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.

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. And we now know (as some suspected at the time) that lockdown may have had a seriously deleterious effect upon our immune systems. But to have articulated any of these things at the time was to get yourself into trouble. So they remained unsayable within polite company and thus got pushed to the fringe, where they grew the comedy heads and tails of a conspiracy theory. Even so, the doubters were right and the mainstream media, especially the BBC, were quite wrong.

Another thing Hancock got wrong, incidentally, was to suggest that smoking tobacco increased the danger from the disease. A couple of weeks after he uttered this nonsense, French doctors were using nicotine patches on Covid sufferers and a whole bunch of reports came out indicating that smokers were far less likely to catch the disease. Never got much play in the media, that one.

Fast-forward three years, and I see that GB News has just been clobbered by Ofcom for allowing the kind of post-feminist feminist writer Naomi Wolf to say that the rollout of Covid vaccines was equivalent to, er, mass murder. Part of Ofcom’s adjudication reads: ‘It is important to stress that in line with the right to freedom of expression broadcasters are free to transmit programmes that include controversial and challenging views, including about Covid-19 vaccines or conspiracy theories. However, alongside this editorial freedom, the Broadcasting Code imposes a clear requirement that if such content has the potential to be harmful, the broadcaster must ensure that its audience is adequately protected.’

This is cant, I think, if a very fashionable form of cant. You can say what you like on air, boys and girls, but not if it has ‘the potential to be harmful’. And who decides what is ‘harmful’, and how can the audience be protected, other than by telling them that Naomi Wolf is wrong?

This kind of dissembling, of course, infests the Online Safety Bill: you can say what you want so long as it isn’t ‘harmful’. Surely it is enough for the audience to understand that the views being stated are from a woman with not even the remotest scintilla of scientific training. In other words, it is her opinion and she is no expert. Most human beings are able to grasp that, I’d suggest – and we should not adjudicate on the basis that six or seven cretins are incapable of discerning between opinion and fact.

Likewise with the former Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, who quoted an unnamed doctor’s claim that the vaccine rollout was ‘the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust’. Yes, it’s only Bridgen: ergo we will not take his word for it. Both Bridgen and Wolf conjured up, to support their suppositions, that controversial Austrian politician Adolf Hitler – Bridgen in his stupid use of the word ‘Holocaust’ and Wolf in likening the rollout to what would happened in ‘pre-Nazi Germany’ (which I assume was a slip of the tongue and she didn’t really mean to blame the Weimar Republic).

We should be wary of persecuting these people, though. Their claims become more and more wild because entirely legitimate concerns are ignored or stamped down upon by institutions such as Ofcom and Conservative Central Office. We now know that there are many unpleasant side effects to the various Covid vaccines, including myocarditis and pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, anaphylaxis, thromboembolic effects and blood clots. More, I daresay, will be discovered later.

I am sure it is the case that, as most of the experts aver, these side effects are very, very, rare – five to 16 cases per million when it comes to blood clots, for example. And that, as a corollary, the world was made safer as a consequence of the rollout. Perhaps: but that is the world, not the individual.

More to the point is the necessity of challenging consensus wherever it exists. An awful lot of what was once the Covid consensus has been proved to be tripe. We should not silence those who would challenge the rest of it.