These BBC covid explainers have largely been very good, interpreting complex guidance in simple language.

But this one uses a travel PR exec who knows no more than anyone else and is arguably partly responsible for the second wave as its ‘expert’ source?! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-52646738

The first few paragraphs are basically sensible. We can’t go anywhere. Fine.

But then…what’s this? Who are you, ‘travel consultancy head’? And on what do you base your ‘feeling’ that things will have changed by April 1st?

Oh, you’re a PR agency for travel firms. https://www.pc.agency/about-us/ 

And your qualifications? Lots of PR and comms for travel firms, mates with people at the BBC (hmm), and works for a firm that makes money when people book holidays…

No epidemiology or policy experience. No obvious insight into Government plans on this, unless they’ve been anonymously briefing again. So why are you quoted?!

And it gets worse.

Their website proudly proclaims this as their most recent PR success: the Quash Quarantine campaign, which claims responsibility for the travel corridors and general lax restrictions on travel over the summer. https://www.pc.agency/case-study/quash-quarantine/

We now know that we in Europe are paying for our travel corridors and lax quarantine measures with the second/third wave of coronavirus, thanks to the disease being re-imported into many countries over the summer https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.25.20219063v2 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/27/five-ways-the-government-could-have-avoided-100000-covid-deaths

And I say ‘we now know’… Epidemiologists were saying it at the time, too. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/opinion/coronavirus-europe-vacation.html

So a PR who is arguably partly responsible for the autumn resurgence of covid, has a clear financial incentive to get people booking holidays and has made a disastrous health/economy trade-off error in the past is quoted as a neutral expert in a BBC explainer article?

This caught my attention because it was so egregious that I Googled it, but this kind of thing is happening all the time. Cosy relationships between lobbyists, ‘consultants’, rent-a-gob contrarians and journalists get all kinds of nonsense printed in our ‘objective’ news media.

Please, don’t book holidays—even within the UK—on the basis that some dude said it, even on the BBC. It may be a personal financial risk: no-one has a crystal ball about viral behaviour or government response.

But also, until we’re out of this crisis, the more put we can all stay, the quicker this nonsense will be over and we can all go on a proper, and much-deserved, holiday.