Allison Pearson Cancer Stupidity

The hour approaches: tomorrow evening, alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson will broadcast to an expectant nation, telling us just how accurate all those overblown front page splashed were last week. And what some of the pundit establishment do not want to hear is that the lockdown will continue more or less as before - because not only are they getting stir crazy, they know better than the Government.

Typical of those pundits bleating to no purpose about the Coronavirus pandemic is the increasingly wayward Allison Pearson, who is still given the credibility of a regular column by the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph. Having exhausted all other avenues, she has now fixed on a strategy of “Yes but CANCER”.

She’s happy to take a citation-free claim and add “Our Government obfuscates. It withholds information that would help people assess relative risks. People in other countries are treated as adults. Given proper info about age and health of fatalities. We get Listen With Mother … Being spoken to like children, having key facts kept from us, refusing to disclose the smallest things to give us a sense of moving forward is demoralising and counterproductive”. Then she introduces her big idea.

“Nurse friend says half the new CV cases they see are hospital-related. Family members like hers. Others from care homes. How many are coming from the community? Government won’t say loudly enough ‘It’s perfectly safe to go to the doctor.’ Because most things they tell us not to do are perfectly safe. That can’t be admitted. Thus tens of thousands will die because cancer wasn’t found soon enough”. CANCER!

Look over there at CANCER! Ignore the rotten Coronavirus! It’s all happening in hospitals and care homes! “Remember 450 people die of cancer every day”. Yes Allison, but cancer is not highly contagious. You don’t catch cancer from touching infected surfaces and not washing your hands. “True, but cancer kills children and young people. Covid rarely”.

So how does she explain this headline from the Guardian yesterday? “Six-week-old baby believed to be England's youngest coronavirus victim … Latest deaths also include leading cancer specialist and a ‘legendary’ market trader”. Also, consider who she’s using as her medical guru: Professor Karol Sikora. Who is not an epidemiologist.

Sikora has a most interesting back catalogue: he was roundly castigated after claiming that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi had only three months to live. The man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing was then released, and lived for another two years and nine months. He’s dabbled in alternative medicine. He’s appeared in a Republican Party attack advert slagging off the NHS and NICE. He’s called the NHS “the last bastion of Communism”.

Also, he’s claimed to have been “a professor of oncology at Imperial College” when he wasn’t. But he is saying “We’re missing so many cancers”, which Allison Pearson is now using as her “look over there” idea to argue against the Covid-19 lockdown.

Allison Pearson may not be totally stupid. But you can see it from there.

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