I could quite happily sit back and cackle at the downfall of BoJo for an indefinite period, but this article refuting that recent poll claiming a quarter of Britons think Covid was a hoax is also worth while :
A YouGov poll in 2021, which put to its respondents the more specific statement “Coronavirus is a myth created by some powerful forces, and the virus does not really exist”, found that only 3 per cent of British people agreed. To me, the differences between this and the new poll are strong evidence that the question wording really matters: people seem far less likely to agree with the more specific, extreme version.
And that’s before you get to the fact that some of the other numbers from the new poll have implications that can’t possibly be true. For example, the pollsters asked whether people had ever attended a protest or rally relating to Covid or other conspiracy subjects, like central bank digital currencies (theorists argue the government is using them to take control of our money) and “15-minute cities” (where the government apparently plans to restrict where citizens are allowed to go).
For each of these, 7 per cent of people said they had already taken part in such a rally. If that were true and representative of the UK adult population (which is about 53 million: the 67 million total population less the 14 million under-18s), it would mean that something like 3.7 million people had already taken direct action and joined a protest against these supposed conspiracies.
The pollsters also asked the public whether they’d heard of the conspiracy newspaper the Light – the subject of a BBC article and podcast released this week. A surprising 14 per cent of respondents (7.4 million people, if that’s representative of the UK adult population) said they’d heard of the newspaper, which publishes content on Covid among many other conspiracy-laden topics... those subscriber numbers are astonishingly high: again, if this was representative, it would mean that more than 2.9 million people in the UK subscribe to the Light – five times as many as subscribe to the Times. That really would be a cause for panic.
But of course, it’s not true. By the time you take 40 per cent of 14 per cent of the sample in the poll, you’re down to just 314 people, and all representativeness is out of the window.
https://inews.co.uk/news/do-quarter-british-people-really-believe-covid-hoax-2409400
