Just Asking Questions – The Sudden Death of Scepticism

A common concern of so-called ‘Covid sceptics’ during the early days of the pandemic, was whether or not the startling numbers of daily deaths being recorded were of people who had died from Covid or merely with Covid, as if the latter were completely incidental and were falsely inflating the true figure.

Whether Covid was merely a contributing factor to a death rather than the primary cause seemed a crucially important distinction to such people, who had apparently decided that coroners and registered medical professionals were, en mass, fraudulently reporting unrelated fatalities as victims of the pandemic.

The Descent of Maajid Nawaz

In times of crisis where social media misinformation is rampant, one of the most valuable characteristics of a social and political commentator is undoubtedly a commitment to truth and accuracy.

When partisan misinformation from influential people has the potential to endanger lives, sensible people might reasonably look for the following attributes in a commentator: Someone who values and consistently promotes truth even to the detriment of their own positions or arguments. Someone who fact-checks their own sources and takes the possibility of spreading misinformation to a large audience incredibly seriously. Someone who is not only willing to retract and correct the record when the evidence demands, but is proactive in doing so.