I receive the daily Global Health Now newsletter from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The words in the title of the school tell you all you need to know about where they stand on a whole raft of issues such as abortion, family planning, smoking, diet, vaccines and of course COVID-19. To be fair they do provide some useful links to genuinely helpful material and have even been brave enough to air some of the concerns over the COVID-19 vaccines. But since the COVID-19 situation was declared a pandemic, they have daily published the cumulative global death toll. Whether this is corrected to account for differences in the way countries report COVID-19 deaths and the contamination of the statistics by false positives is not clear. However, COVID-orthodox they most certainly are. Some days I feel, for someone with my perspective on the pandemic, the newsletter itself should carry a health warning along the lines of: ‘This may be bad for your blood pressure.’
Which brings me to a link they provided this week to a wholly irresponsible piece of reporting and I wonder if the person putting up the link had actually read the contents of the article—a press release by Reuters—to which the link took you. The headline to the piece was: ‘Singapore’s death toll from COVID-19 tops casualties in SARS outbreak’. Correct me if I am wrong, but the title suggests a scenario of doom, gloom and carnage. And then I read the article and a different story emerged. Brace yourself and indulge me as I quote verbatim the opening paragraph of the article: ‘Singapore has reported its 34th death due to COVID-19, taking its toll from the pandemic beyond the 33 casualties recorded during the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak.’
I genuinely wondered if someone had made an error but no, there have been 34 deaths from COVID-19 in Singapore…and it is news. Surely a more appropriate and responsible headline would have been ‘Singapore only records 34 COVID-19 deaths’, but no. Every opportunity must be taken to ramp up the fear and many people living thousands of miles from Singapore and who will never visit it will have their state of hypervigilance maintained. Having started Laura Dodsworth’s A state of fear, it is clear that this is all part of a global campaign of misinformation. The bullets of this campaign are loaded by the public ‘health’ lobby and gullible governments and fired by the press and there are few longer standing and more influential press agencies than Reuters.
The truth about Singapore, with a population of 5.7 million, is that they have managed the pandemic quite well. They have been draconian in quarantining suspected cases and have had elements of ‘lockdown’ to prevent large gatherings. But they do not seem to have ruined their economy in the process. I know Singapore well, have visited many times, and have spent a considerable amount of time working there. It is a strange place which I have described previously as ‘Hong Kong without the fun’. The thought of preventing business and commerce would have been anathema in this Asian and entrepreneurial island. On the other hand, in a place where someone caught smoking a joint will be swinging from a scaffold before the joint has gone cold, it was relatively easy to enforce quarantine. If there is a moral from this story it is that the headlines never tell the whole story. In fact, they often tell the wrong story.
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