Mark Dolan: To say the media have lied about Covid is a bit strong, but they have not provided the full picture

A major new study, confirms that PCR tests are horribly inaccurate. There's a surprise.

According to researchers at the University of Oxford, if you’ve heard of it, a third of people who tested positive for coronavirus via PCR tests, were not contagious and did not need to self-isolate.

The study found, that many laboratories are setting, the positivity bar very low, meaning they're picking up people, who are - quotes - “a danger to no one”.

This follows a change in focus, halfway through the pandemic in relation to hand sanitising.

Do you remember our blistered skin, in March 2020?

Sing happy birthday twice, as you wash your hands? After which a couple of scientists with half a brain cell, pointed out that the virus is transmitted through the air, via aerosols. No sugar Sherlock.

How about this one.

A report came out in August of last year, suggesting those environmentally catastrophic Perspex screens you see in shops, offices and on TV, may make matters worse.

The Environmental Modelling Group, a panel of 16 SAGE experts, said “There is some epidemiological and mechanistic evidence, that suggests screens could increase risks of aerosol transmission, due to blocking/changing airflow patterns or creating zones of poor air circulation behind screens.

Well done everyone. What about cloth face masks, that we've been ordered to wear at such environmental, societal and economic cost?

Lockdown loving CNN's chief medical reporter just last month said do not wear a cloth mask they are facial furniture.

Cloth masks, and those plasticky blue surgical masks, which are not accepted in Austria and Germany make up the vast majority of the masks we have been wearing in this country.

Even where countries have demanded better N95 masks like Austria, cases have sky rocketed nonetheless.

What happened to follow the science? What about vaccine passports? We're saving lives aren't we?

Except that cases have continued to soar in countries that have implemented these divisive measures, which link your medical status to certain basic rights, freedoms and privileges, including in particular in France and Italy.

But also closer to home here in Wales and Scotland. What about closing nightclubs?

The Welsh first Minister Mark Drakeford, who likes a boogie himself was able to demonstrate no evidence that closing nightclubs would have an impact on spread.

Evidence-based policy, along with free speech and common sense, has been another casualty of the pandemic. And what about lockdowns themselves?

Two years in which we have incarcerated the healthy, stopped people from going out to work and making a living, closed once viable businesses, wrecked mental health and ignored worse diseases like cancer.

The Telegraph are reporting that up to 87,000 cancer diagnoses may have been missed. And the rest.

If you think Covid is worse than cancer, there is something wrong with you.

But that’s been the message of the pandemic response.

If it’s not Covid, they don’t care is something I’ve heard from so many of you over the last two years.

The famously deadly disease of cancer, that affects all age groups, has been relegated in importance for two years, with tragic consequences that will be with us for years to come, with cases like young mothers who didn’t get that lump checked or weren’t able to. Well done everyone.

There will be a day of reckoning, for what Professor Jay Bhattacharya one of the most respected medics in the world has called the biggest public-health mistake in history. He's being polite.

In my view, it was the mother of all cock ups.

So who’s to blame?

Well, weak politicians who panicked in March 2020 and discarded decades of pandemic planning.

Something to which Sweden stuck to. Sweden have seen a fraction of the economic damage, the societal damage and have had fewer per capita deaths than so many countries that locked down hard.

I blame the modellers like the randy professor, professor pants down himself Neil Ferguson, who predicted half a million deaths at the start of the pandemic, which spooked ministers into taking this ruinous path.

Some government scientific advisors predicted 6000 deaths a day if we didn't cancel Christmas.

It was clear at that point from South Africa that omicron was milder than a Last Of The Summer Wine cast reunion.

I blame Sage, who failed to equate economic damage with death.

The University of Bristol have told me that half a million people will die as a result of creating the biggest recession in 300 years. And what about wrecked lives?

It's a question no one has ever been able to answer me. Why is it okay to wreck lives? Of course, it isn’t. But wreck them we did. And it's most reprehensible when you think of the needless impact on young people and children, who face vanishing threats from the virus. So who else do I blame?

Well I blame the media. I won’t call them the mainstream media, because we are mainstream too baby.

Our numbers are growing like wildfire.

Over 4 billion people have watched on digital since we started and I'm personally normally beating Sky News. Tell your friends, tell your family, spread the word and let's change the world together.

But I blame the media for offering just one narrative. Lockdowns work, masks work and absolutely everybody's got to have the vaccine.

Now these views are valid, arguably the majority of people and perhaps most scientific professionals think exactly that. No problem. Let's hope you're right, because that's the hell you’ve put us through.

As data comes in from around the world, based upon different approaches, with no obvious difference from where I'm standing, I have my doubts. But remember those press conferences – the Beeb, Sky, ITV – why are we not locking down longer, tougher, harder?

By offering such one-sided coverage of the pandemic, by betting everything on the words of SAGE, and freezing out other scientific voices like Sunetra Guptha, Carl Henegan, Martin Kulldorf and Jay Bhattacharia, the media let us down.

To say that the media have lied to you is a bit strong. But they have not provided the full picture.

And any lawyer will tell you concealing information, is tantamount, in its own way, to an untruth.

Shall we be polite and just call it government propaganda. I think that'll do.

I shouldn't name names, but I will. The Mail and the Telegraph are the only papers I can think of that have consistently balanced their reporting and have dared to offer a critique about these debatable lockdowns.

The Guardian is a paper I've always admired and read every day.

But where was their coverage of the Johns Hopkins University report, a meta analysis of 24 studies into lockdown, suggesting the measures saved 0.2% of lives, whilst of course exacting colossal harm.

Not peer reviewed and the study has been done by economists, but worth reporting?

I’d say so.

Poor people have especially been impacted by the measures, I would've thought the left leaning Guardian would care about that.

In the end I think the media have got this wrong – they’ve backed the wrong horse and they are on the wrong side of history.

So there will be a day of reckoning, for their one-sided coverage. But will we ever get an admission of guilt, or dare I say it, an apology? I doubt it.

There will be no contrition. And for all of those well paid and high profile figures in the media – we know who they are – the relentless cheerleaders for these disastrous and in my view failed measures, sorry seems to be the hardest word.