Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Unlike Britain, France is far from finished with Covid

Paris, 2020 (photo: Getty)

Twelve months ago Britain rebelled against Covid hysteria. As Boris Johnson and his Sage modelling committee prepared to lockdown the country for Christmas, they lost control of the narrative.  

First 100 Tory backbenchers MPs voted against the PM’s vaccine passport scheme, and a few days later Lord Frost resigned as Brexit Minister. In his resignation letter he expressed his concern about the government’s handling of the pandemic. Urging Johnson to ‘learn to live with Covid’, Frost warned against giving into the sect of the worst-case scenario. ‘I hope we can get back on track soon and not be tempted by the kind of coercive measures we have seen elsewhere.’

Macron has never shown the slightest contrition for his Covid authoritarianism

In reporting Frost’s departure, the BBC, very much part of the doom-monger sect, warned that the latest variant of the virus, Omicron, was spreading fast with 90,000 cases recorded on the previous Saturday. The Beeb, along with much of the mainstream media, wanted another lockdown, given that Sage modelling predicted that deaths could reach 6,000 deaths a day from Omicron. But Johnson desisted, spooked by Frost’s resignation and the backbench rebellion. Rishi Sunak also did his best to argue against further restrictions, as did the editor of The Spectator, Fraser Nelson, courtesy of a remarkable Twitter exchange with Graham Medley, the chair of the Sage modelling committee. 

The conversation, in which Medley was admirably candid, revealed the narrowness of the Sage modelling. As Nelson wrote the admissions of Medley ‘raises serious questions not just about Sage but about the nature and quality of the advice used to make UK lockdown decisions’. 

The exchange made the national news. As the Daily Telegraph reported, Sage’s modelling ‘is so unaccountable, inherently pessimistic and predisposed towards the destruction of liberty’. In one glorious week the scales fell from the eyes of the British public; it was the week in which the country – to paraphrase Frost – learned to live with Covid.  As

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