A visiting UK professor of medicine stunned radio host Ben Fordham by delivering a blistering takedown of Covid lockdowns, quarantine, masks, and vaccines.
Angus Dalgleish, a professor of oncology at London’s St George’s University who also sits on the European Commission Cancer Board, told Fordham Australia’s Covid response was ‘absolutely appalling’, ‘madness’ and ‘disgraceful’.
His unconventional views go against the recent Covid Response Inquiry verdict that ‘Australia fared well relative to other nations that experienced larger losses in human life, health system collapse and more severe economic downturns’.
But Prof Dalgleish insisted Australia bungled its Covid response.
He was also scathing about Britain’s handling and said ‘Australia, New Zealand and Canada all over-reacted exactly the same’.
‘The only people who got it right long-term were Sweden,’ Prof Dalgleish said.
‘They didn’t have any lockdown mandates, they had no other mandates, the vaccines were for people over 70 and they have the lowest excess death rates in the Western world.’
Sweden relied on voluntary social distancing, mask-wearing, working from home and avoiding public transport, with 80 per cent of the country saying they complied.
Prof Dalgleish attacked mandated masks being worn outdoors.
‘That’s absolute madness, the only reason you get people to wear masks is to instil a state of fear in them,’ he said.
‘I said right at the very beginning with the very best mask the smallest hole is three times bigger than the largest virus. There is no science behind (mask mandates) whatsoever.
‘You wear masks in (operating) theatres to stop you coughing into someone’s abdomen, it’s not for viruses.’
He also believed lockdowns achieved next to nothing.
‘We know it is respiratory, so lockdowns make no sense whatsoever, particularly when there is no quarantine (which there wasn’t in Britain at the start of their lockdown)’.
He believed hotel quarantine was a ‘complete waste of money’ and didn’t think it ‘saved any lives whatsoever’ because it only delayed the natural herd immunity, which was always the best defence against Covid.
‘You get the virus naturally you can build up an innate immunity to it, and they denied this,’ Prof Dalgleish said.
Fordham asked whether lockdowns were necessary to protect the elderly, but Prof Dalgleish hailed the Swedish approach as far more pragmatic.
‘They say “your grandmothers and people are at risk, just be careful, don’t go too close to them”,’ Prof Dalgleish said.
‘They didn’t lock everybody down, so society wasn’t strangled at the neck.
‘And it worked very well. Why did you have to lock up young, fit people who couldn’t work?’
He also slammed the controversial vaccine mandates.
‘I think it was absolutely disgraceful. It was totalitarian, it was descent into an Orwellian dystopia,’ he said.
‘Especially as we knew when the vaccines were rolled out, the virus had changed completely.
‘I don’t believe (the vaccines) had any beneficial effect whatsoever because the virus changes, mutates so quickly.
‘We know that when our vaccine program was rolled out, the wave of infection was falling off naturally. It didn’t need any help to damp the wave.
‘It was the same with the lockdown – we introduced the lockdown as the first wave was flattening out and if you had done no lockdown, there would have been no difference.’
A clearly taken aback Fordham asked Prof Dalgleish if he thought the vaccine saved no lives.
‘They came in too late, they gave the appearance of saving lives because they were coming in on a wave of people doing in and dying,’ he replied.
‘There might have been a very few, it might have been under one or two percent but not significant compared to what they wanted to do with them.
‘(That was) roll them out to everybody and have mandated vaccines when there was no evidence it prevented transmission at a time when the disease was killing 0.085per cent of the population with an average age of 82.
‘It was complete utter blindness and madness.’