Is there a gagging order

[Daffntulip]

Is there a gagging order? Interesting article

centralbylines.co.uk/news/health/covid-19-is-there-a-gagging-order/

What a bizarre article. Covid comes up in the news when there is something to be said about it, just as flu does. There is full awareness, in my experience, pf the awful effects of long Covid, so much so that I think it has improved awareness of post-viral conditions more generally. And are the annual deaths from Covid quoted in the article anything to write home about? The latest ONS figures that I glanced at just now showed about nine times as many weekly deaths from flu&pneumonia as from covid.
What does the author want the media to be saying about Covid that it isn't already saying???

I bet Pfizer have one in place. AstraZeneca had their name dragged through the mud in the press yet no one batted an eye lid when the people who had the Pfizer jab had heart palpitations, seizures and deaths also.

People die from Covid all year round whereas flu is seasonal, and few take Long Covid seriously.
Those same ONS figures show that Long Covid in kids has doubled in a year. 1% of all kids!
2 million plus adults with Long Covid.

What a brilliant article.
This is exactly what is happening. The covid inquiry this week revealed that the govt lied about it being airborne, and they ARE STILL lying!!
If they had not done this, fewer ppl would have died and been disabled.
They are covering up what Covid is doing to us long term and completely ignoring the millions with long covid. Including over 100,000 children!!
I have no faith in any of them.
It is clear they will keep pretending it’s not ruining everyone’s long term health for a good while yet until there’s another 2 million people disabled by long covid 😡

Byline Times is very left wing @Daffntulip, and I think it’s generally best to extrapolate politics from scientific advice.

Or look at a range of sources. Or follow NHS guidance which will change once the consensus opinion changes.

What is bizarre about the article?

The author talks about a wall of silence amongst politicians etc - including those of left leaning stripes. When was the last time you heard a politician mention the impacts that covid-related health issues were having on anything? It's framed as historical, yet the research citing longer term effects is continually increasing. How much scientific consensus is required before it filters through?

To the PP who mentioned vaccination, I agree there has been silence around those too. Some people do have side effects and longer term issues. The percentages and side effects should be more easily available to people. Data shows there is much more chance of longer term issues from covid compared to vaccination. Lack of openness - both on what covid and vaccinations can do (and are doing) makes way for all sorts of theories which is music to the ears of those deliberately pushing harmful narratives.

@Daffntulip

I don’t think there is a cover up. If you think there is a cover up here, then you look at what is being said around the globe. Is anything vastly different going on in other comparable countries? No.

There IS news now if the new XEC variant.

@Annemcc32 is there a link to reporting on the covid inquiry? I've done a quick search on safari and BBC app, but can't see anything. I know how to access the covid inquiry documents and recordings, just wondered if there was a way to find out the snapshots from each witness. TIA.

Thing is @Daffntulip - I see you are trying this from a different angle, but you are STILL trying to promote health misinformation/conspiracy nonsense - so you’ll probably get zapped by Mumsnet again…

Well now Facebook has admitted that they were pressured by governments to censor certain Covid information I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder what other media outlets have also had the same pressure put on them.

What health misinformation?

What angle?

Politicians are silent. Take the attendance drive in schools for example, it seems odd that in all the discussions, nothing is mentioned on covid (or any illness), even though the number of children with long covid has doubled in the last year. That's not past tense. That's now.

We're very sick with covid every year, whereas we only got a flu virus once every decade or so. Covid is relentlessly debilitating and takes me ages to get over and I'm so sick when I have it and can't do anything apart from panic.

We need vaccinations, but me and dh don't qualify for them. I don't know how the population are coping with this shitty annual infection. It is not just a 'flu'! Proper flu is serious and so is covid, but nobody gives a shit now.

Even though I'm very much of the view "lockdowns caused much more harm than good", I'm equally sceptical of a lot of the anti-lockdown and anti-vax stuff that is written as well. A lot of it is written in the same hysterical tone with which the "covid will kill granny rhetoric" is written. Here is an example, which I am not exaggerating:

"Look at all those vaccine refuseniks, who will prolong lockdowns, and who are going to die, it's very sad."

versus "Look at all those lemmings queuing up for the jabs, they're all going to die, it's very sad."

Almost identical language on both sides of the argument.

What I find is much more damaging than the lockdowns is the way the government communicated with the public; firstly by, in their own words, "frightening the pants off the public", and second, their stance "this is the narrative: nothing else may be spoken, and certainly no debate is allowed". (What happened to Dr Vernon Coleman, has he been cancelled, and silenced?) And yes, I strongly suspect that social media has had a hand in this, promoting whichever side of the argument governments tell or bribe them to present.

In the early weeks of lockdown, nobody was allowed to challenge the idea at all. You could watch BBC interviewers quickly shutting scientists off if they were going to deviate from the government script. I thought this was extremely damaging, that the government appeared to be making sure that only the "we must keep locking down" side of the argument got through. If the government had allowed both sides to be heard, I would have had much more respect for the need for lockdown.

Now, with the ruins of lockdown all around us, the government are effectively pretending that lockdown didn't happen; they say "because of Covid" instead of "because of lockdown" when referring to the damage to children's mental health, and the economy; Labour is keeping dead silence on how they completely failed to challenge lockdown at all, and kept demanding more and more of it. It is also ironic that the government is "cracking down on school absenteeism", when they think we've forgotten how they supported schools being very firmly closed, and resisted all attempts to reopen them. The complete refusal to admit that lockdowns caused massive damage means that I cannot believe or trust anything the government says, and it's easy to believe "they're keeping their powder dry for the next lockdown".

