Former Government Adviser Claims BBC Created ‘Misleading’ Covid Lockdown Justification Risk
Professor Mark Woolhouse stated that supporting lockdown became ‘a test of virtue’ which made debate reasoned and objective debate ‘exceptionally difficult.’
An adviser to the Scottish government claimed that the BBC created a “misleading” risk of COVID-19 to provide justification for lockdown during the pandemic. Professor Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, made this claim while giving evidence to the UK COVID-19 Inquiry on Wednesday.
Mr. Woolhouse stated ina written statementthat in the media, “BBC television news repeatedly reported rare deaths or illnesses among healthy adults as if they were the norm, again creating a misleading impression of who was at greater or lesser risk.” He said that he suspected that this “misinformation was allowed to stand throughout 2020 because it provided a justification for locking down the entire population.”
He also noted that an SPI-B briefing dated March 22, 2020, said 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.”
Last year, SPI-B member, Susan Michie, told The Epoch Times that it “is inaccurate and defamatory to claim that we advised to exaggerate the risk.”
Mr. Woolhouse argued that the “misperception” created by the BBC’s coverage was that “the general impression that we were all at risk,” which hindered the targeting of interventions at the vulnerable minority who truly were at high risk from COVID-19. He added that the Scottish government’s pandemic response was compromised as a result, and that the country incorrectly made excessively stringent restrictions instead of a “middle ground.”
He also mentioned that supporting lockdown in 2020—2021 became what has been described as “a test of virtue,” making reasoned and objective debate about alternatives to lockdown ‘exceptionally difficult.’
Profound Sense of Fear
Molly Kingsley, co-founder of UsforThem, told The Epoch Times it was “bittersweet” to hear the comments now. “Interventions were rolled out on the basis of that messaging, the whole idea we needed to stay in this very long lockdown with school closures and obviously also the vaccine rollout. And the government used this very profound sense of fear to roll out the vaccine under emergency use authorization,” she said.
The Epoch Times contacted the BBC for comment.
