A Doctor Speaks Out, Books - The Assault on Truth

 It's late January. The wards and ICUs are overwhelmed, awash with the virus. The patients seem younger, the new variant more virulent. We are drowning, drowning in Covid. The sight of a doctor or nurse breaking down has become unremarkable. Too close, for too long, to too many patients' pain, we have become - just like them - saturated. Behind hospital doors, tucked out of sight, we seem to suffer as one...

Patients Waiting to See the Doctor, with Figures Representing Their Fears
Rosemary Carson (b. 1962)
Wellcome Collection [Public Domain]

During the first wave, I knew the public had our backs. This time round, being an NHS doctor makes you a target. For the crime of asserting on social media that Covid is real and deadly, I earn daily abuse from a vitriolic minority. I've been called Hitler, Shipman, Satan and Mengele for insisting on Twitter that our hospitals aren't empty. Last night a charming "Covid sceptic" sent me this: "You are paid to lie and a disgrace to your profession. You have clearly sold your soul and are nothing more than a child abuser destroying futures. I do not consent to your satanic ways." A friend, herself an intensive care doctor, has just been told by another male "sceptic" that he intends to sexually abuse her until she requires one of her own ventilators. And this morning, another colleague, also female, was told: "You evil criminal lying piece of government shit. You need to be executed immediately for treason and genocide...

Worse even than the hatred they whip up against NHS staff, the deniers have started turning up in crowds to chant "Covid is a hoax" outside hospitals full of patients who are sick and dying. Imagine being forced to push your way through that, 13 hours after you began your ICU shift. Some individuals have broken into Covid wards and attempted physically to remove critically ill patients, despite doctors warning that doing so will kill them...

Please don't flinch. Please don't look away. The truth of conditions inside our hospital needs telling. To dispel a few prime ministerial press conference myths, the NHS is not "close to" or "on the brink of" being overwhelmed. We are here and now in the midst of calamity...

The prime minister insists that his government "truly did everything we could to minimise loss of life". Yet a quarter of those deaths have occurred in 2021 - during the last four weeks alone - making Boris Johnson's words a patent lie. He didn't lock down promptly, he didn't close our borders, he didn't protect care homes, he allowed tens of thousands of elderly and vulnerable residents to die. And then, instead of future-proofing Britain from a second surge last summer, he offered bribes for social mixing. But our eating out, far from helping out, sent Covid cases ticking hungrily upwards.

This second wave has been turbocharged by Downing Street's procrastination. Putting off lockdown until the eleventh hour has - yet again - wreaked havoc...

How - from where - can we find cause for hope when our political leaders, despite a track record like this, insist they've behaved infallibly? Well, by early spring, the country's most vulnerable citizens should be vaccinated, a prospect that makes me ecstatic...

(Dr Rachel Clarke, The Guardian, 2021)

Are these Covid deniers mentally ill? And Boris Johnson's mendacity is well known. See below.

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism - Peter Osborne

Truth and Falsehood
Alfred George Stevens ( 1817-1875)
Photo Credit:The Fitzwilliam Museum  [CC BY-NC]

... Some of these [lies]are well known, such as those that led him to be sacked from the Times aged 23 (fabricating a quote) and later the shadow cabinet (falsely denying that he'd had an affair with a Spectator colleague.) He [Peter Osborne] also details the serial lies told about Jeremy Corbyn, Labour and the impending Brexit deal over the course of the 2019 election campaign, a time when Osborne maintained a purpose-built website to keep track of all the falsehoods. "I have been a political reporter for almost three decades," he writes, and "I have never encountered a senior British politician who lies and fabricates so regularly, so shamelessly and so systematically as Boris Johnson."...

Johnson's lies are no secret, though they have rarely been as well documented as they are in The Assault on Truth. The question is why they - and books such as this - do him so little harm..

(William Davies, The Guardian, 2021)