Toby Young is the creator and Editor of the website "Lockdown Sceptics". He has opposed and criticised virtually all measures to control the virus, and promoted a wide range of Covid-sceptic arguments.
From the start of the pandemic he argued that the UK was close to herd immunity.
In summer 2020 he claimed "there will be no second spike" and "The virus has melted into thin air." He has suggested the fatality rate is around one fiftieth of the real level, and "lower than seasonal flu".
In Autumn 2020 he argued that the upsurge in cases simply reflected "false positives". He complained about mask use and having to wear a "face nappy". He argues that the cost of restrictions, "to prolong the lives of a few hundred thousand mostly elderly people is an irresponsible use of taxpayers’ money".
In mid-January 2021, he deleted all his tweets from 2020, and press regulator IPSO ruled that the Daily Telegraph must publish a correction over a "significantly misleading" column he wrote in July 2020, which claimed the common cold could provide "natural immunity" to Covid-19 and London was "probably approaching herd immunity".
“Surging Covid cases, ambulances, not answering call, NHS in crisis…but percentage of ICU beds occupied in England on December 20th was lower than this time last year in every region of NHS England.”
Tweet (now deleted), 28 December, 2020
"You probably haven’t heard of the Great Barrington Declaration... why haven’t you heard of it? The short answer is there’s been a well-orchestrated attempt to suppress and discredit it.... Ignore the censors and the smear merchants. Go to gbdeclaration.org right now and sign the petition."
"Why can’t we talk about the Great Barrington Declaration?", Spectator, 17 October 2020
"If Whitty and Vallance had taken questions, I hope someone would have asked them what the projected number of cases would be on 13th Oct if you discount the 91% of “cases” that are false positives."
Tweet (now deleted), 21 September, 2020
"Should we be worried about the uptick in cases? Almost certainly not. It’s due to recent increases in testing capacity, with many more tests being done now than ever before. As Professor Carl Heneghan and others have pointed out, the problem with the PCR test currently being used in Pillar 2 community testing – which accounts for the lion’s share of the 2,988 new cases detected – is that it yields numerous false positives, so the more tests you do, the more positives you get.... This would explain why the rise in the daily number of coronavirus cases hasn’t produced a corresponding rise in deaths."
"No, until hospital admissions and deaths start to increase in the UK we really don’t need to worry about case numbers. Given the over-sensitivity of the PCR test, the rise in new cases is telling us just how many people have had Covid-19 in the past and completely recovered, not how many have got it. Good news, in other words."
"Should we be worried about the uptick in Covid cases? Almost certainly not", Telegraph, 7 September