 We've heard from the many doctors we've had on this show that the army of covid deniers on social media are an enormous source of frustration and cause an unneeded. Dent to morale however in an east sorry hospital this month covid skeptics created a more practical challenge. If you want to have a quick conversation I can just quickly debrief him and tell you what the current issue is and what the problem is here. Since being moved from AMU none of the family have been consulted with what's his medical condition. Yesterday he went off the radar the hospital had been lying to all the family. What are you doing with him? My main concern is his safety and at the moment you are making him unsafe. Can his oxygen off? He's going to die if we don't put it back on. No I'm not. Yes you are. No I'm not. Don't just say something. It is against the law you put yourself all at risk. We need to step outside. If you go home he will die. He has coronavirus pneumonia affecting both of his lungs. He's on steroids called dexamethadone. He's on antibiotics to treat concurrent bacteria and infections. That's the treatment he's on. And that's it. To my knowledge if we get his drugs I can tell you what he's got. I am out into the hospital saying that the family wasn't happy with the steroids in the antibiotics. And they'd be able to replace it with vitamine C, vitamine D and zinc. Plus there was another one. I'll forget what the lawyer told me earlier. None of those approve treatment for coronavirus. However antibiotics and steroids are. The person they're trying to take the patient off oxygen against the wishes of his doctor was Toby Hayden Lee. He describes himself as the patient's McKenzie friend which is an untrained legal observer. The patients have the right to them. It's a fine system obviously going quite wrong there. You heard them say ignoring all of the wishes of the doctors saying no he can come off oxygen. It's completely fine then disputing all of the different functioning medicines he was being given and demanding that a bunch of basically vitamin supplements replace those effective treatments. At the moment you might think, oh what's going on? Is this just some people who've read some stuff about the correct treatment for coronavirus and want to have their voice heard in a particularly obnoxious and quite chaotic fashion. No, the next part of the clip shows us the true motivations of the people involved. You're putting this whole world at risk. You are. What, me personally? Yes. Why is that? Listen, can I just say something please? I am his next opinion. Right. Sorry doctor. Now if he's going to leave, now obviously they've got oxygen indoors. He'll last about half an hour because of that. What oxygen? I'm not thinking oxygen. What I'm saying is, we've got oxygen at home. Not this much. Coronavirus or in fact coronavirus, can you define coronavirus? SARS-CoV-2. SARS-CoV-2. 2019. Yeah, that hasn't been proven to exist but it was declassified. It was declassified in March 19th, 2020. It's no longer highly effective disease. SARS-CoV-2 hasn't been proven to exist. I feel for everyone involved. I feel for everyone on that ward. I feel for that guy who's been taken off his oxygen. It seems that he was in on this as well but he's been taken off his oxygen. The doctor's pretty confident that if he leaves that he's going to die. He says he's got oxygen at home. Those don't normally last for more than five or six hours if you're requiring the kind of pressure that you have in a hospital. This is not going to work out well for the guy if the visitor gets his way. But you also just have to, you know, the doctor there. You know, imagine you're going into work every day. You're seeing, you know, you're seeing so many people die. It's one of the most traumatic experiences of your life. Probably the most traumatic experience of your life. We know how many doctors are getting PTSD and you've got someone who is coming in trying to take one of your patients off oxygen and telling you that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't exist. How do you define it? It was shown that it's taken off the dangerous infections list. This isn't even a thing. We just want to get him home and feed him some vitamin D. We'll talk about the, you know, the political surroundings that have allowed events like this to happen in one moment. First of all, let's take a look at what happens next. The security are called to have the pair removed from the hospital. You're going to be removed by the security guard now. Get off, mate. Listen, just get off in place. That's a legal paperwork. That's my son. I need that paper. This is legal paperwork. Oh, walk out of here. Let me give the paperwork to her. Well, let go. Let go. Let go! I'm trying to get him. Listen. You can't do that. We need to pick it up. We've got sick people here. Yeah, two of them standing next to me. Excuse me, can we have a conversation? Now we're outside here. Can you put a mask on, please? I'm exempt. Show me your example. Can we take him outside the ward? No, he said bring it out here. I am not leaving my husband. If he wants to come with me, he's coming with me. Paul was contacting me. What do you mean, no? Did you just say no? No, no visitors in the hospital. Sorry? No visitors in the hospital. We're not visitors. We're coming here to pick Paul up. He can't go home. Says who? You've got no power turning over him. You can't decide what he can do. If he wants to leave, he can leave. If he wants to leave, he can't stop him. If he wants to go and die at home, that's up to him. If he wants to go and die at home, that's up to him. I mean, there are actually some circumstances where that probably is a reasonable argument when someone is in hospital. Normally, in that situation, the doctors are incredibly responsible and they say, if that's what you want to do, if you are now in a palliative state, if we know that your life is going to end soon and we just want to make this as comfortable for you as possible at home, that's something doctors are very used to doing. What doctors aren't used to doing is have someone storm in with no mask on, going through wards where there's patients at real, real risk, and dragging someone away. Aaron, what do you make on that? I suppose both from the level of how chaotic that must be if you're working in that hospital, but also how did we end up here where we're in the middle of a pandemic. Obviously, in this country, there's much lower vaccine skepticism than we initially had feared, but you still do have this very noisy minority who are not only on social media saying, oh, it's all due to false positives, COVID-19 is just like the flu, and now you've got some examples of them storming into hospitals and dragging patients out. Yeah, I think it's really important to say, Mike, actually from the start that in Britain this is less of a problem than elsewhere. You're looking at places like France where basically 50% of the population aren't really sure they want to take a vaccine. I think and also what's interesting