We lockdown sceptics are, increasingly, accused by the mainstream media and our political leaders of having “blood on our hands.” By lockdown sceptics, I refer not to lunatics such as Piers Corbyn who claim that Covid does not exist, but those of us who ask questions about government policies which are illogical and, in many cases, do more harm than good. Demonstrably, some aspects of lockdown mean that government ministers like Matt Hancock, egged on by the entire political and almost all of the media class, do, quite literally, have blood on their hands. Take the case of 23-year-old Kimberley Eccles.
She had three NHS appointments missed in the first half of last year when we are repeatedly told that hospitals were less crowded than they are now. So there was spare capacity but, “to protect the NHS”, appointments and operations were cancelled. By August 2020 it was too late and over zoom, doctors told this mother of one that she had six months to live.
Kimberley is having surgery this week to tackle her rare form of cancer, Rhabdomyosarcoma, but sadly this is a long shot and her chances of survival are just 1%.
And Kimberley is not alone. Across the country, folks have missed cancer tests and scans and so will be dying in 2021 when they should not be. Folks will discover that their heart disease is now too advanced to be reversed, that the cancer they did not know they had because of a missed test has spread. The list goes on and on. Many of the skipped appointments were in months during 2020 when covid cases were relatively low. That the NHS is coping now with more case numbers than at the 2019 peak suggests there was always capacity to do those tests, to treat those folks like Kimberley. But that did not happen because Hancock, Mark Drakeford, Piers Morgan and the lot of them said that we had to protect the NHS.
I spoke to someone today, probably reading this, who was due to have heart surgery next month. But he will not. And he is not being told when he may be operated on though the Government insists that Covid patient numbers will fall from next month thanks to lockdown which seems, for the first time, to have worked. It is nothing whatsoever to do with herd immunity kicking in.
There is a nasty trait among Tory MPs, notably the wretched Simon Hoare and, arse-licker of the year, Neil O’Brien to spend hours online searching past tweets by lockdown sceptics such as Toby Young or Laurence Fox and to then troll them with streams of abusive and hostile comments. Surely, as taxpayers, we must ask if it is really worth paying someone £77,000 a year to troll journalists who have the nerve to question government policy.
Folks like O’Brien really do seem to think that those of us in the 4th estate who question lockdown and challenge the Government have blood on our hands. It is a nasty smear. And one they might care to justify to poor Ms Eccles and my friend with his cancelled heart op. Really, is it we who have blood on our hands?