The wannabe FASCIST Press Gang and their silencing of opponents

by Niall McCrae:

Medical fascism is on the march. This week the government’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign has escalated, with an apparently coordinated media assault on the minority who are refusing to be jabbed.  On Monday 17th May a minister warned that ‘vaccine refusers are the principal threat to the final lifting of lockdown restrictions on June 21’. The compliant are told that the promised return of their liberties is endangered by the noncompliant. This provocative statement shows little confidence in the vaccine, and suggests something more sinister than a public health mission.

Vital to the campaign are media commentators, several of whom have acted as propagandists for the Covid-19 regime. Back in February, as the vaccination programme was reaching down the age bands, Observer columnist Nick Cohen set the tone, in an article titled ‘it is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated’. He used the term ‘vaccine apartheid’ positively, and claimed that it is a ‘journalistic duty’ to attack dissidents such as Piers Corbyn and Toby Young. 

Animosity to ‘anti-vaxxers’ went into overdrive this week. On Sunday, the day before the pubs reopened in England, Times writer and Orwell Prize winner Janice Turner was concerned that spreading of the Indian variant was caused by reckless vaccine refusal, tweeting: – 

‘Infuriating and sad. We risk not have (sic) out freedoms returned in June because people refuse to get vaccinated’. 

Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges tweeted: – 

‘The solution to the Covid crisis is not to pretend there’s not an issue with a small bit (sic) significant number of people being the offered the vaccine not accepting the vaccine. The solution is to ensure those people refusing to get vaccinated get vaccinated’. 

Hodges, Turner and fellow members of the vaccine press gang never consider legitimate reasons for vaccine reluctance. Have they seen the Yellow Card data on suspected adverse reactions? Did several countries ban the Astra Zeneca vaccine for no reason? Blood clots and blindness are noise rather than signal to these journos, who seem to want free-thinking citizens to be pursued like a fox by a pack of hounds, held down and jabbed against their will. This is barbaric. 

On Monday, President Joe Biden warned that ‘those who are not vaccinated will end up paying the price.’   The drumbeat got louder yesterday (18th May), with a flurry of antagonistic commentaries in British newspapers. ‘Jab them up’, a Sun editorial, ridiculed ‘anti-vaxxers’ and their wacky conspiracy theories about a global takeover: – 

‘With every new stat proving jabs have slashed hospitalisations and deaths, these dimwits look increasingly like Flat Earthers. Except more dangerous.’

Strangely, Covid admissions and deaths declined to almost nothing last summer, without a vaccine, but facts shouldn’t get in the way of a good story. In the Evening Standard, Nimco Ali, close friend Boris Johnson’s partner Carrie Symonds, wrote a column titled ‘we should uncouple, unfollow and evict from the pub anyone who refuses to get vaccinated.’ Ali pulled no punches: ‘I have zero tolerance for the stupidity of those who refuse to get the Covid vaccine’. Ominously, she urged Britons to accept a medical surveillance system as ‘successfully’ introduced in Israel. 

The worst invective was by Sean O’Grady in the Independent. ‘This is what we do about anti-vaxxers: no job, no entry, no NHS access’, O’Grady opined. With faulty comparisons to drink-driving and smoking indoors, O’Grady claimed that ‘everyone who refuses a vaccine could be a killer on the loose, and should be judged accordingly’. The comments below the line were a heartening rebuttal of this abomination. 

The day’s work ended with a monologue by Iain Dale on LBC, accusing the unvaccinated of selfishness. In response, James Delingpole tweeted: – 

‘Dear @iaindale your ENTIRE schtick is about how nice and reasonable you are. Yet here you are stigmatising a group of informed, thoughtful people with perfectly valid reasons not to submit to experimental gene therapy for a bug with a 99.8 per cent survival rate.’   

The message is about public health, but the real purpose is compliance, with bought media shamefully paying their part in state propaganda. The government wants every segment of society jabbed and electronically certificated to achieve a comprehensive digital identity system. Journalists should be able to write freely. But as most people appreciate, a line is drawn at incitement. Hodges, Cohen and O’Grady are not only pushing pseudo-scientific totalitarianism. Arguably, they are engaging in domestic terrorism.