in the last few weeks is actually things are moving in the right direction for Britain. So already within Europe, we were one of the least COVID skeptic nations and it's getting better. Basically, that's because we have a public service broadcaster with this huge market share, huge 80% of radio, TV, huge online footprint, and that's squeezed out the COVID denying right-wing press. That's one thing. Secondly, again, I'm just trying to sort of, I'm playing devil's advocate here. It's highly probable this stuff happened in 1919 with the flu. It's highly probable that a significant part of the population during a collective trauma, which is what this is, process it in such a way that they deny it is happening and they behave like this. I'm sure there were similar sort of maniacal scenes during war, during famine. I'm sure that's not to excuse it, but I think we have to sort of put it in with a historic context. Thirdly, I think the government in its initial response to COVID really provided fertile ground for these people, sadly. Fourthly, you've got social media. So I think social media comes actually quite, you know, quite low down in terms of people generating these conspiracy theories. What I find more worrying, and actually this goes further back, is how the COVID denialism and these people come out of movements like, you know, Freeman of the land, supremely anti-rationalist arguments, right? They won't be sort of swayed by empirical data. And that can actually be traced back to, I think, quite mainstream positions. So for instance, the MMRAJAB, you know, in the European Union, for instance, we don't have genetically modified crops because they're Frankenstein crops. There's no rational argument for not having genetically modified crops because there was basically a scare surrounding them in the late 1990s generated by activists. And I think that we have to make the argument for science for rationality. And I think actually in the last 20 years, that's not been a thing. And then finally, I think the reason why people are doing this, and this was an argument I first heard in 2016, 2017, about why many, many people voted for Brexit precisely because they didn't think it would change anything. They didn't think leaving the European Union would actually have severe consequences so they didn't really care because, quite frankly, since 1945, we've lived in a period of unprecedented political stability and progress, rising living standards, rising home ownership, elimination of various diseases and hunger, and we're all eating more Kilo calories. Life expectancy is going up. Now, I think since 2010, that's clearly plateaued, but there have been no major wars, no major famines, no major pandemics. And so I think to an extent this kind of, this denial as an actual sociological theory, because like I say, I think people always deny traumas when they're in the middle of it, but this kind of movement of COVID skepticism I think reflects that. These people have never seen a tragedy like this before. I find it hard to believe that if somebody lived through Stalingrad, or somebody lived through Dunkirk, or 1919, the pandemic then, I struggle to believe they would exhibit the kind of political features that we're seeing with the COVID skepticism. I think it's an outgrowth almost of unprecedented abundance and stability and not much happening. And again, that's why they're processing this in a strange way. Now, that's not to excuse what they're doing. That man is an idiot. You know, I think he should be locked up. I say that as somebody who thinks the present population should be significantly reduced. But I do think it's deep-seated, and I do think to an extent it's explicable. If you look at the long duree of politics released in 1945, combine that with a move against rationalism, really, in the last 20 years, you then add on poor communication from the government, and then, of course, social media. And this makes sense. We do spend a lot of time sort of critiquing the BBC for not being not even sufficiently critical of the government, but for basically covering for the government by making everything seem like a natural disaster instead of potentially any fault of Boris Johnson. But when it comes to keeping people living in the same universe, which is to some degree evidence-based, they're quite good at that. So if you look at the United States, you have a much higher level of COVID skepticism than you have here, and that's because they don't have a public service broadcaster and half of the population are watching something owned by Rupert Murdoch, which is precisely actually why we should be quite worried about GB News coming in this country and trying to compete with the BBC. I mean, I don't think they will be able to sufficiently or severely compete with them, but you could imagine them getting sort of 10 to 20 percent of the population who are sort of addicted to watching that Andrew Neal show. And we know that Andrew Neal, chair of the BBC, has been the main outlet for COVID skepticism in this country. So you have to think if the same people who currently work at Talk Radio, Talk Radio, not many people listen to it. It's very much a sort of minority endeavour. They get a lot of attention because they say outrageous things on Twitter, but a lot less people listen to Talk Radio than they do LBC or to the BBC radio channels. But if you have lots of the people who are on Talk Radio who are, you know, Julie Hartley-Buer is being, you know, looked upon as someone who might go on GB News with a big show. She has been someone who's been pushing, oh, yeah, this false positive story whereby it's just a pandemic which looks like it's really bad because of the number of false positives and really there was never a second spike. You know, now they've sort of, they change their stories every now and again. Now it's the, oh, actually, yeah, of course there was a big spike, but people would have died anyway. Ah, yes, of course there was a big spike, but the lockdowns caused more damage. They changed their story as each of their last stories becomes shown to be completely false. And you can see how these attacks on public service broadcasting from billionaires, from Rupert Murdoch, from GB News could be really dangerous here. It's also worth saying it's not only, you know, proper COVID skepticism that is a massive minority in this country. It's also actually, you know, lockdown skepticism which, you know, is a much more respectable seeming position. The kind of thing that Julie Hartley-Buer is actually dragging anyone out of a hospital, but she doesn't think that lockdowns do more harm than good. That doesn't have any scientific backing. And actually the public on issues like that are more informed than Boris Johnson it seems, because the public consistently have backed going into lockdowns and taking serious early action against COVID-19 when Boris Johnson has avoided having to make that decision. If we put the public in charge of the COVID response we might not have had 100,000 people die.