BBC Created ‘Misleading’ Risk to Justify Covid Lockdown, Claims Former Government Adviser

A sign asking people to stay at home stands on the sea front in Southend, England on Jan. 08, 2021. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

The BBC created a “misleading” risk of COVID-19 to provide justification for lockdown during the pandemic, an adviser to the Scottish government has claimed.

Giving evidence to the UK COVID-19 Inquiry on Wednesday, Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said that the state broadcaster created a “misleading impression” of the risks of COVID-19 to the general population.

In a written statement, former SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) member Mr. Woolhouse said that in the media, “BBC television news repeatedly reported rare deaths or illnesses among healthy adults as if they were the norm, again creating a misleading impression of who was at greater or lesser risk.”

‘Misinformation’

“I consider that this applied to Scotland as it did to England,” he added.

He said that he suspected this “misinformation was allowed to stand throughout 2020 because it provided a justification for locking down the entire population.”

He said that this view was supported by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B), which was one of the sub-committees that advised SAGE, which was tasked with advising the government about how to maximise the impact of its pandemic communications strategy.

He noted that an SPI-B briefing dated March 22, 2020, said that “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group ... the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”

Last year, SPI-B member, a longstanding member of the Communist Party and director of the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, Susan Michie, told The Epoch Times that it “is inaccurate and defamatory to claim that we advised to exaggerate the risk.”

Mr. Woolhouse said the “misperception” created by the BBC’s coverage was that “the general impression that we were all at risk.”

He said that this was a “misperception likely to be shared by policymakers too—was a barrier to targeting interventions at the vulnerable minority who truly were at high risk from COVID-19.”

“I fear that the Scottish government’s pandemic response was compromised as a result,” he added.

Mr. Woolhouse argues that the country incorrectly made excessively stringent restrictions instead of a “middle ground.”

“Regrettably, the middle ground combining protection and suppression in the knowledge that the better you did one the less you would need the other — was effectively abandoned throughout the pandemic, and not only in Scotland. In my view, this resulted both in avoidable deaths and unnecessary and overly prolonged lockdowns,” he said.

He added that supporting lockdown in 2020—2021 became what has been described as “a test of virtue.”

“This attitude was prevalent within the scientific community as well as in wider society. It made it exceptionally difficult to have a reasoned and objective debate about alternatives to lockdown, even among scientists,” he said.

Profound Sense of Fear

Molly Kingsley, co-founder of UsforThem, told The Epoch Times it was “bittersweet” to hear the comments now.

Set up in May 2020, UsForThem campaigned for the UK government to discontinue the use of masks for children and adults in school settings and evidenced the harm of lockdowns on kids.

“It’s bittersweet to hear this now as that messaging never made it’s way to the BBC and authorities,” she said.

“Interventions were rolled out on the basis of that messaging, the whole idea we needed to stay in this very long lockdown with school closures and obviously also the vaccine rollout. And the government used this very profound sense of fear to roll out the vaccine under emergency use authorisation,” she said.

“We have to start asking what this means in terms of informed consent,” she added.

The Epoch Times contacted the BBC for comment.