BBC must be held to account for generating Covid climate of fear

There were times during the Covid years when the BBC’s medical editor, Fergus Walsh, was never off our screens, dressed in hospital scrubs, lurking in yet another ICU ward to warn the nation of the dangers of the virus.

The corporation’s health editor, Hugh Pym, also bludgeoned us nightly with pandemic paranoia, presenting worst-case scenario Covid porn to scare viewers out of complacency.

Meanwhile, the collateral damage of lockdowns on poor, multi-generational families crammed into high rises was seldom mentioned in bulletins.

And those who dared to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, mask mandates and shutting of schools, struggled to be heard.

There has been a reckoning in the aftermath, with government responses to the coronavirus outbreak being scrutinised in a way they weren’t at the time – for the past two weeks, in the Scottish leg of the UK Covid Inquiry, which has been more thorough than proceedings to date in London.

But media coverage, and especially that of the national broadcaster, has escaped much of the criticism, until now.

In his evidence to the inquiry in Edinburgh, epidemiologist and Scottish government advisor Professor Mark Woolhouse accused the BBC of misrepresenting the dangers of Covid to boost public support for lockdown.

The broadcaster “repeatedly reported rare deaths or illnesses among healthy adults as if they were the norm”, giving the impression everyone was at risk, said Woolhouse. In reality, it was known that the risk of dying from Covid was 10,000 times higher in the over-75s than the under-15s.

The BBC also “gave the impression that hospitals were being overwhelmed during the first wave. Some (mainly in London) were, but overall hospital bed occupancy was at an all-time low during that period”.

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

The lack of public debate over the established wisdom was one of the great frustrations of the pandemic and the BBC was not alone in suppressing dissenting voices. 

But there was a creeping suspicion as those grim months progressed that the news outlet most of us relied on for honest reporting had been captured by government groupthink.

Journalists working for the corporation thought so too, with some admitting to the Telegraph last year that a “climate of fear” existed and seasoned reporters were “openly mocked” if they questioned lockdowns.

To viewers and listeners, it was often perplexing to find the same Covid doom mongers trotted out ad nauseam while more eminent scientific opinion was routinely ignored.

The modeller Professor Neil Ferguson, who had a penchant for the doomsday narrative, was rarely off the airwaves, while Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, was ostracised.

“For the whole of 2021 I was virtually ghosted by the BBC,” he told the Telegraph. “I was sometimes booked to go on programmes but then it would be cancelled or I would be told I wasn’t needed.

“I was told by some of the people at the BBC that it was supporting lockdowns and editorially it was not deviating from that line.

“It got to the point where the BBC was at times just the broadcast arm of the government, for example the way they reported death figures without giving any context to them.”

The Oxford epidemiologist Professor Sunetra Gupta also became something of a media pariah for challenging the official science.

Her appearance on one radio programme was cancelled on the grounds that it would “not be in the national interest” to hear her views; and while she eventually made it on to the Today programme in the autumn of 2020, she was cut short.

Gupta, it turns out, was correct in questioning the policy of trying to suppress an ineradicable virus instead of finding a way to live with it. 

Her view – that “lockdown is a luxury of the affluent, something that can be afforded only in wealthy countries – and even then, only by the better off households in those countries” – has been vindicated by reports of a post-Covid escalation of ill health, mental breakdown, poverty and school absenteeism among the most deprived.

Prof Woolhouse agreed that lockdown had been “least effective at protecting the most vulnerable precisely because of their need to have contacts with health care and social care workers — self-isolation was not an option”.

He partly blames the BBC’s misleading coverage, that everyone was at risk, for acting as a “barrier to targeting interventions at the vulnerable minority who truly were at high risk from Covid”.

So not only did the public service broadcaster deliberately skew the message, its propaganda efforts possibly harmed the nation’s health and wellbeing.

The corporation, fairly or unfairly, is constantly under attack, from the right and the left, for perceived political bias.

 Sometimes it can’t win but during Covid, in sacrificing truth and transparency, it sold its soul and, along with the governments of the day, must now be held to account.

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