It’s four years since 11 March, 2020 when the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic and with the media awash with a dodgy photoshopped happy snap of Catherine, Princess of Wales, and the youngest heirs to the throne, the main thing we have learned is that the difference between a conspiracy theory and mainstream media is now down to about 24 hours.

Fears for Kate’s well-being have been aired on social media ever since Kensington Palace announced in mid-January that she would be undergoing abdominal surgery and would not make a public appearance until after Easter.

Since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Kate and her beautiful brood are the most popular royals in the House of Windsor, so three months out of the public eye is a long time. Coupled with King Charles being treated for an undisclosed cancer, a pall of ill-health was cast over the world’s most famous family. Moreover, unlike the King, no details were given about Kate’s condition. The Palace simply hoped the public would respect her wish for privacy.

Given that the Princess is a fit mother of 42, the mystery operation and long recuperation were bound to prompt anxiety. Last Sunday, to quell those fears, Kate posted a photo of herself and her three children taken by Prince William and wished everyone a happy (UK) Mother’s Day.

Yet instead of reassuring the public, sharp-eyed observers on social media immediately started identifying what eventually added up to at least sixteen problems with the photo which showed that it had been manipulated.

In less than 24 hours, six of the world’s leading news agencies had pulled the photo from their wires and libraries due to fears that the ‘source has manipulated the image’.

On Monday morning the UK Telegraph ran with a front page splash that read, ‘Photo from Palace was doctored, say agencies’.

A stony silence emanated from the Palace which had previously said, ‘We’ve seen the madness of social media and that is not going to change our strategy’.

On Tuesday however, a contrite statement was posted on the royal social media account from Kate saying, ‘Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing’ and apologising ‘for any confusion’ the family photograph had caused.

The true confession triggered hilarious memes. One showed a scene from the TV comedy Little Britain in which MP Sir Norman Fry (David Walliams) accompanied by mortified wife (Matt Lucas) and two children apologises outside his house for falling on top of a young Rastafarian gentleman and accidentally entering a part of his body. The caption read, ‘It was at that point that I inadvertently found myself on… Adobe photoshop’ #KateMiddleton.

Others had a go at photoshopping the picture, one putting Paddington bear on Kate’s lap, another substituting Kate with Bernie Sanders in a face mask, his legs crossed on top of hers and his signature woollen gloves on four hands cuddling the children.

The notion that the convalescing Princess photoshopped her picture provoked guffaws of disbelief. ‘So you expect me to believe our post-op Princess was up all night… editing her own photographs?’ asked one. ‘They have 60 staff members and Kate who is recovering from major abdominal surgery is doing the photoshopping of a photo William took’ asked another. ‘Why is their PR team making Kate the scapegoat?’, asked a third.

The fear that dare not speak its name outside of social media is that Kate’s health, like that of King Charles, might have been compromised by a Covid vaccine. Last month, the Centre for Health Security and the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out a ‘Practical playbook for addressing health misinformation’ ‘to help public health and medical professionals… understand when to step in and what actions to take to address rumours and misinformation related to public health issues’.

Yet the CDC also released a 148-page study on Covid vaccine-induced myocarditis, in response to a Freedom of Information request from the Epoch Times, in which every page had been redacted. Why? To protect the guilty?

The Epoch Times also published a memo from Dr Matthew Memoli, director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases Clinical Studies Unit at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in which he warned Dr Fauci, then NIAID’s director and chief medical adviser to US President Biden, that ‘forcing people to take a vaccine can have negative consequences from a biological, sociological, psychological, economical, and ethical standpoint and is not worth the cost even if the vaccine is 100 per cent safe’. Memoli wrote that, ‘a more prudent approach… would be to focus our efforts on those at high risk of severe disease and death, such as the elderly and obese, and… not push vaccination on the young and healthy any further’. Memoli also warned that the Covid vaccines could cause serious (potentially fatal) side effects such as myocarditis, that vaccinated people could spread Covid, and the vaccines were flawed because they relied on a single antigen, inducing immunity that lasted for only a short time, and when it waned, the virus could evolve, in the worst case prolonging the pandemic and causing more sickness and death. Memoli sought a vaccine exemption which apparently wasn’t granted, but at least he held on to his job.

Swedish-born Martin Kulldorf, who was a professor of medicine at Harvard was not so lucky. He wrote in the City Journal this week of how he supported Sweden’s anti-lockdown policies and was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration which called for protection of the elderly while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives. He also spoke out stating that as expected, Covid-acquired immunity is superior to vaccine-acquired immunity. For his courage, he was censored on Twitter at the request of the US government, his request for a vaccine mandate was denied, and he lost his professorship at Harvard, whose motto, ironically, is Veritas, truth.

The point about Kategate is that it is emblematic of the loss of trust in institutions that is the inevitable toll of the dishonest way in which the last four years of pandemic have unfolded. Kate is not Tiffany Dover, the pretty nurse from Chattanooga, Tennessee who was vaccinated with the Pfizer Covid jab on live TV in December 2020, clutched her forehead, collapsed, and then vanished.

The Princess will reappear, hopefully restored to good health. Our trust will take longer to return.