I recall the newsroom conversations during the dark days of the pandemic only too well. They were upsetting at the time. Now, as we see a disturbing rise in excess deaths across the country, the thought of them fills me with horror and outrage.
‘You do realise these lockdowns and restrictions will end up killing people too, don’t you?’ I would say to senior editorial colleagues with something approaching desperation in my voice. ‘Sure, the virus is a serious threat to a small proportion of the population but the longer-term consequences of shutting the economy down and closing off the NHS will be deadly for huge numbers who were never at serious risk from the virus, people with years of life ahead of them. Shouldn’t we be reflecting that in our coverage? Shouldn’t we be considering the possibility that the government is going down the wrong path on this?’
The response of these colleagues would vary in tone, from patient but patronising good humour to open mockery. Many were influenced, I believe, by social media echo chambers (curated by pernicious algorithms). My colleagues had swallowed the myopic belief, adopted by people largely on the liberal left, that only lockdowns could ‘save lives’ and ‘protect the NHS’ from the devastation threatened by Covid-19. Anyone who demurred was, as far as they were concerned, clearly a right-wing lunatic.
Now we can all see how well that is working out. Provisional figures released this week reveal that more than 650,000 deaths were registered in the UK in 2022 – 9 per cent more than 2019. This is one of the largest excess death levels outside the pandemic in 50 years. But despite many of the causes of this being obvious, the BBC is pretending the development has come as something of a shock.
First to tackle the figures was the BBC’s Head of Statistics, who appeared on the news channel shortly after the stats were released in the morning. Astonishingly, during the entirety of this correspondent’s grim analysis, the word ‘lockdown’ wasn’t mentioned once. The term ‘pandemic hangover’ was used without mentioning ‘lockdown consequences’. This was perhaps no surprise given BBC News reporters continue to conflatethe impacts of Covid restrictions with the direct effects of the virus itself. Indeed, when a graph was displayed showing a large fall in new blood pressure prescriptions in early 2020, the correspondent failed to draw any attention to the fact that it coincided with the UK’s first national lockdown.
‘A lot of people have been wandering around in the last two years not getting treated for things that could cause heart problems later on,’ he said. In this regard, he was only half right. People hadn’t been ‘wandering around’ at all during the pandemic – they’d been staying at home, too terrified to see their doctor after watching apocalyptic BBC News reports from Covid wards. The correspondent wasn’t finished though. The ‘most worrying’ statistic, he said, related to the previous two weeks – with deaths running at 20 per cent higher than usual, a trend he warned that could ‘keep on running throughout January and February’. The news anchor weighed in, saying there were ‘very big questions for the government and for NHS’ to answer. I was left wondering who would pose the ‘very big questions’ to the BBC about its role in all this.
The BBC’s analysis didn’t just fall short because it failed to mention the L-word. In broad terms, it connected the excess deaths to a combination of missed treatments and an NHS already in crisis. Yet anyone working for BBC News knows full well that the NHS is in crisis every single winter. This knowledge didn’t stop BBC editors ignoring warnings that lockdowns would only exacerbate health service bottlenecks once restrictions were totally lifted.
Despite leading on Covid countless times during the pandemic, the World at One on Radio 4 didn’t even mention excess deaths in its opening headlines. The news bulletin that followed WATO’s preamble, however, did lead on the story, with a report by a health and disinformation reporter. Again, there was no direct mention of lockdowns, or the fact that many people had warned that we would, in time, pay a terrible price for reaching for the blunt instrument of authoritarian Chinese-style restrictions.
The fact that a reporter with a joint brief encompassing disinformation was covering this story tells you everything you need to know about the BBC’s muddled and compromised approach to Covid. It should go without saying that BBC health reporters must not present unsubstantiated assertions as facts in their reports. But throughout the pandemic they did just that. Exaggerated claims about the efficacy of masks and vaccines to stop transmission of the coronavirus were repeated without any meaningful interrogation. We now know, thanks to Isabel Oakeshott, that mask mandates were more to do with politics and messaging than science. Regrettably, as is the case with many liberal media outlets, the BBC’s ‘disinformation’ reporting has become a selective and somewhat political exercise in debunking claims that don’t chime with the worldviews of editors.
The same health and disinformation reporter had already had a go at unpicking the excess deaths figures on the BBC News Channel shortly before midday. She was keen to point out that excess deaths during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 were much higher due to ‘very clear… direct Covid deaths’. I remember working in the BBC’s newsroom during those years and it was never ‘very clear’ how many people had died as a direct consequence of coronavirus. Deaths were reported ‘within 28 days of infection’ and any caveats about co-morbidities were jettisoned very early in the pandemic.
The BBC says that ‘We have covered the newly released data on excess deaths with great care and in detail across our news output, which is what people expect of the BBC.’ But as the day wore on, the excess deaths story slipped down running orders. The Six O’Clock News, on BBC One, was 13 minutes in before it got around to reporting the figures. Who better than to shed light on the mystery than the BBC’s own Sir Chris Whitty stand-in, the BBC’s Health Editor, who was given little over a minute to talk about the statistics. His analysis could have passed unnoticed. But I jerked to attention when the L-word escaped, perhaps unbidden, from his lips. As he explained: ‘There’s more and more speculation and examination now of the fact that people didn’t get certain operations, treatments and appointments during lockdowns, and that contributed to their conditions getting worse, and that led to their deaths subsequently.’ Finally, I thought, a BBC journalist who wasn’t mincing his words. But my relief at hearing this bald statement turned to anger once again when I remembered predicting these exact outcomes and pleading with BBC editors who could have made a difference.
Three days later, BBC News provided more evidence that a lack of journalistic rigour marks much of its reporting on Covid, but in a way I couldn’t have predicted. In a vetting lapse (comparable to the occasion when Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, was interviewed, following the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell in December 2021), Dr Aseem Malhotra was invited onto the News Channel to talk about statins. Malhotra took advantage of a distracted presenter to espouse his controversial views on Covid-19 mRNA jabs. Adding to the embarrassing nature of this booking was the timing: the heart specialist was platformed only a couple of days after Andrew Bridgen was suspended as a Conservative MP for tweeting that he had spoken to a cardiologist who seemed to compare the vaccines to the Holocaust. Malhotra has firmly denied he was the cardiologist in question, but Bridgen was quick to tweet his praise for the consultant’s interview.
Malhotra’s appearance will, no doubt, result in an internal inquiry and a row on social media. Meanwhile, in the real world, people are continuing to die needlessly and, in part, because our publicly funded state broadcaster took sides, and hitched the BBC’s wagon to short-term measures, drawn up in a panic with no cost-benefit analysis, that were always going to turn out to be self-destructive and lethal in the longer-term. It will now be many years before the full casualty count is tallied. The day the BBC finally accepts responsibility for its role in this is also, without doubt, a long time in the future.
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