Open letter to mainstream newspaper editors and journalists re: COVID-19
Dear Sirs,
I am writing to you as a concerned citizen regarding your pivotal role in informing the nation, and setting the public mood, regarding the coronavirus situation.
For the past 18 months, the national consciousness has been bombarded with a relentless onslaught of highly emotive news articles and television broadcasts, designed to invoke a) fear (that there is a highly virulent and dangerous pathogen that could spell agonising and untimely death for oneself and/or loved ones) and b) compliance (that the only way to mitigate this threat is to comply to a vast array of, sometimes arbitrary and often draconian, rules and restrictions, undemocratically imposed by the UK Government and related bodies).
Clearly, without the complicity of the media, the Government would have found it impossible to engender such an unprecedented and sustained level of fear and compliance in the population, so I write to you today to ask you to take the time to consider the wide body of scientific evidence available - including and especially the harms to health and life that have resulted from the Government's unilateral impositions - and whether this is an agenda your newspaper wishes to continue to support and promote.
In the first instance, this week, the UK Government is in receipt of an open letter signed by 133 doctors, nurses, and other allied healthcare professionals, including top surgeons and NHS consultants, challenging the Governmental handling of the coronavirus situation. Please take the time to carefully read this letter in full at the link.
In this letter, the signatories state that ministers have:
- Failed to engage in dialogue and show no signs of doing so. [Ministers] have removed from people fundamental rights and altered the fabric of society with little debate in Parliament. No minister responsible for policy has ever appeared in a proper debate with anyone with opposing views on any mainstream media channel.
- Despite being aware of alternative medical and scientific viewpoints, [ministers] have failed to ensure an open and full discussion of the pros and cons of alternative ways of managing the pandemic.
- The pandemic response policies implemented have caused massive, permanent and unnecessary harm to our nation, and must never be repeated.
The letter goes on to extensively detail the catastrophic mismanagement by the UK Government of the coronavirus situation, whereby ministers and their advisors have:
*Failed to evaluate the harms done by lockdown restrictions;
*Dismissed the clearly institutional nature of COVID-19 (e.g. that serious illness in healthy people under 70 is exceptionally rare, and it is overwhelmingly a condition confined to care homes and hospitals);
*Dramatically exaggerated the severity of the threat;
*Suppressed discussion of effective treatment protocols being successfully deployed elsewhere;
*Misunderstood the nature of asymptomatic transmission and used this to promote public compliance with restrictions;
*Relied too heavily on data modelling whilst ignoring real world data;
*Inappropriately and unethically used behavioural science to generate unwarranted fear.
I am writing to you because the Government could not successfully have achieved any of the above, in particular the final point, without being fully enabled and abetted by the media.
The job of a free press in a national emergency, where all the normal processes of democracy and parliamentary due process have been suspended, is not to act as propaganda vehicles for the Governmental agenda. On the contrary: it is to scrutinise the Government at every turn and hold ministers to account. Never in our lifetimes has this been a more imperative job of journalists and editors - many of whom entered the profession specifically in order to expose corruption and demand accountability from powerful authorities.
I am afraid to say that, since March 2020, I have been, and remain, deeply dismayed at how profoundly the press is failing in its obligations in this regard - with a few notable exceptions, such as Peter Hitchens for the Mail on Sunday, and also The Telegraph newspaper, which has published some excellent and rigorous journalism regarding the inadequacies and harms of lockdown restrictions and mask and vaccine mandates.
However, overall, the 'free' press is functioning merely as the public relations department for the UK Government and SAGE, by keeping the population in a permanent state of fear, which is both inappropriate, based on the actual threat level from the virus, and unethical, for reasons that should be obvious - namely, that intentionally keeping a population in a sustained state of terror is immoral and destructive. "Intentionally keeping a population in a sustained state of terror" has another, more succinct term to describe it - terrorism.
I am writing to you now to ask you to explore all the data available, and fully consult your own consciences, and make the decision as to whether the promotion of permanent fear and the enforcement of anti-democratic compliance to Governmental diktats, that have never passed through proper parliamentary scrutiny or been approved by the people, is an agenda your newspaper wishes to continue to promote.
