Dan Wootton: Anti-lockdown protesters are right to stand up to Covid authoritarianism

Violence during any form of protest is completely unacceptable – you know I have been consistent on that, be it BLM, anti-lockdown or Extinction Rebellion rallies.

But the shocking and widespread riots across Europe this weekend – shamefully being largely ignored by the mainstream media – are an inevitable consequence of medical freedom being extinguished and health apartheid ushered in under the guise of Covid public health.

Surely this civil unrest erupting in Vienna, Brussels, throughout the Netherlands and closer to home in London and Belfast should be leading the news the world over?

When the murder of George Floyd sparked new Black Lives Matter protests in the US last summer, it’s all TV wanted to talk apart – despite the horrible murder having very little to do with life in the UK, officially one of the least racist countries in the world where the police are largely unarmed.

The rage over government overreach through vaccine mandates and passports is fast creating a two-tier society that we may never be able to reverse.

Yet the vast majority of the media and political elite are looking away.

The question is not that the vaccine is largely a force for good.

I have been open about the fact I have exercised my personal choice to be jabbed, taking into account my overall health.

But I respect everyone making their own call without judgement – and certainly without the threat of losing their livelihood, freedoms or, from February in Austria, being fined over £3,000 for breaking the law.

To fundamentally alter the way we treat modern medicine by starting to enforce procedures on the individual in a free society is not just wrong, it’s terrifying.

Where does this end?

Enforced abortions for pregnant women carrying babies with Down syndrome?

Enforced stomach stapling for the clinically obese?

And don’t laugh and suggest this is all some mad conspiracy theory when the thought of democratic nations like Germany and Austria mandating a vaccine on its entire population – or Wales stopping the unjabbed going to a cinema – was also not that long ago considered a laughable conspiracy.

Sajid Javid this weekend insisted the British government will not go down this path.

But that is slightly disingenuous, given we are already experimenting with such an authoritarian policy in social care and the NHS, refusing to take into account scientific realities like natural immunity.

Meanwhile, in Australia army personnel are now being used to transfer close contacts of Covid cases in their Northern Territory to state run facilities.

How has a civilised democratic country gone so mad that this sort of behaviour is being treated as even slightly normal?

Meanwhile, our mainstream broadcast media cravenly want to follow suit, failing to accept that our big bang reopening on Freedom Day means there should be no going back.

Let me repeat the facts for the folk like this who seem to have been struck down with Covid derangement syndrome.

The UK is now an 80 per cent double jabbed society – one of the world leaders – and a quarter of us have been boosted.

Meanwhile, Covid has an infection fatality rate of 0.096 per cent, increasingly comparable to the flu.

If you are talking about locking down the country again or locking up your fellow citizens who have exercised a medical choice different to yours then you’re the one with the problem