Steph, if we weren’t continually returning to discussions about “lockdown”, we could have progressed to much more interesting and important matters, such as, what will the course of covid-19 really turn out like, and what can we do to regain democracy?

But the agendas are set by the corporate media, and they are its own, so we’re forever “debating” irrelevancies such as the opinions of Ioannidis and Yeadon. I’m frustrated because I’m up against a force many orders of magnitude more powerful than myself, and I’m frustrated with you because you unwittingly permit yourself to be a channel for it – yet another channel, of the millions that it cultivates. It makes so much noise that it isn’t even possible to achieve an atmosphere conductive to reasonable discussion. It propagates hideous sound-bites like “the new normal”, as if we’re going to have masks and social restrictions forever from now on – which ignores every realistic scenario by which covid-19 could develop.

Please. Pointing out that covid-19 could overwhelm the hospitals and cause hundreds of thousands of deaths in a couple of months is not fear-mongering, nor a reflection of my fears. It is merely the most likely extrapolation of what we’ve seen so far. And if Yeadon says otherwise, ask yourself; is it likely that he’s doing so on Delingpole’s blog rather than in Nature because Nature is part of a global scientific conspiracy to rob the poor? Or is it because he’s talking crap?

We mustn’t mix up what we’ve got with what we want, and we certainly mustn’t pretend that covid-19 is less serious than it is just because we don’t like what the “government” is doing.