I have just watched, belatedly, a GB News interview and panel discussion with Dr. David Thunder, broadcast on 8 October. I was deeply impressed. I have been a bit of an ostrich in all this. And I’m not saying that ostriches are necessarily always stupid. Sometimes it is sensible to do just what you are told when you can trust the people telling you to do it. In this case – Covid – I have, up until now, found myself secretly wishing that all those in the Resistance would go away and just let us grin and bear our travails while they lasted. David, whom I know personally, was one of those who kept me aware of his resistance. I was of the view that he was squandering his considerable talents on a nine-day-wonder.

I was wrong. Here is what convinced me.

I am now grateful to him for his rational voice and am appalled at his treatment by the various media platforms which have denied him the freedom which we need him to have. He has suffered for us.

He has told me all about it.

“It’s been a difficult and stressful experience to be marginalised and shut out of newspapers (I am now persona non grata at The Irish Times, can no longer even publish in my local regional newspaper on anything critical of Covid measures), Twitter (for speaking out against vaccinating the young with no net benefit to them), & occasionally Youtube (my account remains open but I now veer away from direct statements against their politics). My blog is on a largely uncensored platform, substack, and I’ve also opened a Telegram and Rumble channel for sharing uncensored commentary.”

What is alarming about this experience goes far beyond our current crisis. It is that an entire media and scientific establishment has so readily imposed on our society a blanket gag on speech and thought. Who, in the months and years to come will join David Thunder in trying to pick up the pieces of our freedom and put them together again.