Peter Hitchens is a British journalist and author. He has shared his thoughts on Covid-19 through his Mail on Sunday columns (archives here), his prolific Twitter account, and regular appearances on Mike Graham's talkRADIO show.
Since the pandemic began, Hitchens has argued that the government's response to the pandemic has been a dangerous threat to liberty. People can reasonably disagree about the role and limits of state action in emergencies, and make different predictions about the legacy of this crisis. But in his writings and other appearances, Hitchens has supplemented his viewpoint with what is in our view wishful thinking about the severity of the pandemic and the virus itself, propagating many of the myths and misconceptions that are examined on this site.
As recently as 4 December 2020, Hitchens was using terms such as "casedemic" to describe the prevalence of the disease, indicative of his long-held view that we faced a "false epidemic of so-called Covid 'cases'" that was "a bogeyman dreamt up to increase fear" (see our response to these claims). This came after a summer in which he ridiculed the possibility of a second wave of the virus (“There’s no evidence for a second wave of coronavirus, these second waves happen for influenza" at 22:59 minutes), declaring that "'infection rates' are mostly measures of how hard the state is looking for infections."
This view—that cases and even hospitalisations in large part reflected the "bizarre fetish" for more testing—has been a constant theme of his writing. On September 19, he even mused whether hospitals were being encouraged by ministers to admit very mild Covid-19 patients to inflate figures.
Early in the pandemic, Hitchens speculated over whether there was a significant divergence between the number of people dying "with Covid" or "of Covid" (see our response to this claim). He dismissed the idea that the first UK lockdown had any impact on cases, saying he had seen no evidence it had "saved a single life" (see our response to this claim). Other times, he suggested lockdowns merely delayed cases (18:40 minutes) and deaths (an argument that forgets that medical innovation, such as better treatments and vaccines, were being and have been developed).
Hitchens has speculated, based on some estimates about missed medical care from a paper submitted to a SAGE meeting, that more people had died from the policy reaction to Covid-19 than Covid-19 itself (see our response to this claim). He has questioned whether the death rate from Covid-19 is more deadly than that of flu and has opposed not just mask mandates, but mask-wearing in general, describing masks as "face nappies" and "muzzles." He also propagated the view of Sunetra Gupta that half of the UK population had already been infected with Covid-19 by late March 2020.
Hitchens recently appeared on a Spiked podcast titled “Showtrial of the Sceptics,” where concerns were expressed about the silencing of Lockdown Sceptics - at least partly in response, one suspects, to the work of this website and its authors. But Hitchens has previously expressed an uncompromising view towards holding people to account for their words and actions as a means of correcting errors in a free society. In May 2020, he wrote that those who caused the Covid-19 "panic":
"must publicly admit they were wrong, that they hugely overstated the danger of Covid-19 and made a terrible mistake. For a little while, they can do so voluntarily and be forgiven. But, if at long last they must be forced into it, then I do not think it will be half so easy to pardon them.”
Presumably, the same rules apply for those who have been mistaken in the opposite direction.
“Those media who said that the excess deaths during 2020 were the greatest since 1940 were trying to hide the real facts with emotion. Many of the statistics around Covid need very careful examination. The raw figures are (mostly) correct, but the way they are presented and interpreted is often fishy, and we will have to wait for an independent inquiry to make sense of many of them – if then. But the comparison with 1940 is plain wrong because the population of this country has risen so much since then. If you allow for that growth, the excess deaths for last year were probably the highest since 2008. Bad, but not that bad. Also please bear in mind that many of the excess deaths for the past year may well have been caused by delayed or missed medical treatment resulting from lockdowns – not Covid.”
Mail on Sunday column, January 16, 2021 [NB: the ONS data shows that the increase in deaths between 2020 and 2019 represented the largest year-on-year increase in mortality since 1940. Population growth over the past 80 years cannot explain this, because the base year for each comparison is the year before. We are not comparing absolute numbers. Even if we adjust for the aging of the population too, 2020 saw the biggest mortality increase since 1951.]
“I refuse to gloat over the mess into which Sky News journalists Kay Burley and Beth Rigby have fallen. They and their colleagues all behaved like normal, reasonable human beings, socialising in a sane and friendly manner. There is still no evidence at all that Johnson and Hancock’s various shutdowns and regulations have saved a single life. The Sky journalists do not deserve any punishment at all. But they should consider the part which their over-wrought coverage of the Covid crisis played in creating the frenzy which has now engulfed them too.”
Mail on Sunday column, December 13, 2020
"Casedemic falls more slowly in London , so they threaten to punish Naughty Londoners."
Twitter, December 4, 2020