Hancock’s lockdown files show there was no Covid ‘plandemic’

For those of us who were cynical about the government’s pandemic response as it was unfolding in real time – as I was – the Daily Telegraph’s ‘lockdown files’ confirm our worst suspicions. Judging from the revelations in the 100,000+ WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock’s phone that Isabel Oakeshott has handed to the newspaper, the then-Health Secretary’s decisions were driven as much by a desire to shore up his own political reputation as they were by medical considerations.

To be fair to Hancock, the medical advice often changed from one moment to the next and wasn’t always consistent, as these messages reveal. The overall impression left by the ‘lockdown files’ is that the government wasn’t ‘following the science’, as Hancock and others claimed – not because the scientific advice was clear and they were ignoring it, but because there was no such thing as ‘the science’. We were in uncharted waters and no one really had a clue what to do, including the government’s scientific advisors.