 you are more vulnerable to COVID-19 if you are old or if you have an underlying condition. So, for example, diabetes or severe asthma or cancer or numerous things. And that on a practical level is important to know because we know who we need to cocoon, who we need to sort of have, take extra measures so that they don't catch the illness. But there are certain elements of the media who now think that this should be something we take on board as a moral question to suggest that these people's lives aren't quite as valuable because they would have died anyway. This was sort of pushed quite explicitly by people like Andrew Neil and Toby Young last weekend. It was then taken on by Sky and most recently by the BBC. I'm going to run you through a clip and a tweet, Fred. So, the first is from Sky News last weekend. They're talking about how we should interpret the death toll from COVID-19. So, let's take those 20,000 predicted deaths from coronavirus. Now, one of the government's key advisors hazarded a guess this week that between half and two-thirds of those dying would probably have done so soon anyway. So, do the maths and deduct those from the predicted deaths and you're left with somewhere between 6,667 and 10,000 deaths that can be attributed directly to the virus. Deduct those from the total deaths, I think is quite a sinister phrase. I want to go now to a BBC, Fred, from yesterday. They are, of course, the organisation where most people get their news. They lead on how we should talk about national crises as we'll get up this, Fred. Now, news of more and more deaths is worrying for people across the UK. It's also tragic for the families of those involved. But what do the figures really tell us? This is from BBC News. Deaths being reported daily are hospital cases where a person dies with a coronavirus infection in their body. But is the virus causing the death? It could be a major cause, a contributory factor, or simply present when they die of something else. Most people who die with coronavirus have underlying health conditions, which can be more of a factor. There are, however, cases including health workers and a 13-year-old boy from London who died with no known underlying conditions. Half a million people could have died by August in the UK if no action was taken. Now it's hoped social distancing will limit deaths to 20,000. But that doesn't mean 480,000 lives are being saved. Many people who die from COVID-19 would have died anyway. In the UK, nearly 10% of people aged 80 or over will die in the next year. The risk of them dying if infected from coronavirus is almost exactly the same. That does not mean there will be no deaths, but there will be a substantial overlap. Why do I think this is a real problem is one, just because someone has underlying conditions doesn't mean we shouldn't value their life. I mean, this is really, this is really new. This is a new entry to political discourse in this country, which I really think takes us back a few steps in terms of compassion and humanity for us to say, well, I mean, you know, they had an underlying condition anyway. Is it really worth us taking a hit of a couple percentage points to GDP to save these people who are sick anyway? I mean, I think that's not a particularly healthy way for us to think about the consequences of policy decisions. But at the same time, what they're not saying is that even if you were, and there will be some cases, especially with people who are very old, where the chances of them dying later in the year were quite high anyway. Now, the difference is, if they died from a natural cause, maybe they got late stage cancer or whatever, then they would have died in hospital potentially, but their family would have been able to be there, sit with them. They'd have been able to have a funeral where anyone who was close to them would be able to attend, that'd be able to have a proper send off. If they die from COVID-19, one, if they've got pre-existing conditions, that means they're less likely to get the ventilator anyway, so they could die in severe pain, struggling for breath. If they die or wherever they die, be it hospital or in a care home, their family is not going to be able to visit them. So they're going to die alone. They're going to die alone. They're going to die in pain. And then when their funeral happens, the only people who are going to be able to attend are the closest members of their family because of infection control. So this isn't just a case of like, oh, they would have died anyway. Does it really matter? What's the difference if they die from COVID-19 or they die from cancer? Well, the difference is it's someone dying alone and in a great degree of pain or someone dying when they naturally should do with their family around them. I'm going to go to Ash and Aaron in one moment. First of all, I just want to show how ingrained this has become in the BBC's coverage of COVID-19. And it's clearly gone into their style guide about how to report all deaths when it comes to coronavirus. I want to go to a headline, which is how the BBC reported the death of Arima Nazreen. So she was one of the nurses we talked about earlier. She was 36 years old and a mum of three. So they've written that a nurse dies with COVID-19. So she just happened to have COVID-19. She kind of had it in her pocket. She died of something else. Let's go to a couple more. So this was the day before comedian Eddie Large dies with coronavirus. Stacey's mum's songwriter dies at 52 with coronavirus. Like, who could say whether that caused their death? Who could say? I mean, what I'd say to that is unless it was the case that Arima Nazreen, a 36-year-old nurse and mother of two, would have died today in an ICU wing if she hadn't caught coronavirus. And to me, that seems pretty fucking unlikely. Then you can at least pay her the respect of saying died after catching COVID-19, died after becoming infected of COVID-19, or even died from COVID-19, because I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have died from pneumonia if she didn't catch this disease. And I mean, for one, I'll hazard a guess that when we see nurses falling dead from COVID-19, one of the reasons that has happened is because they weren't provided with adequate PPE, they weren't provided with adequate masks, and