UK Government Admits to Treating Anti-Lockdown Scientists Like Terrorists

Britain’s government used policies designed to target terrorists to shut down scientists who opposed lockdown on social media.

Former Health Secretary Matt Hancock published his “Pandemic Diaries” last week, in cooperation with journalist Isabel Oakeshott. After extensive interviews with Hancock, Oakeshott wrote:

As far as Hancock was concerned, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach was mad and dangerous and needed to be shut down. His account shows how quickly the suppression of genuine medical misinformation—a worthy endeavor during a public health crisis—morphed into an aggressive government-driven campaign to smear and silence those who criticized the response. Aided by the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health harnessed the full power of the state to crush individuals and groups whose views were seen as a threat to public acceptance of official messages and policy. As early as January 2020, Hancock reveals that his special adviser was speaking to Twitter about “tweaking their algorithms.” Later he personally texted his old coalition colleague Nick Clegg, now a big cheese at Facebook, to enlist his help. The former Lib Dem deputy prime minister was happy to oblige.

Such was the fear of “anti-vaxxers” that the Cabinet Office used a team hitherto dedicated to tackling [Islamic State] propaganda to curb their influence. The zero-tolerance approach extended to dissenting doctors and academics. The eminent scientists behind the so-called Barrington Declaration, which argued that public health efforts should focus on protecting the most vulnerable while allowing the general population to build up natural immunity to the virus, were widely vilified: Hancock genuinely considered their views a threat to public health.

Oakeshott also revealed how little science was behind the government’s push for mask mandates:

As early as 3 February 2020 … ministers were told the masks make no significant difference. In April 2020, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (nervtag) reiterated this advice. At the end of that month, the Sage committee said much the same thing, telling ministers that it would be unreasonable to claim a large benefit.

When it came to schools, masks were introduced not because of science, but politics. The UK government specifically excluded schools from all recommendations to wear masks. But then Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, announced that Scotland would mandate mask wearing in high schools. “Faced with an unpleasant choice between wheeling out the chief medical or scientific officer to say that the Scots were wrong or performing a U-turn, Downing Street chose the latter,” wrote Oaskeshott. “That, rather than any medical reason, is why millions of schoolchildren were forced to spend months with grubby bits of material stuck to their faces.”

Hancock’s diaries reveal what we said from the start: Lockdowns were a massive expansion of government power and a massive retreat from the rule of law and individual liberty.

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote that “government tyranny is routine in human history” and that “our people have kind of settled into an unreality about what is really happening around us. They don’t understand how deadly dangerous it is!”

To understand more about how liberty is under attack, read our article “Your Freedom Is More Fragile Than You Think.”