ALONG with Kathy Gyngell, I am afraid I cannot join in the fulsome tributes to the late Dame Jenni Murray. Although she was a lively and occasionally combative broadcaster, much of her success on radio being down to having elocution lessons as a child, she was also a long-term pusher of vaccines, fat jabs, statins and many other pharmaceutical interventions, none of which delivered good health, at least not to her. In fact, the more pills and jabs she took, the worse her health became.
Yet in common with many strident women journalists of a feminist bent – Polly Toynbee, Melanie Phillips and Libby Purves are others – she uncritically promoted lockdown, testing, masking, social distancing and, most particularly, the covid vaccines. Those of us who raised concerns were condemned as anti-vaxxers and treated with scorn.
Although we don’t know exactly what carried Jenni off, her lucrative columns in the Daily Mail and Saga magazine, arranged by her agent Knight Ayton when she was kicked off Woman’s Hour, were more or less a long list of all the ailments and conditions she had bravely suffered from her earliest years, amid pleas for ever more vaccines to be injected, especially into children.
As a child, she contracted measles, for which she blamed her lifelong asthma, plus sinusitis and rhinitis. ‘If only there had been measles jabs when I was little, my friend would still be alive,’ she complained in an emotive 2024 Daily Mail column. Cue a plea for every child to be injected with the MMR vaccine. Was there any mention of a possible link with autism in her article? No, of course not. With journalists like Jenni Murray acting as aggressive spokeswomen for the vaccine industry, who needs government propagandists?
At university, where Jenni started to put on weight, she took amphetamines, which brought her weight down from 11 stone to seven. These drugs, often prescribed for weight loss in the 1950s and 60s, were later found to have serious side effects, and may have triggered her lifelong health problems.
After university, the weight continued to pile on, especially when she started on her career as the nation’s favourite broadcaster. She blamed her sedentary job, with all the breaks for sugary snacks, for her weight gain.
In 2006 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy. She also suffered from severe menopause problems, all of which she described in graphic detail in her book Is It Me, or Is It Hot in Here?
Meanwhile her weight crept up to 24 stone. This led to a double hip replacement when she was in her 50s as well as causing back problems and sciatica. She then took Prozac and other anti-depressants. Her ever-increasing health problems were faithfully recorded in broadcasts, articles and books.
She underwent bariatric surgery, otherwise known as having a gastric band inserted, in 2014, and this was successful in bringing her weight down, at least to a degree.
In a 2015 article, Jenni discussed being on statins for life because of course she had heart problems as well as everything else. But when covid hit, boy, did she get into her stride. She had all the jabs for covid and all the tests and lo and behold, she went down with a bout of covid severe enough to land her in hospital. Not making any connection between the vaccines and her continuing poor health, she also had flu and pneumonia jabs, then got pneumonia. For a time she was ill enough to be admitted to a care home but, dauntless as ever, continued to file copy for her various outlets while promoting the jabs at every opportunity.
Naturally, every ill that happened to her was somebody else’s fault. She first blamed her mother who, she said, was obsessed with dieting and weight loss and that at the age of 13, she joined her mother at WeightWatchers sessions. And when she returned from university two stone heavier, her mother called her a baby elephant. Jenni’s self-confessed low self-esteem, she believed, was caused by her mother. Well – how low does your self-esteem have to be to present Woman’s Hour for over 30 years?
After her mother died in 2012, Jenni was able to blame Ukrainian refugees for her new weight gain. In 2022 she opened her basement flat in London to Zoriana and her 18-year-old son Ustyn. Chronicling every aspect of their stay, she blamed Zoriana for putting all her weight back on, in spite of the gastric band, saying that she could not resist the refugee’s delicious cooking. After the Ukrainians left, Jenni had to resort to more drastic methods to lose all that weight and that led to Mounjaro.
She was still taking the covid, flu and pneumonia jabs, and urging all her readers to make sure they were fully vaccinated and continuing to test themselves. Now she added another jab to the noxious mix. She blessed Mounjaro for enabling her to lose four stone and wrote in a Daily Mail article: ‘You’ll have to prise the fat jabs out of my hand.’ But later she wrote: ‘After one year on Mounjaro I have lost six stone, but I can barely walk. I am reduced to crawling on my hands and knees.’ The fat jabs had caused severe mobility problems, brought about, presumably, by loss of muscle function.
In 2020, the year of lockdown, she tripped outside a supermarket and broke a rib as well as damaging her face. ‘Blood from my bust lips poured into my mask,’ she wrote, subtly reminding her readers that, naturally, she was wearing a mask as well as observing social distancing. Next day, in agony, she tells us she valiantly fought off her fear of Covid-19 and called a taxi to take her to hospital. She was prescribed codeine for the pain, putting yet another pill into her system.
When I met Jenni at a media Christmas party a few years ago, she was walking painfully with a stick and could hardly stand up. By this time her spine was very crooked and she was hobbling along almost bent double. Perhaps needless to say, she had no truck with my researches into vaccine damage, never mind that I, unboosted, had never succumbed to even the slightest tinge of covid, pneumonia, sepsis or any of the other illnesses that kept landing her in intensive care in hospital. ‘You were just lucky,’ she said.
One might ask: Can one woman ever have endured so many health setbacks? I’m sorry that all these chronic illnesses blighted her life, but I cannot forgive her for the indefatigable, non-stop plugging of firstly the covid and flu jabs, not forgetting the MMR, and then the weight-loss jabs. What an advocate for the pharmaceutical industry she turned out to be.
That is why I will not be adding to the wildly over-the-top tributes for this dangerous and angry woman.
Lest we forget, My Covid Diary by Liz Hodgkinson reminds us of what we went through. Available from Amazon and to order from bookshops.
