The Telegraph is doing wonders with its efforts to mine the 100,000 WhatsApp messages leaked to it by a reporter who ghostwrote a book for former UK Health Minister Matt Hancock.

Hancock wanted to churn out a book celebrating his genius leading the government’s COVID response, and handed over most of his archive of messages between him and other government officials, including other government ministers and bureaucrats, to his ghostwriter. She wrote the book for him, but also leaked the messages to the public.

Neither he nor the British government comes out looking very good in the messages, which were never intended to see the light of day.

The latest revelation, of which there are too many to count, is that Hancock refused to change quarantine requirements that were imposed on people who had been exposed to COVID positive patients. Despite scientific evidence that sequential testing for 5 days with no quarantine was a better policy, Hancock refused to change government guidance.

Because he didn’t want to admit that the government was wrong. For almost a year, the UK government locked people away for 10-14 days after exposure to COVID, despite knowing that it was unnecessary and harmful to people and society as a whole.

Matt Hancock rejected advice from England’s Chief Medical Officer to replace the 14-day Covid quarantine with five days of testing because it would “imply we’ve been getting it wrong”.

Mr Hancock was told by Prof Sir Chris Whitty in November 2020 that it would be “pretty well as good” for contacts of positive Covid cases to test for five days “in lieu” of a fortnight’s isolation.

WhatsApp messages between the two have also revealed that the 14-day quarantine period was likely to have been “too long all along”.

By then, nearly a million people in England who had come into contact with an infected person had been told to self-isolate for a full fortnight, even if they had no symptoms.

Although ministers reduced the self-isolation period to 10 days in December 2020, it was not until the following August that some groups were made entirely exempt from the requirement.

For nearly a year they forced people to self-isolate for up to 2 weeks despite knowing that doing so was entirely unnecessary.

In November 2020, Sir Chris and other government advisers were “in favour” of trialling the alternative system.

But Mr Hancock, the then health secretary, resisted, saying it “sounds like a massive loosening” and that removing the quarantine requirement could make it appear that ministers had made a mistake.

The release of the messages about isolation came as other leaked WhatsApps revealed how Mr Hancock fought to take credit for the success of Britain’s vaccine campaign, telling colleagues: “Everyone knows I’m Mr Vaccine and this is the route out.”

He feared being overshadowed by others, including the medicines regulator, saying that speeding up approval of jabs was a “Hancock triumph”.

I am utterly flummoxed by the tendency of vast numbers of people to either deny anything wrong was done or to forgive the people who they know imposed these requirements on us.

To be fair to them–I have to be since some of them are people whom I dearly love–I think they sincerely believe that little harm was done. “What’s the big deal?”

To me, this is a very big deal, both because of the direct harm and costs involved in pursuing such policies and because of the viciousness with which those of us who objected to the mandates were attacked. There was absolutely nothing benign about those attacks.

They were systematic, personally costly, harmful to public discourse, and undermined both comity in society and trust in the government.

We said they were lying. They were lying. And we were silenced and punished for speaking the truth.

It is also a big deal because even today, when we explain how betrayed we feel and the harm imposed on us and ours, the defenders of the powers that be merely shrug.

Collectively how many million man-days were spent locked in isolation unnecessarily so that Matt Hancock didn’t have to admit he was wrong? One man’s temporary embarrassment vs those millions of days locked away. How many kids were stuck inside bouncing against the walls because Matt Hancock didn’t want anybody to get the idea that he was fallible?

Unbelievable.

You can expect Hancock’s colleagues to throw him under the bus for the sin of having been caught, but you can also be sure that he is hardly the only person in the UK government or our own to have pulled this crap. I have written extensively about Fauci’s campaign to deny the possibility of a Chinese lab leak, and that had nothing to do with defending science, or Chinese scientists, or anything other than covering his own ass for having funded gain of function research in Wuhan.

We are disposable in their eyes. Our time, our integrity, our livelihoods, and perhaps even our lives are insignificant compared to their own prestige and well-being.

Expose them all.