Neil Oliver deserves an apology: he was right
BACK in March, you published a piece from Carlos Alba which can only truly be described as a hatchet job on his one-time friend, Neil Oliver (“Neil Oliver: The man I knew and the man he became”, heraldscotland, March 6).
Mr Alba did a first class job of cataloguing Mr Oliver’s erroneous ways, characterising him as an attention-seeker plunging downward in a spiral of increasingly shrill and extremist pronouncements. Amongst his many failings, “Neil has, for example, campaigned for Reform UK, a populist, right-wing party founded with support from Nigel Farage”. No-one reading that sentence can fail to notice that the F-word is being used as a kind of logical shibboleth. Farage is a spreader of hate; therefore so is Oliver. Farage holds views that no decent person would hold: therefore so does Oliver. Farage is wrong about everything; therefore so is Oliver.
Of particular concern to Mr Alba was what Neil Oliver has had to say about Covid lockdown and vaccinations. In one of his GB News monologues, Mr Oliver said he would “cheerfully” catch Covid if it meant safeguarding his freedom. “If your freedom means I might catch Covid from you, then so be it. If my freedom means you might catch Covid from me, then so be it. That’s honestly how I see it.” Personally I’m not sure I’d be cheerful about catching Covid, but I get Neil Oliver’s point. Better to die on one’s feet than to die on one’s knees pumped full of a vaccine the consequences of which are unknown. Except that now they are.
We learn that Astra Zeneca has withdrawn its Covid vaccination worldwide; “the jag can, in very rare cases” cause Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome (TTS), a serious and potentially fatal blood clotting complication” (“Covid, Astrazeneca vaccine, blood clots: What do we know?, heraldscotland, May 11).
Is this the reason that male heart deaths in Scotland are at their highest number in a decade? Public Health Scotland’s report published in January 2023 recorded that the age-standardised mortality rate from heart failure among men in Scotland had fallen steadily from 2012 to 2019, before rebounding in 2020 and rising again in 2021 (“Male heart deaths in Scotland at highest number in a decade”, heraldscotland, January 25, 2023).
Was it the virus, the unhealthy lifestyle caused by lockdown, or the Astra Zeneca vaccine that caused the change? I don’t know, but then again neither does Mr Alba.
What is certain however is that
Mr Oliver’s scepticism has been justified. I suspect the audience share on his GB News show will now soar. Good on him. To raise questions about the rapidity of the vaccination process is to ask why. To ask why is to think scientifically. To ask questions is, in my opinion, the purpose of journalism. It is not journalism’s purpose to ventriloquise the propaganda of politicians and large pharmaceutical companies. That, in my opinion, is the very opposite of thinking.
At the time of reading Mr Alba’s piece, my knee-jerk reaction was that Mr Oliver was entitled to a reply. It was, as is the case with most knee-jerk reactions, wrong. Mr Oliver remained silent and retained his dignity. History looks like proving Neil Oliver to be somewhat wiser than his one-time friend.
Graeme Arnott, Stewarton.