Nothing on the news and social media is as it seems: the last four years have convinced me of that very firmly indeed.

@scalt

Which ‘government’ are you referring to? Global governments or just our government? Practically every government across Europe had a lockdown.

Pandemics are a global issue, and strategies used to protect citizens were not just something cooked up by our UK government.

@Trobealone Mostly our government: I don't think others set out to terrify their citizens as much as ours did. Because our government acted very late, they threw everything they could at "stopping covid", to the point of pure desperation and recklessness, making up rules which were so absurd that they knew they were complete nonsense (hence Partygate), censoring any anti-lockdown sentiment at all, and having no plan at all for the inevitable ending of lockdowns, and the damage they would cause: that was all waved aside as if it would never matter.

If it had been more calm and measured, and they had said things like "we know lockdowns are painful, we know they will cause damage to the economy and to the mental health of your children, we will endeavour to keep them as short as possible", I would have had much more respect for them. But because they pretended that they caused no damage at all, and now they're practically pretending they never happened, I just cannot take any UK government seriously. I don't think there was a "gagging order" of silence, but there's definitely a tacit agreement of "we will never mention lockdown again".

@scalt Some did - in the Philippines they threatened to shoot you if you didn’t comply.

Totally agree with the acting late.

But I think on a global comparison level, we were fairly average in Europe. I would imagine other European countries used similar tactics. I think some countries e.g. Finland were better than others.

I think when you have a new virus without a method of control, without knowing how it will mutate, when your hospitals are stretched to capacity and you can’t deploy staff effectively to all services (including maternity) then as a last resort a lockdown is needed until you find a way to control the virus.

So I don’t think you can completely dismiss lockdown as a strategy but you can definitely learn ways to implement it better.

Not everyone has had repeat infections. I haven't had covid in years, since my one and only infection in 2021. Same with my dd.

How do gagging orders work? Is it a legal thing? Is it like a D-notice, or whatever they call it now, and doesn't that refer to military matters mainly, or national security?

I think there may have been an unofficial editorial policy to not mention Covid because the whole issue - like Brexit and not mentioning that in a way - became so toxic and depressing, it was like 'enough already'. Not quite on a par with the decision to not show the planes crashing into the Twin Towers some time after 9/11 because it was so traumatic, but similar.

Personally I think there's a media blackout on the use of euthanasia in care settings but I'm curious as to how it's enforced, and who decides and who enforces it.

Vernon Coleman was censored

His website directs you go the site of his new videos

https://www.vernoncoleman.com/

I just did a google search on the word 'covid', restricting the results to news, and to just the last month.

There were 31,600,000 hits, and among the top results were the many stories from the BBC, as well as releases from UK Parliament, GOV.UK, trades unions, universities, etc, etc.

That's why I said that the article linked to in the OP was bizarre. What more coverage are you looking for? The covid inquiry is being fully covered, the awful effects of long covid crop up in a lot of stories, new variants and new treatments are occasionally mentioned.

Do you want covid to still be a relentless central news focus?

Why would you expect that? Many terrible events that dominate the news for a while subside relatively into the background because they have become less severe and because there are fewer new developments to report. That is how news works. The pace of development in relation to covid as a medical, social and political phenomenon is just slower now, so we read stories about it less frequently.

"Covid" is receiving a lot of coverage. "Lockdown", especially the harms thereof, less so. There is a lot of confusion between the effects of "covid" and "lockdown". I think it's vital to keep the distinction between them. The government frequently says "covid" when they mean "the extremely damaging lockdowns which they cheered on". It's a bit like "died with covid" and "died of covid"; the government used them interchangeably, especially in their statistics to frighten us.

@scalt

Really? The Telegraph tend to have daily articles on the harms of lockdown.

The problem is, none of what you are saying makes any sense when you consider Covid on a global scale and do a global comparison.

Can’t understand why so many people think Covid/restrictions are purely something invented by the UK government…

I don’t think restrictions and lockdowns are unique to the UK. But I do think we are being nudged into forgetting how horrible they were, just like we were nudged into accepting them as the “new normal”. Now I think we’re being nudged into accepting the possibility of future lockdowns as a “new normal”, previously unthinkable. I will only believe otherwise when the government (not the media) starts talking about the harms of the lockdowns they supported. This is why I think it is vital that we never forget the harms of lockdowns, no matter how much we are nudged otherwise, so we don’t blindly accept future ones, and plead for more.

@scalt

So if you are concerned that nudging is going on here, then - with internet - it’s easy to see if reporting is vastly different in other countries across the Europe.

And I’d say - we are broadly similar.

So that would involve global nudging, global duping. Do you really think that’s possible?

Do you think - compared to 10 years ago, worldwide reporting, growth of social media : ‘nudging’ is easy to do on a global scale?

Or is it more that growth of reporting/social media means every idiot gets a say : and conspiracy theories spread like wildfire.

I think it’s very important to extrapolate the scientific reasoning behind lockdown from the politics.

Science doesn’t aim to harm people.

If politicians act like arses, this shouldn’t cause us to think science is wrong.