Matt Hancock and the Covid Roadmap: crisis management or crisis magnification?

The building of a roadblock

On 22nd February 2021, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new four-step plan to ease England’s lockdown. Later dubbed ‘the Roadmap’, it would, Johnson promised, see all the Covid “emergency” measures lifted by 21 June, if strict conditions were met.

The conditions were “data on vaccines, infection rates and new coronavirus variants to be met at each stage”.

The Vaxx Front were unhappy. Within 18 hours, Matt Hancock was warning that England’s easing of lockdown could be slower than the timescale set out in the PM’s roadmap. Speaking to Sky News he said that further stages, which would see areas such as the hospitality industry open up, could be delayed depending on infection rates. 

Other bureaucrats (both Health and Whitehall) were leaking to the press their concerns about “reckless steps” within hours of BoJo’s broadcast. But the PM was in ebullient mode: the vaccines appeared to have had a spectacular positive effect, and this sense of conquest continued for at least a fortnight. Infection rates, too, were falling: on March 29th Johnson announced, “….yesterday, we recorded the lowest number of new infections for six months, while deaths and hospital admissions across the UK are continuing to fall.” Thumbs were pointing upwards.

The vaxxers were gloomy. Even Neil Ferguson chirruped in to say he thought some outlooks were now too pessimistic.

Soon afterwards, the MSM began being peppered with attempts to up the bogeyman count. On April 18th, climate Armageddon was disinterred by The Times – which went Full Monty on burning forests, cascading oceanic plastic, carbon dioxide and a host of other less worthy panic-inducing extinction scares. Two days later, the 18,700 figure for known Jihadists at large in Britain was updated to 46,000. Hard to imagine exactly how a 250% increase in throat-cutting happens under closed borders, but ours not to reason why and all that. Several titles were also back on the US ‘domestic terrorists’ track, and every MSM source now feels incomplete without at least one (Ras)putin accusation.

The now familiar process of justifying draconian top-down dictation through crisis creation was in full swing.

But then everything suddenly changed. The next day – April 21st, the third anti-roadmap factor thus far dormant – new deadly mutant strains from ghastly places abroad – rode to the rescue of the Vaccination Valley PD.

This was the Indian Strain….the next in a long line from Japanese, South African and Brazilian variants. Two says later, The Slog observed:

‘The Indian health ministry has already made it clear that the Covid19 variant they’re dealing with this year has “a considerably lower death rate than the previous version”. Go to the Worldometer site, and you’ll see that India’s deaths per million is a minute 134: that’s 7% of the US and French figures, 6% of the UK and Italy’s and the lowest by far of any country in the Top 30 for cases. Virtually no vaccination has been undertaken in India (only 1.3% are fully vaccinated) and the country is not using lockdowns. The Times of India has just denied the BBC’s ‘deaths from oxygen shortage’ fakery.’

More blatant falsification followed. Beneath a banner headline about “mass cremations”, the BBC ran a full-colour photo of one such event. The only problem was that it turned out to be a library shot from the previous year related to an industrial accident.

Immediately (it seemed) the new variant B.1.617.2 was enough for India to be put on the Naughty Step. Our brave chaps manning the borders were on the case.

But here’s a funny thing: I’m told that Whitty, Vallance, Hancock and others knew about the strain by 2nd April at the latest – when Bangladesh and Pakistan flights to the UK were stopped. Johnson didn’t (which is, shall we say, interesting) but he did by some time on or around the 16th….and promptly cancelled his Indian Trade Triumph visit.

Matt Hancock was cornered about the delay in stopping India-UK flights on the Marr Show, and said, “The positivity [rate] of people coming from India was low at the start of April and it then rose and when we saw it rising we brought in the red list restrictions”. This is not my understanding. In fact, when the BBC rang the Ministry of Health for confirmation, it provided averaged figures for the whole period of 26 March to 22 April – making it impossible to see the positivity rate on 2 April…and thus letting Hancock off the hook.

This is profoundly suspicious – as indeed are almost all of Matt ‘Ether’ Hancock’s answers to toxic questions. It can’t be claimed that the Health Secretary is just dim, because his statistical skills are on the record as being close to Mensa level. So we are left with no explanation as why a man charged with saving lives allegedly did nothing for 21 days. But his behaviour following this period offers some clues.

From the second B.1.617.2 (& 3+4) arrived in Britain, Hancock moved into a rentagob mode that can only be described as the marriage of dribbling tumescence to pop-eyed alarm. He told Sky News:

“This strain can “spread even faster” than the Kent variant, which drove the UK’s deadly second wave of infections this winter, and we already have over 1,300 cases in the country so far….it’s a race between the vaccination programme and the virus – the Indian variant has given the virus some extra legs in that race…it is spreading like wildfire especially among those who haven’t yet been vaccinated.”

It’s odd isn’t it that a Health Secretary who claims not to have collected detailed numbers of vaccine side-effects seems to have at his finger tips cross-analyses concerning unvaccinated people as a statistically significant proportion of Indian variant viruses.

Even odder is that – he tells us – although this new (and of course deadly) mutant is a serious threat to the Johnson roadmap, he proclaimed two days ago he is “confident that existing vaccines will provide protection from a more transmissible Indian coronavirus variant now spreading across the country”. So, based on 1,300 cases “most” of whom were not vaccinated, Hancock is sure that both the Pfizer and Astrazeneca formulations can stop it.

I’m sorry dear reader, he can’t possibly know that. Any more than he knew the “vaccines” were safe, but he doesn’t have a clue what the casualty numbers among the jabs are. Once again, he falls back on cases, transmission, alarmism (1,300 cases is not “spreading across the country”) obfuscation and contradiction. Once again, he ignores the low death rates in India.

He is doing what he’s always done: create a crisis and then present half-baked non-vaccinating vaccines as the only solution. “But they’ve worked” I hear you say: I agree there is a lot of evidence to correlate the jabs to falling infections – but they are not vaccines. Their formulations use an entirely untested mRNA boost to fight off infections; the risk-levels of Cytokinic ovrreaction to future viruses remain a complete unknown – and a serious potential danger.

And so we are left with a Health Secretary whose evasive virusecrecy is at best misleading and at worst mendacious: a man who stands accused of suppressing data, mangling it and offering the same assurances you’d expect from a grubby little sub-prime bond salesman.

Fraser Nelson wrote a fine piece in the Telegraph recently on why a full Covid Inquiry is an absolute must given the devious behaviour of many of those involved in the saga.

If there is going to be a proper Inquiry into Scamdemic Spin, a good place to start would be why our Secretary of State for Health really waited three weeks before moving against India-UK flights. And, to be blunt, why he lies so much.

In today’s Telegraph: Government should have stalled May 17 reopening due to Indian variant, Sage member says. In today’s Times: Ministers are considering contingency plans for local lockdowns or a delay to reopening after June 21 in response to concern about the spread of the Indian variant of coronavirus. In today’s Daily Mail: Boris gathers Cabinet amid grim claims there is ‘close to nil’ chance of June 21 ‘freedom day’ going ahead as hoped due to India variant alert.