See here.

Excerpts:

Croft is similarly downboat about the vaccines, which I think is unwarranted. He says it ‘remains unclear as to whether or not Covid-19 vaccination has resulted in fewer deaths from Covid-19’. But it seems fairly clear that vaccines did break the link between cases and deaths in the spring and summer of 2021. Still, Croft is right to say that the protection they offered was brief and incomplete. Long before vaccine passports were imposed on Scots in autumn 2021, there was abundant evidence that vaccines did not stop infection and transmission. This should have blown the bottom out of the case for vaccine passports. That it failed to stop them is a disgrace.

Unsurprisingly, Croft’s report hasn’t gone down well with the lockdown-supporting press in Scotland. He has been attacked as being ‘not an expert’ in viral pandemics. I don’t know Croft and hold no personal brief for him, but his CV indicates a much longer experience of microbiology-related public health than, say, public-health academic Devi Sridhar, who exerted much influence on Scotland’s Covid response. Military medicine – where he spent his career – takes a great interest in epidemics. They have stopped many armies, from Charles VIII at Naples (syphilis) to Admiral Vernon at Cartagena (yellow fever).

No Western public-health agency advocated lockdowns for a respiratory viral pandemic before 2020. The approach was adopted ad hoc during the Covid pandemic because, as Professor Neil Ferguson (who has scant prior coronavirus experience) infamously told The Times, the government realised it could ‘get away’ with a China-style lockdown after Italy imposed one in February 2020.