There are many of you who believe that the lockdowns were absolutely necessary and we should have had more of them, instituted earlier. There are probably even seven or eight of you who think that masks work. It seems to me a kind of psychosis, this overwhelming fear of other people. But, whatever, you cleave to your beliefs and I will cleave to mine — unless other evidence turns up.

And that’s the point. Because what we also sacrificed during Covid was an appetite for the truth. Those who challenged the official edicts were censored, harried and pilloried, caveated by the BBC if they were allowed on air at all, signposted as disseminators of that quixotic thing “fake news” if they were on social media. And this happened long after their points of contention were proven to contain a certain truth, whether it be about masks, social distancing, lockdowns or indeed — and here I worry that we may have a scandal brewing for the future — the dangers of vaccines.

There will be another, similar scare one day not too far distant. My only request is that we keep our critical faculties about us and do not treat as pariahs, to be disparaged, those who beg to differ from the approved paradigm. We should remember that the greater the consensus, the more doubting we should be.