they weren't able to take the precautions to keep them alive. So then to say it's just this passive voice, it was accidental. They died with COVID-19. I really don't think that is doing justice to the sacrifice that that brave woman has made. I mean, you're completely and 100% right. And what's most disingenuous about this is that we already have a model of talking about the role of comorbidities, secondary infections, when it comes to other forms of pandemic illness. And I'm of course talking here about AIDS is that it's very common to talk about AIDS related illnesses, because it's very rare that it's the AIDS virus itself that it kills you. It's the effect that AIDS has on your immune system and secondary infections, for example, like pneumonia, which is most common, would be most commonly the cause of death in cases where AIDS is unable to be controlled by things like antiretrovirals and so on and so forth. So we already have a model of talking about the way in which there are opportunistic infections and secondary infections and comorbidities, which affect the lethality of a particular virus. And so the fact that that same set of language isn't being used here in relation to COVID-19, I think tells you that it is indeed an ideological and deliberate decision being made. And I also want to talk a little bit about how absurd this matter of the interchangeability of numbers is, because it really is something which falls apart at the faintest interrogation. So let's say that last winter, we actually had a fairly mild flu season. So fewer people died of the flu than you would normally expect during the winter season. It wouldn't mean that if I were then subsequently to go up to Michael Walker and stab him in the head, that I wouldn't be done for murder, right? Simply because, well, we will lighten the numbers in this regard. Therefore, one more death in the government's books won't really make that much of a difference. Therefore, this death doesn't matter. That's not how it works. Can you imagine standing up in court and say, yeah, I stabbed him, but he had diabetes. So is it really that bad? That's essentially what they're arguing is that the presence of either comorbidities or being older makes your life of lesser value. Now, we don't even have voluntary euthanasia in this country because we do think that there is a principle in the law of the sanctity of life and that there is an overriding imperative to preserve it no matter what the circumstances in cases of old age or illness. We don't even have consensual voluntary euthanasia. So this idea that suddenly, well, death was coming anyway, it was kind of inevitable. Therefore, the under-equipped hospital won't be seen as a causal factor. The fact that we didn't go on a lockdown when many other European countries and our neighbors were on lockdown, that won't be considered a factor. The fact that there wasn't testing. So I didn't know whether or not my grandmother's carer had COVID-19 and therefore could have passed it on to her when helping her do her shopping or helping her in the bath. No, that won't be considered a factor because numbers are interchangeable. It's completely insane. And what's most disgusting about this is that in legacy media outlets, they really are constantly just in love with their own sense of mystique, in love with their own status, in love with their own titles. I've never met a group of people who were more addicted to getting high off the smell of their own farts. They really have a hugely inflated sense of self. And one of those things that they talk about is the grandeur and the calling of journalism to tell stories that need to be told, to tell hard truths and hold the powerful to account. In this case, the faintest drop of a hat, they're going around spinning lines which are considered to be too distasteful for the government to utter and say, no, well, actually, these lives of disabled people, people with underlying illnesses in the elderly are worthless. How disgusting is that? Yeah, there's a few things I want to sort of pick up here. So the first is imagine if there was a terrorist attack, an elderly nursing home, a care home for the elderly, or hospice, people who may be in the final months of their lives and a terrorist attack happened there, hundreds of people died. Would the media go, well, they were going to die anyway? Well, the median age was 80. On average, they were going to last eight months, 10 months. Of course they wouldn't. Or can you imagine if in Iran, or China, or Russia, countries that generally speaking are political class, for better or worse, you might agree, disagree, don't like, can you imagine if they were reporting in Iran? Well, lots of people are dying in Iran, but most of them were over 80. So that means that actually that it's not as many years as one might think. These aren't really people. I mean, it's obviously nonsensical. And when I look at that video, that excerpt we had from Sky News, first of all, 20,000 deaths was presented as a best case scenario. That's the first thing. They were very clear. If we get 20,000 dead people, by the way, in early February, Public Health England, Matt Hancock, the Chief Medical Officer, all said this was a low risk to Britain. Now apparently 20,000 deaths is a sensational story. We've gotten away with it. Wow. Great achievement. 20,000 deaths is not what's going to be expected or predicted or even likely to happen. 20,000 is best case scenario. And then he's dividing the 20,000 saying, well, this as if it's already happened. Okay, what if it's 100,000? What if it's 200? So repeating lines from state agencies, actually misreporting them and then putting them and casting them is such a favorable light for the government. I mean, you run out of metaphors. It's not the kind of thing you would associate with... I'm being serious. It's not the kind of thing you would associate with the free media. It's just not. And the thing is, this wasn't the BBC. This was Sky. This is Sky News. The government can't turn to them and say, well, if you report this in an unfavorable light, we're going to review the terms under which you operate, which they can do with the BBC. It's why the BBC is so defanged often. It's current affairs and political reporting. I mean, it was unbelievable to watch that.