Walworth anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown campaigner Piers Corbyn has said he doesn’t care about police investigating him for peeling off stickers telling people to wear masks from Tube trains.
A video emerged on social media over the weekend of Mr Corbyn, the brother of former Labour leader Jeremy, taking off several stickers on a Victoria line train. British Transport Police said they were investigating the incident.
Mr Corbyn said this week: “I don’t care. They can investigate all they want. These signs they’ve put up are dishonest… Transport for London should not be putting things up. I don’t think we’ve committed criminal damage anyway, we haven’t broken anything.”
Mr Corbyn thinks that wearing masks damages people’s health and that “social distancing is madness” because it harms the long-term immunity people pick up from interacting with others. “We’re a social creature,” he said. “All these measures are designed to weaken people’s liberty… Democracy in the UK will be ended.”
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He compared the risks of Covid-19 with other diseases, as well as fatal accidents like drowning. “We’re all told to wear masks – everybody should be issued with a lifebelt so they can walk around with it all the time.” Fact-checking organisation Full Fact argued last year that a comparison between drowning and Covid-19 risks was “not meaningful”.
Numerous studies have shown that masks and social distancing lower the risk of passing on Covid-19 and help keep people safe. Transport for London (TfL) has told people to wear masks or another kind of face covering on public transport since June last year.
Some 57 TfL workers have died with Covid-19 since the virus hit the UK last year. Asked whether he thought his actions could be seen as disrespectful to transport staff who are at increased risk of infection, as they cannot work from home, Mr Corbyn said: “No, I don’t think so. Transport workers have seen us and stood there doing absolutely nothing.
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“Like any section of the population, there will be people who agree with us and those who disagree with us.”
Mr Corbyn, 73, recently ran for mayor of London on an anti-lockdown, anti-low traffic neighbourhood platform, coming eleventh out of twenty candidates and gaining 0.8 per cent of the vote. He has been arrested several times for breaking lockdown rules with protests and was charged with ten offences in March. Mr Corybn was criticised in January for promoting a leaflet that seemed to compare Covid-19 vaccinations to Auschwitz.