I don’t doubt that something similar happened in D.C. Do you?

Note: The TELEGRAPH story is behind a paywall; the link can be found in the Powerline story. POWERLINE reports:

[Secretary of State for Health and Social Care] Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “frighten the pants off” the public and ensure they complied with lockdown, leaked messages seen by The Telegraph have revealed.
***
In a WhatsApp conversation on Dec 13, obtained by The Telegraph, Damon Poole – one of Mr Hancock’s media advisers – informed his boss that Tory MPs were “furious already about the prospect” of stricter Covid measures and suggested “we can roll pitch with the new strain”.

The comment suggested that they believed the strain could be helpful in preparing the ground for a future lockdown and tougher restrictions in the run-up to Christmas 2020.

Mr Hancock then replied: “We frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain.”

Mr Poole agreed, saying: “Yep that’s what will get proper bahviour [sic] change.”

The reason?

Politics, of course.

Mr Hancock expressed his worry that talks over Brexit would dominate headlines and reduce the impact, and probed Mr Poole for his media advice. “When do we deploy the new variant,” asked Mr Hancock.

Of course, most of the media in the U.K. (just like in the U.S.) are blaming the messenger, rather than the facts.

The Lockdown Files have been full of extraordinary revelations, but perhaps the most extraordinary of all has been the news that some journalists believe that we should never be allowed to know the real truth about how lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine passports were imposed on our nation.

Since The Telegraph splashed the first stories gleaned from Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages, the focus of many journalists, in print and on air, has been not on the story but the story-getter.

[. . .]

How could they (the proudly mask-donning, patiently queuing two metres apart outside Waitrose, working-from-home, “nice” people – as opposed to the Covid denying, anti-vaxxing granny killers that they falsely and laughably brand people like Oakeshott and me [Julia Hartley-Brewer] to be ever come to terms with being on the wrong side of history?