prof Woolhouse also argues that for lockdown to have had an effect it would need to have been imposed earlier. This is what worked in Australia and New Zealand, which pursued a 'zero Covid' strategy.... 'Lockdown as an intervention only makes sense in the context of zero Covid, and by the time it was imposed it was no longer the appropriate tool.

"'There are ways we could have responded to the pandemic that would have avoided most of the lockdown, and saved more lives. But lockdown happened anyway because by that stage no one – including me – was prepared to risk waiting to find out if [restrictions introduced prior to our full lockdown on March 23] had worked.' But that stay-at-home order was, for most, the hardest part of the pandemic. 'It made everything so much harder than it might have been,' he adds.

"Countries that had earlier lockdowns, better testing capacity and were able to identify and isolate cases fared better during the initial wave of the pandemic.In the UK, lockdown was seen – at a point of desperation – as the only option left remaining. But Prof Woolhouse argues people had already become more cautious. Studies using anonymised mobile phone location tracking data show contacts between people plummeted in early March (although the biggest drop was March 24, the day after lockdown).

"Dr Ali says: 'The purpose of lockdown is to reduce contacts, but if people are doing that anyway, the additional benefit [of making it a legal requirement to stay at home] is obviously somewhat reduced.'

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10655171/Englands-lockdown-did-NOT-prevent-people-dying-Covid-say-growing-number-experts.html

Lockdowns were a failure based on a falsehood, says epidemiologist in new book

Britain got it wrong on Covid: long lockdown did more harm than good, says scientist | The Guardian - Robin McKie:

January 2, 2022 - "There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. 'Everyone is at risk,' he announced. And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. 

"'I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,' [Woolhouse] says. 'In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15. And it was this failure to understand the wide variations in individual responses to Covid-19 that led to Britain’s flawed responses to the disease’s appearance, he argues – errors that included the imposition of a long-lasting, national lockdown. This is a strategy that Woolhouse – one of the country’s leading epidemiologists – describes as morally wrong and highly damaging in his forthcoming book, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir. 

'We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt' he argues '... to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy. We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked'. This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.'

"Rather than imposing blanket lockdowns across the nation, the government should have adopted measures designed to make contacts safe, Woolhouse maintains. 'You can see from the UK data that people were reducing their contacts with each other as cases rose and before lockdown was imposed. That, coupled with Covid-safe measures, such as masks and testing, would have been sufficient to control spread.' Largely voluntary behaviour change worked in Sweden and it should have been allowed to progress in the UK, argues Woolhouse. 

"Instead, we plumped for an enforced national lockdown, in part because, for the first time in history, we could. Enough business is now done online to allow large parts of society to function fairly well – through video conferences and online shopping. 'But it was a lazy solution to a novel coronavirus epidemic, as well as a hugely damaging one,' he adds.

"However, Woolhouse is at pains to reject the ideas of those who advocated the complete opening up of society, including academics who backed the [Great] Barrington Declaration which proposed the Covid-19 virus be allowed to circulate until enough people had been infected to achieve herd immunity. 'This would have led to an epidemic far larger than the one we eventually experienced in 2020,' says Woolhouse. 'It also lacked a convincing plan for adequately protecting the more vulnerable members of society, the elderly and those who are immuno-compromised.'

"Instead, the country should have put far more effort into protecting the vulnerable. Well over 30,000 people died of Covid-19 in Britain’s care homes. On average, each home got an extra £250,000 from the government to protect against the virus, he calculates. 'Much more should have been spent on providing protection for care homes,' says Woolhouse, who also castigates the government for offering nothing more than a letter telling those shielding elderly parents and other vulnerable individuals in their own homes to take precautions.

"The nation could have spent several thousand pounds per household on provision of routine testing and in helping to implement Covid-safe measures for those shielding others and that would still have amounted to a small fraction of the £300bn we eventually spent on our pandemic response, he argues. Indeed, Woolhouse is particularly disdainful of the neglect of 'shielders', such as care home workers and informal carers. 'These people stood between the vulnerable and the virus but, for most of 2020, they got minimal recognition and received no help.' Britain spent a fortune on suppressing the virus and will still be servicing the debt incurred for generations to come, he adds. 'By contrast, we spent almost nothing on protecting the vulnerable in the community'....

"And Woolhouse is emphatic that further lockdowns are not the way to deal with future waves of Covid-19. 'Lockdowns aren’t a public health policy. They signify a failure of public health policy,' he states."

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/02/britain-got-it-wrong-on-covid-long-lockdown-did-more-harm-than-good-says-scientist

The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir on Amazon