Chris Whitty (Image: PA)

       When Sir Chris Whitty told the Covid Inquiry last week that the decision to make Covid vaccines mandatory was “100% political”, my jaw hit the floor.

       Whoa! What about the government’s insistence that it was “following the science”?

       What about informed consent? How could mandatory vaccination even be contemplated if the Chief Medical Officer was against it?

       For anyone who’s blocked out the memory of the awful decisions the government too often took during the pandemic, let’s remind ourselves that care home workers were sacked if they refused to be vaccinated, despite the fact that the vaccine did not stop infection or transmission.

       There was then a proposal, though later abandoned, thank God, for all healthcare workers to face the same mandate, again on pain of losing their jobs.

       And for months it was seriously proposed that everyone in the country would be obliged to carry “vaccine passports” just to go about their daily business.

       No wonder so many felt coerced. Yet, we now know, thanks to the interminably slow Covid Inquiry, that Chris Whitty was deeply sceptical about mandates.

       He considered, rightly, that all of us, including health workers, should decide for ourselves what should be squirted into our arms, especially, he now says, since “every drug and vaccine has side effects, and some of those may be rare, but still severe”.

       You can say that again. The Covid vaccine caused appalling injuries and fatal conditions, including blood clots, partial paralysis, myocarditis and vaccine-induced thrombocytopenia and thrombosis.

       Close to 20,000 jabbed Brits have applied to the vaccine damage payment scheme to seek compensation for injuries either to themselves or to loved ones.

       (Sadly, you have to be at least 60% disabled by the vaccine to get a payout, so those who were merely 59% disabled get nothing.)

       The government knew about the risks and had set aside nearly ￡2bn to indemnify the pharmaceutical companies who’d developed the vaccines, yet went ahead with its mandate for care workers anyway.

       It ignored the advice of its own Chief Medical Officer, and swatted away the science, just as it did when it shut our schools thereby causing irreparable long-term harm to our children.

       It forced hundreds of thousands of care workers, whether they liked it or not, to get the jab or lose their job.

       Alright, the government might say that it took this political decision with the best of intentions (regardless of the science) to limit the spread of a horrible virus.

       But that’s little consolation to someone who is now in a wheelchair for life, or who has lost a loved one to a fatal vaccine-induced seizure. Good intentions can’t help those people now.

       What’s more, in the long run, forcing people to do something rather than giving them the facts and allowing them to decide for themselves is just stupid.

       More and more people are now, post Covid, expressing “vaccine hesitancy”, and less than half of all frontline healthcare workers, who know a thing or two about vaccines, now have the annual flu jab.

       Could it be that the authorities’ attempts to coerce have backfired?

       The lesson for the government, then, is to start treating people like adults, not toddlers. Give us the whole truth, not just the bits you think we should hear, then let us decide for ourselves.

       Otherwise, whether it’s about vaccines, weapons of mass destruction or Southport child murderers, we rapidly lose trust in what the state tells us. Sadly, I’m already there.