Where this got maligned and it really did get maligned was the deliberate, smearing and

discrediting and undermining and vilification of eminent people, distinguished epidemiologists,

public health experts, people from Harvard, people from Stanford, people from Oxford University,

we all know some of these names, who bravely continued to argue that there was another

way to do this and for which their their reputations were dragged through the mud.

Hello, welcome back to the Brendan O'Neill show with me, Brendan O'Neill and my special

guest this week, Isabel Oakshock. Isabel, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

It's really good to have you on. I think listeners will have clocked straight away why I was

keen to speak to you this week. You've been working on a little story called The Lockdown

Files, which has provided an extraordinary insight into what was being said by the political

class behind closed doors during the pandemic and during the lockdown. And what we can now

see are lots and lots of the WhatsApp messages that Matt Hancock was sending back when he

was health secretary and also the replies he was getting from other ministers, from civil servants.

And in all of this, they were talking about COVID, they were talking about lockdown, they

were talking about the rules and they were talking about us and in some instances how

to control us. So it's really given us an incredibly interesting and at times grim insight into

how the establishment was thinking during that most extraordinary moment in modern British

times. So there's a lot I want to ask you about but I want to kick off by asking you why you felt

it was important to get this material into the world. So you came by Matt Hancock's WhatsApp

messages when you were working within on his book The Pandemic Diaries and now the telegraph has

got them and the telegraph is doing an excellent job of sifting through them and finding the important

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