Activists in the UK who once campaigned against Covid mandates, including lockdowns and vaccines, now face another challenge: the way the Covid Inquiry, meant to investigate the response to the pandemic in that country, is shaping up.
Under investigation, among others, is a government entity known as the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU), which was used to spy on the critics of government pandemic-era policies on the internet, and flag those opinions as “misinformation.”
The inquiry has been set up as independent, but is getting “dangerously one-sided” – and that would be, siding with the government. This is how pharmaceutic physician Dr. Alan Black and founder of UsForThem Molly Kingsley see the goings-on.
They allege that the inquiry’s bias is prominent specifically around the way it treats “mis/disinformation” and cite the remarks made by the secretary to the inquiry, Ben Connah, who announced that what is known as Module 4 of the probe was to look at these phenomena to establish if they had “led to vaccine hesitancy.”
If “mis/disinformation” represented what it did before the pandemic – namely, lies and inaccuracies, this would not be a problem, Black and Kingsley suggest. However, they say the terms have been weaponized during COVID-19 to shut down scientific debate and enforce official narratives.
As reported by Daily Sceptic, More proof of bias is seen in the comments made by lead counsel for the inquiry Hugo Keith, who said that the CDU and the Rapid Response Unit were on the job of “tackling Covid vaccine mis- and disinformation” – as well as that these were “real problems” with the question for the government now being, what they did to address them.
“We have also obtained evidence from the social media platforms as to how the government interacted with them, and we will be hearing from the Permanent Secretary at the DCMS (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) about the processes for identifying and acting on such material,” Keith added.
However, Black and Kingsley write that these remarks “seem obsequious” and that this is clear to those who, like them, were impacted by CDU’s censorship efforts. The implication is that the inquiry will look at what the government could have done to “better” control the narrative around its response to Covid – rather than actually shed light on the censorship involved, and do that in a critical way.
Moreover, the two activists note that simultaneously, the government, pharmaceutical companies, and “friendly” media were able to “pump out industrial levels of demonstrably inaccurate, false and in some cases deliberately misleading information about the risks and effects of Covid and the risks and benefits of Covid vaccines.”
“The presumption already being engineered for the next pandemic appears to be simply to shut down public debate and eliminate dissenting views ever more efficiently,” Black and Kingsley said of the apparent intent behind the inquiry.
