Bow Group Fellow Benjamin Loughnane has said that those who opposed restrictions were treated as extremists and “cast out of polite society”.

The Research Fellow for Migration made the remarks on GB News after analysis by the renowned American Johns Hopkins University revealed that during the first Covid-19 wave in the Spring of 2020, lockings in the United States and Europe reduced mortality by just 0.2%.

“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument,” the researchers wrote.

Benjamin Loughnane remarked that while the media had been demanding harder lockdowns, there were people coming out against such restrictions, “but they were immediately regarded as being in some way extreme or far beyond the pale”.

Mr Loughnane said on GB News: “It was the same with doctors. You had perfectly respected doctors who were experienced, specialising in areas and no one ever questioned their credentials until they questioned that maybe the pandemic wasn’t quite as bad as to suggest we needed this response… but those people were immediately sidelined. They were called extremists and they were cast out of polite society.”

“The principle of the scientific method is not that you come up with a theory and try to prove it. You come up with a theory and try to disprove it. No one tried to disprove lockdown… they just tried to prove it,” he added.

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