The BBC failed to follow its own editorial standards during lockdown and instead misrepresented COVID in a way that justified tougher restrictions, a government advisor has claimed.
A submission last week by an eminent epidemiologist to the official UK Covid Inquiry caught the attention of many of those who feel that the government’s COVID response was disproportionate to the threat.
Professor Mark Woolhouse, who advised the Scottish government during the pandemic, told the Inquiry that Britain’s national leading broadcaster “repeatedly reported rare deaths or illnesses among healthy adults as if they were the norm.” He added that this helped to create the “misleading impression” that “we are all at risk” and “the virus does not discriminate.”
Lockdown sceptics are not alone in losing general interest in the official inquiry. They say it was set up simply to “prove” that tough restrictions ought to have been imposed even sooner and that it fails, say, to consider the impacts of lockdown on children. But Woolhouse’s contribution has undercut part of the government narrative.
The false claim that all people were at an equally huge risk of being harmed by COVID helped to justify measures such as school closures, the impacts of which will be suffered for many years to come.
Pointing to early reports that “hospitals were being overwhelmed during the first wave” while “overall hospital bed occupancy was at an all-time low during that period,” Woolhouse said:
I suspect this misinformation was allowed to stand throughout 2020 because it provided a justification for locking down the entire population. … Possibly, this kind of coverage was an attempt to back up government public health messaging; for example, the hugely misleading claim that “we are all at risk.”
Alan Miller, who co-founded the Together Declaration during the pandemic to campaign against the restriction of freedoms, said the BBC “mugged us all off.” Diagnostic pathologist and campaigner Dr. Clare Craig added: “Does BBC apologise? No.”
A spokesperson for the corporation told The Daily Telegraph that “we do not recognise this description of our working environment,” insisting: “We reported on the pandemic in line with the BBC’s rigorous editorial standards—using a range of official and scientific sources.” What then, asked Craig, “does that say about BBC standards?”