‘To live years under this strange paranoid dystopia is crazy’

Bristol could have been a very different place indeed if Jon Rogers had won the 2012 mayoral election. The retired GP was the Lib Dem candidate that year, standing after a distinguished career in local politics.

As recently as 2017, Rogers was organising a hustings event for Stephen Williams’ first bid to become metro mayor, but these days he spends a lot of his time posting videos to Facebook rallying against the curtailment of freedoms, and questioning the effectiveness and need for a Covid-19 vaccine.

In the 42nd video he has published since late-October, Rogers is among the protesters on the latest Stand Up Bristol march as it heads down Union Street close to the Odeon cinema.

As a man with a megaphone chants “Free your face!” behind him, Rogers comments that “everyone looks like they’re having a good time”.

But this isn’t a ramble. This is a protest against masks, lockdowns, tiers and vaccinations. “The mask does absolutely nothing to prevent Covid,” Rogers explains matter-of-factly.

Rogers was a family doctor in Bristol for more than three decades, a councillor for Ashley ward from 2005 to 2013, a cabinet member, deputy leader of the city’s Lib Dems and remains an honorary alderman.

But the clean-cut politician from back then has been replaced by a new-look Rogers with long hair and a scraggly beard, who was baptised at B&A Church in St Andrew’s in 2018.

He has advocated against lockdown measures since the start of the pandemic, and has since attended multiple anti-lockdown protests both in Bristol and in other towns and cities.

“The evidence is certainly not strong that lockdowns save lives,” Rogers told Bristol24/7 when we spoke to him before the most recent Stand Up Bristol protest.

The economic and societal cost of lockdown, according to Rogers, includes “increased mental health problems, increased child abuse, increase in domestic abuse, loss of jobs”, as well as increased non-Covid deaths resulting from missed hospital appointments for cancer or other illnesses.

Jon Rogers in 2012, the year he was Lib Dem candidate for Bristol mayor – photo: Facebook

In terms of lives lost, Rogers says that the coronavirus has not yet had the expected “devastating effects” and instead says that the impact is more like that of a “bad seasonal or respiratory virus” such as the flu.

(According to official government statistics, the total number of UK coronavirus deaths recorded from March 2 to December 3 this year has exceeded 62,000. This is 45,000 more deaths than the estimated yearly death toll from flu, according to Public Health England figures.)

Rogers believes that the government should focus lockdowns on the elderly and the sick, and allow non-Covid sufferers and young people to live life normally.

“The majority of people that I’ve talked to break the rules in some way or another, because the advice they’re getting changes every week. It has no logic to it from, from a scientific perspective, it just seems to be something that’s been dreamt up in government.

“If you were to give a very clear statement about how the vast majority of Covid is passed from one person to another is by symptomatic people – people with coughs, temperatures, headaches, people who’ve got loss of sense of taste or smell – and the very clear instruction that those people should self isolate while they’re symptomatic, then that would be very unambiguous.”

Rogers aligns himself with the Great Barrington Declaration, a petition started by three scientists in Massachusetts. It argues against lockdown policies and for ‘focused protection’ of vulnerable people, such as the elderly.

The World Health Organization and other academic and public-health bodies have stated that the strategy proposed in the Great Barrington Declaration is dangerous, unethical and lacks a sound scientific basis.

Rogers told Bristol24/7 that Covid-19 “washes its way through the population quite rapidly in any given area”.

He said: “London was badly hit in spring, and now it’s not so badly hit because most people already have already developed some sort of immunity. Areas like Manchester and possibly Bristol, to a certain extent, weren’t badly hit in March and have more of an effect now.”

As London prepares to move from tier 2 to tier 3, Bristol’s mayor Marvin Rees – who came second in the 2012 mayoral election in which he competed against Rogers – thinks that Bristol could remain in tier 3.

Rogers disputes the theory that coronavirus can infect a person more than once. He says that “if you catch a disease, you become immune to it”, adding that “your body then deals with it perfectly adequately”.

(Though scientists say it is too early to know the full facts about Covid-19, there are multiple examples of other viruses that have been proved to be caught more than once, such as RSV [respiratory syncytial virus], which children can get multiple times in the same winter.)

One of Rogers’ primary concerns is the “unknown impact” that lockdown measures and the wearing of masks are having on children.

“I go to the supermarket. I see fear in people’s eyes. There’s people sort of pulling their children away from other people and they’re teaching children that they’ve got to be afraid of other people.”

He adds that “there’s no evidence” that children can transmit the virus, citing this as further reason to lift restrictions in schools.

Scientists have warned, however, that although it seems likely that children play a smaller role in transmission of coronavirus, evidence remains weak for either argument.

Rogers, who studied for his medical degree at the University of Bristol, compares Covid-19 to freshers’ flu, the common cold that new university students often suffer with during the first few weeks of the academic year.

“When I was at university in 1973 to 74, everybody ended up with constant colds. You still carried on partying like there’s no tomorrow.”

He added that he finds it “really hard to understand why” the current lockdown measures are in place.

“It’s a nasty virus and if you happen to get it, well, you take your chances. But to live years under this sort of strange paranoid dystopia is crazy.”

Main photo: Facebook

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