Matt Hancock
© AFPMatt Hancock delivers more grim news in Parliament.
I woke yesterday morning to find that I had been locked out of Twitter for "violating our rules against abuse and harassment". I was dumbfounded. Which of my recent tweets had been abusive or harassed anyone? I glanced down the email to see something I had posted last week in response to yet another We're All Doomed! report on the BBC news. "How hard is it for people to understand? We WANT students to get the virus. They will speed us towards community immunity. It may not be very far off."

Whether you agree with my tweet or not, it accurately represents the opinion of a number of distinguished scientists, including Oxford's Prof Sunetra Gupta (whom I interviewed for the Planet Normal podcast) and Prof Michael Levitt, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2013. Neither is a wacky Covid-denier. They just happen to agree that the worst-case scenario of 500,000 deaths arrived at back in March by Professor Neil Ferguson, which presumed (wrongly) that all age groups were equally susceptible to the virus, was possibly inflated by a factor of 10 or 12. They also reckon that the best strategy now is to shield the elderly and the vulnerable and allow the virus to infect the healthy population, notably the young, so we build up that terrific community immunity that seems to have served the Swedes so well.

Why would Twitter object to my sharing that evidence-based idea? Especially as the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show there is no enormous spike in Covid deaths, which makes locking up 25 per cent of the population look ever more cruel and futile. Is it a coincidence that the Twitter algorithms, which put me on the Naughty Step for 12 hours, align so closely with government policy? Or is it that Lefties get to shut down any version of the truth but their own?

If there's a risk that the present lockdown strategy will do more harm than good - a suspicion which sadly grows by the day - then surely there has to be free and vigorous debate of the kind we gratifyingly started to see in Parliament this week, as 50 Tory MPs volubly registered their concerns.

Increasingly, what we are witnessing is a brutal stand-off between The Science (or one aggressive, politicised version of it) and Humanity. Take a recent headline in this very paper: Ministers will do whatever it takes to save Christmas. Too kind!

Look here, Christmas is not for Matt Hancock to withhold or bestow on a grateful, cowering populace. Christmas has done very well for more than 2,000 years, it has survived wars and pestilence far worse than Covid, reuniting families, shining the light of love and hope into the darkest corners of our history. Christmas is non-negotiable. (Perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury, rather than recommending the NHS app, could have made that point rather forcibly himself.) For the Government to pretend that the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ is in their gift, but only if we comply with the rules, is disgusting, frankly.


My friends are a pretty law-abiding bunch, but none of them has any intention of obeying the Rule of Six over the festive season, especially when small children are counted in your half-dozen in England but not in Scotland or Wales. So a new grandchild, a babe in arms, can make the difference between being allowed to invite a widowed uncle for the one day of the year when he gets a slap-up meal with all the trimmings. What is the logic behind that? No one has a clue. Not our Prime Minister, burbling bafflingly yesterday about households being allowed to mix indoors in the North East (er, they're not). Nor his squirming skills minister, Gillian Keegan, who admitted she didn't know whether, under punitive new laws smuggled on to the statute book under cover of darkness, friends were allowed to meet in a pub garden.

Oh, for crying out loud, just stop it with your ludicrous no loud singing or dancing. At the start of The Great British Bake Off, Matt Lucas did a wickedly good impersonation of a hapless Boris announcing the latest back-of-a-fag-packet wheeze: "We are now approaching Phase 46!"

Sorry, but it's gone beyond a joke now. People are suffering, really suffering. Here is Russell's story: "My mum (82) and my dad (83) live in Newcastle. My mum is bewildered by this latest lockdown, she has had to cancel meeting her friends, which is about the only thing that has kept her going. She feels a sense of hopelessness. It has been six months of mental pain and loneliness. She says they don't have long left and she wants to LIVE. They have a new grandson due in November but have no idea when they will see him. Their niece is getting married in December and they cannot attend. They know they will probably see very little family around Christmas. How much misery is this government going to cause before it ceases its reign of terror?"

Good question. Perhaps Boris would like to address it at his press conference today. The cure is now far worse than the disease, Prime Minister. There are people who would rather die than live in this theatre of the absurd. The risks your scientists frighten us with are vanishingly small. Even under Imperial's worst case scenario of 500,000 deaths without lockdown, only 99.3% of the UK's population would not have succumbed to the virus. Many will suffer with loneliness and some will lose the will to live. Many, many more will perish from other diseases. It's quite simple; shield the vulnerable and let the rest of us get on with pulling this great country out of the mire.

You may get locked out of Twitter for saying it, but I won't stop. Censorship be damned. The truth will out.

Read Allison Pearson at telegraph.co.uk every Tuesday, from 7pm, and listen to Planet Normal, her podcast with fellow Telegraph columnist, Liam Halligan on the audio player above.