I understand that there is an extremely large financial catalyst driving your current editorial policies, and I know that the UK Government has been the number one advertiser in the press for the past 18 months. I know that you are a business and money is your bottom line. However, whatever money the Government is contributing to your newspaper is not going to be enough to ensure your personal and familial insulation from the colossal harms that will result from the next lockdown, which all signs suggest will be imposed imminently.
You, and your family and loved ones, have to live in the same world as the rest of us, and when the schools shut down once again, disrupting your children's education and harming their future prospects; when young adult family members lose their jobs and are forced to move home; when small businesses all around us collapse; when those in the family with mental health problems lose their routine and relapse; when urgent medical care becomes delayed or withdrawn; when the food supply is disrupted and scarcity becomes the norm - this is going to affect all of us, journalists and editors most certainly included.
The kind of future you are currently complicit in creating is not one that you will want to live in any more than the rest of us, but, unlike the rest of us, you have the platform and the power to do something about it.
In effect, the media could bring an end to catastrophic lockdown restrictions and irrational and unethical fear-based behaviour modification policies overnight, by ceasing to publish sensationalist propaganda, and, instead, focusing on the facts - and why these have been so suppressed and misrepresented by the UK and worldwide governments.
I would like to see rigorous, real investigative journalism regarding:
*Why the PCR test is being used to inflate 'case' numbers, when it is known to have little clinical significance and does not confirm the presence of active infection, and when experts have already warned that it can create the false appearance of "epidemics" due to its over-sensitivity and myriad false positives - as reported by the New York Times in 2007
*Why, if 2020 marked a 'global pandemic', the death rates remained normal and the global population increased;
*Why newspapers have supported a mask mandate when the evidence overwhelmingly shows they do little or nothing to prevent the spread of viral infection but do come with a huge catalogue of risks;
*Why coronavirus patients are placed on ventilators, when whistleblowing medics have stated from the start these are "death-traps" and a completely inappropriate treatment, and a significant majority of ventilated patients do not survive;
*Why the mainstream media has paid so little attention to the midazolam scandal in care homes;
*Why the media has so aggressively promoted fast-tracked vaccinations that do not prevent either contraction or transmission of disease, whilst being dismissive of the risks of these injections, and demonising those who do not wish to receive them - even going so far as to support the idea of social exclusion based on vaccination status.
These are all areas that principled journalists and editors are pursuing in what is deemed the "alternative" media, but sadly, such journalists report when they approach mainstream channels with their findings, no matter how much solid and irrefutable evidence they provide, they are summarily dismissed.
Please take the time to consider the content of this letter very carefully, and use it to guide your future editorial policies. It is not hyperbole to state that the future of this country is in your hands, as the Government cannot spread its fear-based agenda nor enforce its anti-democratic, unethical and harmful restrictions without your compliance in promoting this message to the people. Please choose very carefully how you would like to proceed, as, once more democratic rights and civil liberties are taken away form us, history clearly dictates they are not easily given back.
The future is in your hands. Please use this colossal responsibility wisely.
Yours sincerely,
[Name]
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If it makes my friends in England feel any better, the U.S. is experiencing this exact same thing. In my city, we are politely refusing to wear the masks that businesses are handing out. If they insist we wear them, we tell them we're happy to spend our money elsewhere and walk away. We haven't "social distanced" (a classic Orwellian oxymoron) forever, and rightly so, it turns out. Biden's adviser Scott Gottlieb was on video just weeks ago announcing that the six feet of "social distancing" was completely made up. And if required to show proof of vaccination to participate in various activities, we don't participate, and get legal help. A large number of nurses from Northern Kentucky's largest medical employer have let themselves be fired instead of being forced to take the vaccine, and they are now being represented in a class-action lawsuit. Hospitals can now change their signs from "Heroes Work Here" to "Heroes Fired Here". We stay aware of the dangers posed by the virus, but even more aware of the dangers of the mitigations and the media dishonesty. Finally, we don't look to the U.S. Government to save our lives. The U.S. Government can't even save money.