It’s not much satisfaction to keep on learning just how right we were, all along, about the Covid pandemic. Whether it’s the worse-than-uselessness of lockdowns and mask mandates, or the endless lies about the Covid vaccines, the schadenfreude of being right when the worst bullies in the world were wrong, wrong, and wrong again, is little real satisfaction, compared to the sheer monstrousness of what they got away with.
And what they’re still doing.
While we’re still being hectored, bullied and smeared about “misinformation” and “scaremongering”, we’re learning just how much the people doing the finger-pointing were the ones really peddling misinformation and scaremongering.
The UK’s former Health Secretary plotted to “deploy the new variant” of Covid-19 to “frighten the pants off everyone” into complying with lockdown, leaked text messages show.
From the very beginnings of the pandemic, it was obvious to anyone who wasn’t glued to Jacinda Ardern’s daily podium of lies that, while the threat of the virus was cause enough for concern, it was being unconscionably misused by the powerful to maximise their power further and suppress legitimate questions.
The damning messages between Matt Hancock and media adviser Damon Poole in the run-up to Christmas 2020 show the behind-the-scenes planning to use “Project Fear” to prepare the British public for another Covid lockdown.
They are part of a massive trove of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages obtained by the UK’s Telegraph, dubbed the Lockdown Files, showing how government ministers and officials used scare tactics to force compliance at the height of the pandemic.
Scare tactics such as, for instance, claiming that 80,000 New Zealanders would die? That even in a best-case scenario, 7,000 a year would die? (Less than 4,000 have died, even on the over-generous “with Covid” reckoning, in the entire three years of the pandemic.) That even a “gust of wind” would be enough to transmit the virus?
“We frighten the pants of [sic] everyone with the new strain,” Hancock agreed […]
One week after those messages, Hancock did the rounds of national TV to spread the message. “The new variant is out of control and we need to bring it under control,” he told the BBC.
Remember: the Branch Covidians were indignantly adamant that they weren’t deliberately fear-mongering in order to force compliance with heavy-handed mandates. Matt Hancock’s own department dubbed such claims as dangerous misinformation.
But the devastating leak of Hancock’s messages in the Lockdown Files has revealed UK officials explicitly plotting to do just that.
In one conversation during the third national lockdown in January 2021, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case said the “the fear/guilt factor” would be “vital” in “ramping up the messaging”.
The Lockdown Files have exposed the barefaced lie that it was all about “The Science”. It was political, all the way.
And they didn’t even believe their own bullshit: Hancock, like Professor Wrongo Neil Ferguson, and New Zealand’s own do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do hypocrites like Siouxsie Wiles and David Clark, was caught breaking his own lockdown rules. To shag an aide.
Apparently, it was all quite the hoot for the lying control freaks.
In one set of messages, Case and Hancock mocked members of the public who were forced to isolate in “shoebox” quarantine hotels.
“I just want to see some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a premier inn shoebox,” Case wrote. “Any idea how many people we locked up in hotels yesterday?”
Hancock replied, “None. But 149 chose to enter the country and are now in Quarantine Hotels due to their own free will!”
“Hilarious,” Case wrote back.
As “hilarious” as the nomenklatura might have found it, for everyone else, from the people forced to fork out thousands on useless hotel quarantine, to the industries devastated by lockdowns, to the generation of children whose future prospects have been perhaps irreparably damaged, it was far from a laughing matter.
“My mate who had to spend two grand to be locked in a s**t hotel room in Heathrow for ten days so he could get home to see his terminally ill father before he died did not find this anywhere near as hilarious as Case and Hancock did,” wrote digital consultant Sharon O’Dea.
“Hotel quarantine was disastrous for families who paid thousands, those with disabilities and the travel industry. Plus it was found to do sod all in stopping Covid spread. Good that [Matt Hancock] and Simon Case thought it was a jolly old laugh then,” said The Times journalist Ben Clatworthy.
Former NHS surgeon Dr Anthony Hinton wrote, “Look at the date. Remember the Kent variant — that’s why I got locked down in Switzerland having arrived from UK. All just made up theatre. These people should be in prison.”
NZ Herald
In prison? They’re not even apologising. Instead, Hancock is trying to put on the high dudgeon act, claiming, “There is absolutely no public interest case for this huge breach”.
Sounds like another Covid hypocrite we all know.