pWhen Covid-19 started to shake the world in early 2020, former medical and science correspondent Neville Hodgkinson felt a disturbing sense of dj vu. This was not primarily because of the damage caused by the virus, but by the global response to it. Powerful, state-funded bureaucracies mishandled the emergency so badly as to devastate millions of lives the world over. Big Brother, Big Pharma, Big Tech, mass media and academia all came together in an unholy alliance that caused a far-reaching betrayal of individual, social and national interests. ppbrppHodgkinson was working at the London Sunday Times when a similar global panic arose in the mid-1980s. American government scientists promulgated the idea that a lethal, sexually transmitted virus, HIV, was spreading silently across the world, causing a collapse of the immune system among those infected. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars flowed into the hands of drug companies, researchers, and countless non-governmental organisati