Panic saw 100 years of evidence-based pandemic response programs junked as superstition-driven diktat took over in the wish to be seen to be doing something. Britain’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said on 13 March 2020, ‘If you locked down absolutely everything, probably for a period of four months or more, then you would suppress the virus. But when you do that and then release it, it all comes back again.’ That’s what has happened here. Covid is now endemic. It will circulate throughout the world and keep returning with mutating variants. People who have been infected and/or vaccinated can contract and transmit it. We have little choice but to learn to live with it. What’s important is to make sure the right policy lessons are learnt so that never again, neither for a novel coronavirus nor for any other infections disease, do we go down the path of public policy insanity to lock up the whole country and give total power and control to sociopaths and psychopaths.

Fear was instrumentalised to terrify citizens. A 2021 Yale study concluded that public health messaging was effective in shaming and embarrassing people into getting vaccinated both to protect themselves and in the belief this would also expedite the date for the entire community to be released from all restrictions. Yet vaccines were tested for reducing the likelihood of infection leading to serious illness and death, not for protecting against infection and transmission. Robert Blumen notes: ‘Covid injections were a treatment, not a vaccine’. Manufacturers and health authorities ignored the more troublesome concepts of absolute risk reduction and numbers needed to vaccinate. Instead, they concentrated on weaponising the relative risk reduction of 95 per cent so that people were misled into believing it meant 95 per cent protection against infection, rather than a 95 per cent reduction in the risk of those infected to progress to severe disease. There would never have been the widespread public backing for vaxports if people had not been misled into exaggerating the threat from Covid by several factorfold and mistaking relative for absolute risk reduction. This led them into the false belief that mass vaccination would end the pandemic and the unvaccinated were prolonging that day of release. The brainwashing was so effective that to this day many insist that Novak Djokovic has been protected from Covid by the high rate of vaccination.

The Covid policy house of cards has been tumbling down during the month I was in India. The explosive lockdown files in the UK have blown apart the official narrative and confirmed that we the sceptics were right in our dark suspicions of the motives, scientific basis and evidence behind government decisions. Yet, even we did not fully grasp just how venal, evil and utterly contemptuous of their citizens those in charge of our health, lives, livelihoods and children’s future were. Many suspicions voiced by sceptics from early 2020 onwards and mocked as conspiracy theories have turned into plausible claims and even accepted facts The virus might have originated in the Wuhan laboratory after all. Dodgy Covid modelling dressed up outliers as reasonable case scenarios. Lockdowns failed to stop the spread and eradicate the virus. They increased non-Covid deaths and caused other grave harms. School closures did not curb transmission but did cause long-term harm to children’s education, development and emotional wellbeing. Masks stopped neither infection nor transmission. Infection confers natural immunity. Covid vaccines do not stop infection, hospitalisation, death or transmission. The safety of vaccines using new technology had not been definitively established for the short- or long-term. Vaccine harms are real and substantial yet safety signals have been summarily dismissed and ignored. mRNA vaccines are not confined to the arm but spread rapidly to other parts, including reproductive organs, with worrying consequences for fertility and births. The harm-benefit equation of vaccines is, like the disease burden itself, steeply age-differentiated. Healthy young people do not need initial or booster doses. Vaccination mandates don’t increase vaccine take-up but can fuel cross-vaccine hesitancy. Suppression of sceptical and dissenting voices lessen trust in public health officials, experts, institutions and scientists. Estimates of ‘long Covid’ were inflated (CDC estimate of 20 per cent of Covid infections against UK study’s estimate of three) by using generalised, non-specific symptoms like mild fatigue and weakness.

Health policy interventions involve policy trade-offs just like all other policy choices. Cost-benefit analysis is therefore an essential prerequisite, not an optional add-on.

Regulators seem to have become vaccine enablers, more committed to defend vaccines from criticism than protect people from harm. Germany’s Die Welt became the first major mainstream publication to report on the allegations of fraud in Pfizer’s clinical trials. Participants who suffered adverse events were unblinded and removed and the death of Pfizer subjects was covered up. The New York Times has taken the European Commission to court over President Ursula von der Leyen’s refusal to release her text messages with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in which she personally negotiated the purchase of up to 1.8 billion doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. On 15 February, Florida issued a health alert on mRNA Covid-19 vaccine safety. By now, the vast majority of Covid deaths in many countries are among the vaccinated and boosted. This proves conclusively the ineffectiveness of vaccines at the community level, demolishes the premise of vaccine mandates, but leaves open the possibility of net protective benefits for target groups like the elderly and people with serious underlying health issues.

The swirling propaganda notwithstanding, not every vaccinated person who died was killed by the vaccine; not every vaccinated person who didn’t die from a Covid infection lives because of the vaccine; not all unvaccinated to survive an infection owe their lives to being unjabbed. All such claims should be rigorously scrutinised and discussed with the increasing flow of data and a growing body of studies. The imperative need is to investigate the phenomenon of vaccine injuries and excess deaths. The refusal of governments to do so is exasperating but perhaps also very telling: never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer. The policy conclusions are to demand local clinical trials for new products and not rely on overseas results; end revenue dependence of regulators on the pharmaceutical industry; disclose financial links of regulators, doctors and researchers with Pharma; end legal indemnity for vaccine manufacturers; lift mandates in public settings; and prohibit companies from imposing them in most business settings, leaving it instead for people to make informed decisions in consultation with their doctors free from threats of sanctions.