Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Much of the Covid consensus has been proved to be tripe

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Three years ago this week marked my first misgivings about the government’s Covid lockdown. Sure, I was late to that particular party – my wife, for example, had been carping viciously for the previous two months. But my rational assessment of lockdown was perhaps tilted by the gentle, bucolic magic of the thing itself.

I think I have never enjoyed a more pleasant time. The weather was beautiful, and out in the Kent countryside, where I then lived, one could enjoy it to its full. Wildlife was less shy than usual, perhaps a consequence of the state-imposed quietude. Occasionally city dwellers would infest our country lanes and I had great pleasure in yelling at them to return to their filthy tenements, taking their vile diseases with them.

We shouldn’t adjudicate on the basis that a few cretins are incapable of discerning between opinion and fact

There was a pleasure, too, in the Ballardian scenes at the local supermarket, as the chavs wheeled out their thousands of loo rolls and sacks of pasta. And at the local farm shop, a couple of assistants wore plastic bags over their shoes because of a theory then prevalent that the virus was heavy, fell to the floor with a kind of awkward clunking sound and then got picked up inadvertently by the nearest pair of Nikes. It was, I would concede, a time of government-enforced mass idiocy and I enjoyed it immensely.

A very large amount of what we were told by Chris Whitty, often via that glistening receptacle of wisdom Matt Hancock, was quite quickly proven to be false. Masks, for instance, were never of use for most people, as several studies have confirmed. It was almost impossible to pick up the virus from a surface, such as a shop counter, so the hand gel was also pointless.

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