Mark Dolan: Matt Hancock's vaccine remarks are rank hypocrisy

1Just when you thought it was safe to go out, prize numpty Matt Hancock reappears in today's mail on Sunday with an article about vaccines.

The disgraced former health secretary, captured on CCTV in an intimate clinch with an aide, is clearly trying to wrestle his way back to public life, in the same way he wrestled that lady’s tonsils. In this article, he says, and I quote, “in all my time in public life, I have never come across a group so blinkered and dangerous as anti-vaxxers”.

Well I think he could give them a run for their money. Why is he piping up now, having resigned in humiliation, after flagrantly breaking the rules, he ruthlessly inflicted on the rest of us.

After three national lockdowns, incalculable economic and societal damage, a spiralling non-Covid death toll and a year and a half of our lives we’ll never get back, the one thing we don’t want back is him. If I were the architect of this hell, I would be keeping a low profile.

This is the health secretary who collaborated with behavioural scientists to scare the bejesus out of us for the last 18 months, implying Covid was the bubonic plague rather than yes a nasty virus, and highly infectious, but one non-fatal to the vast majority of the population.

We’ve had a raft of Covid measures at this man’s behest, that are scientifically debatable, but whose damage is clear. Matt Hancock was a cheerleader for the mask mandate for example, even though Professor Carl Henegan of Oxford University says they are “not evidence based” and Dr Colin Axon, former SAGE advisor told Dan Wootton on this network, that they are a comfort blanket at best.

And he told the Telegraph newspaper “the best thing you can say about any mask, is that any positive effect they do have, is too small to be measured."

And what about lockdowns? The University of Bristol have predicted that creating the biggest recession in 300 years will claim half a million lives, as a result of the economic damage. All of this is on the PM, on Whitty and Valance and yes, on the man considered to be the biggest lockdown hawk in cabinet, Matt Hancock.

Notice the stark change of tone and strategy with his replacement Sajid Javid, known as The Saj. Frankly he's not just the Saj, he's the sage, with an opening statement to the Commons on day one of the job, saying we must learn to live with this virus.

Boris Johnson's former advisor Tim Montgomery told me on this programme that Boris’s belated lockdown scepticism and enthusiasm for personal liberty, can be credited to the Saj himself. It was of course on Sajid Javid's watch as Health Secretary that we went ahead with Freedom Day on the 19th of July.

Would Matt Hancock have sanctioned a move, described by some at the time as reckless, you tell me. But I have my doubts. Would we be gearing up for future restrictions if he were still in post? I suspect we would.

I share the view of Professor Jay Bhattacharya, one of the most respected medics on the planet, head of medicine at the world renowned Stanford University in California, who says lockdowns have been the biggest public health mistake in history. In this country the face of that policy was Matt Hancock, so forgive me for not wanting to see it again.

I'm pro vaccine and I've had the jab, but how dare he guilt trip and vilify those who choose not to have it. Especially when take-up has been so high.

And how typically anti-science for him to ignore the capacious immunity among healthy people, that getting Covid and recovering from it actually brings. But that would interfere with the bullying, fear-drenched narrative. Now I think the whole government, including the PM, will be accountable for the damaging measures that we have seen in the last year and a half, the case for which crumbles every day.

The data is now there for countries that locked down hard and others that didn't, with eerily similar outcomes. As far as I'm concerned, this former health secretary, whose policies have led in part to an NHS waiting list of twelve million people, was a disaster for the nation's health. Based upon that infamous CCTV footage, his new girlfriend clearly loves the front of his face. Well I’d like to see the back of it.