You wouldn’t have thought a talk about the welfare of our children was controversial. But it has turned out to be.
“There is a dangerous intolerant totalitarianism, aided by timidity, strangling debate in this country,” writes Professor Richard Ennos as he describes the disturbing cancellation of my proposed talk to parents.
The cancer of slowly killing free speech in Edinburgh and beyond continues, aggressively. Our event with Hugh McCarthy, a respected retired headteacher, and a former Director of Education of three Northern Ireland Learning Areas, someone who has presented directly to ministers, political party leaders and elected members, was refused several possible venues for the talk ‘What Are We Doing To Our Children?’ on grounds that were both spurious and unsettling.
“Anyone speaking out can be suppressed,” Prof. Ennos told Jeffrey Peel, adding that his group, Common Knowledge, has been denied venue after venue.
Censorship is, of course, rife. My cancellation demonstrates how far the tentacles of totalitarianism reach. And for me, it wasn’t the first time.
If you are proposing to vaccinate my child or grandchild, surely I am entitled to ask why, but doing so resulted in a ban from LinkedIn. And my attempts to obtain answers from the medical authorities fared no better, simply being ignored.
Similarly, if you are insisting that my child or grandchild wears a mask at school and on the bus for eight hours a day, I must be entitled to ask if you have carried out a risk-benefit assessment. But pointing this out and drawing attention to the potential damage to children resulted in me being silenced by the BBC, when the host closed the call despite me being an invited guest on his popular phone-in radio programme.
I further thought in a liberal democracy that I was allowed to ask questions such as, “What are we doing to our children?” Yet a talk on this topic in which I largely used Government data to highlight the adverse effects of Covid restrictions on children had to be given only to invitees and was subject to stringent security measures – and was then banned from YouTube for good measure.
The focus of my cancelled talk in Edinburgh was to be to present the evidence of the harms to children from restrictions while examining whether those harmful policies – masks, testing, isolation, school closures – actually worked. I was also to look at whether children were ever in danger from the virus or a danger to others, and therefore whether restrictions on them were necessary at all.
Arguably this is what any responsible society should be asking. And if the answers are ‘no’, somebody should be held responsible.
Apparently though, the Times, Telegraph, Express and others can say it, but I can’t.
Lockdown “damaged a generation“, the Telegraph reports former Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies saying. She told the Covid Inquiry of the “damage” lockdowns had done to children and that it was “awful” to see “these young people struggle”, according to the Express.
The Times reported similar comments from former Chancellor George Osborne, saying lockdown “harmed a generation of children”.
The Telegraph ran a further feature under the headline, ‘How lockdown broke a generation and no one seems to care’. It states: “New research has shown that lockdowns fuelled a staggering rise in teenage eating disorders – and this was not the only damage done.”
This is basically what I was going to say in Edinburgh. Why may they say it but I may not?
Should I be surprised, though, when world-leading scientists have suffered the same fate. Professor Norman Fenton explains how his status as a world expert “counted for nothing” and he became an “academic pariah” after his public criticism of Covid countermeasures such as lockdowns and vaccines. “Now no one is even prepared to review our papers let alone accept them,” he said. He is now “shunned by my academic colleagues”. ”Just having my name on a paper was enough to get it rejected.” His academic papers are now routinely being rejected, even by pre-print servers. Having been invited to speak at a major NHS event, the invitation was summarily withdrawn of the basis that he had questioned the efficacy of the vaccine.
The censorship has sometimes taken on an intimidatory tone as world-renowned scientists have been denigrated and subjected to threats. For example, the authors of the widely-endorsed Great Barrington Declaration were derided as “fringe scientists” by U.S. Government officials. Professor Sunetra Gupta in particular was subjected to intimidation and cancellation. I had offered her my support and complimented her on the roundtable discussion hosted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in which she participated. She replied: “The round table has been taken down by YouTube – very depressing.”
The Great Barrington Declaration itself and its three authors were subject to a Government-sponsored attack, as reported in STAT:
Emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Institute for Economic Research revealed worrisome communication between Director Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and others within the National Institutes of Health in the fall of 2020. At issue was the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter written in October 2020 and eventually signed by thousands of scientists. It argues that COVID-19 policy should focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable, and largely re-open society and school for others.
Collins’s response to the memo signed by thousands of scientists demonstrates a clear intention to silence. Collins wrote:
This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize-winner Mike Levitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.
The Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART) – a group of scientific and medical experts formed to present evidence around Covid policies – is similarly concerned about the suppression of freedom of speech and academic inquiry among scientists and other researchers. They write:
Once you are persona non grata for one of your beliefs, you become an ‘untouchable’. This culture of instant dismissal for an unpopular belief (regardless of whether it is accurate or not) has been exponentially rising in prominence in the last decade. It has led to a culture of self-censorship amplified by social media algorithms which merrily curate your timeline into a homogenous soup of unilateral agreement, obscuring anyone who may challenge your worldview.
Perhaps the biggest danger is indeed that we engage in self-censorship. The HART authors continue:
At heart is the realisation that it is not just a question of eradicating the physical act of censorship, as bad as it is. A much more insidious and evil practice seems to be rife, that of silencing a few outspoken people such that a larger minority choose to self-censor for reasons of self-preservation. The ‘official’ narrative… therefore prevails, unchecked.
Or as Professor Ennos puts it in his conversation with Jeffrey Peel: “There is incredible social stigma about being different – it takes a lot of courage, so we self-censor.”
Worryingly, some countries are taking censorship a stage further, starting to legislate directly against free speech. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, for example, currently being debated in the Irish Senate (having been passed by the lower house) has been described by the Free Speech Union’s Toby Young as a “draconian anti-free speech law”.
Finally, there is the growing absence of democratic accountability. I have written of the order of 200 emails to individual politicians in our political parties and to Government medical officials asking why we are vaccinating children, why children are masked and why schools were closed. Most recently I asked if medical facilities had displayed information explaining to patients the meaning of, and their rights under, informed consent rules.
Most do not even afford me the courtesy of an acknowledgement, let alone answers to my questions.
In a second article, the HART authors write:
So what is the truth, and who can speak it? While the answer to this question may not be clear-cut, one thing is absolutely crystal clear: if we are not allowed to talk about it, then it seems very unlikely that the mainstream narrative will resemble anything that is even remotely close to the truth. HART has more to say on this matter, and we intend to say it.
Read More: I Was Censored for Raising the Harms Lockdowns Have Done
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