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Home » A Story of Censorship – Starting in the 1970s

A Story of Censorship – Starting in the 1970s

Adam Green By Adam Green December 3, 2025 11 Min Read
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A Story of Censorship – Starting in the 1970s

This article was originally published by Rhoda Wilson at The Exposé.

Dr. Vernon Coleman first became aware of the censoring of citizens by the British state in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the 1980s, he wrote a good deal about the AIDS hoax, which the establishment didn’t like, and culminated in his book ‘The Health Scare’ being banned.

“AIDS was the first attempt to control the world with a pandemic. And it was the similarity between the way AIDS was promoted and the way the coronavirus hoax was being promoted, which helped me understand the truth about COVID right at the beginning,” he writes.

By Dr. Vernon Coleman

It’s difficult to know precisely when the censorship and the oppression really began, and it’s always been difficult to know who was behind it. But there has been no doubt in my mind that it has, for a long time, been very real.

In the 1970s and 1980s, I wrote and campaigned a good deal about animal experiments (of which I always heartily disapproved on scientific grounds as well as on humanitarian grounds), and the police in general, and the special branch in particular, started taking a close interest in my work from that time on.

Whenever I went to speak at an anti-vivisection rally, I would have my own video cameraman. He would follow me around and film me and everyone I spoke to.

Robin Webb was the Animal Liberation Front’s official press officer, and he had his own police cameraman too. When we met and talked, our two devoted cameramen would stand beside us filming us both. I photographed a bunch of policemen who were following me once and wrote an article about them in the Sunday People. One of the photographs was captioned `The Hand of Plod’.

On one occasion, I was prevented from travelling to a demonstration by a police sergeant who threatened to arrest me simply for driving on the road. I sued the Chief Constable. The judge didn’t like me suing a policeman.

The son of a dear friend of mine worked for Special Branch and told me (via his father) that although they followed all my activities closely, they did not regard me as dangerous in a physical sense. “Following my activities closely” meant that they tapped my telephone, sucked messages off my fax machine, and every time I moved house, someone arranged for one or two plainly marked telecom vans to sit parked outside my gate for days at a time. Whenever I asked what they were doing, the men inside the van replied that they were just making sure that my telephone line worked well. And this without my ever making a complaint about a dodgy line.

Another MI5 operative confirmed what I had been told.

The oppression was very heavy in those days because animal rights campaigners were pretty much the only reason for the existence of MI5, GCHQ, and Special Branch. My phone and fax machine were constantly tapped.

After that, other campaigns attracted the attention of the various branches of MI5, Special Branch, and GCHQ.

My successful campaign to force the government to issue controls on benzodiazepine tranquillisers resulted in my phone not working and my mail disappearing.

And then there was AIDS.

AIDS was the first attempt to control the world with a pandemic. And it was the similarity between the way AIDS was promoted and the way the coronavirus hoax was being promoted, which helped me understand the truth about COVID right at the beginning – in February and March 2020.

In the 1980s, I wrote a good deal about AIDS. I did a great deal of research and wrote a number of articles for The Sun (for which I was the medical correspondent for ten years), and in a number of them, I explained precisely why the Government and the medical establishment were creating entirely false fears. It was clear from all the medical literature that AIDS was not going to kill us all. (The official line, supported and promoted with great enthusiasm by the British Medical Association and the rest of the medical establishment, was that by the year 2000, everyone in the world would be in some way affected by AIDS.)

For the first months of the scare, I appeared a good deal on television and radio to debate the whole AIDS scare.

And then producers who were organising debates suddenly decided that they didn’t want anyone questioning the AIDS story – they wanted their debates to consist entirely of people supporting the official party line.

But I first started to be seriously, seriously banned in 1988 when my book ‘The Health Scandal’ was published by Sidgwick and Jackson in London.

Everyone at the publisher was terribly excited about the book. I met members of the board at some sort of pre-publication drinks do. One bigwig, William Rees-Mogg, a former editor of The Times, told me how important he thought the book was – both for the company and the country. This was, I think, the first book of mine to be targeted and crushed.

And then the mood changed, virtually overnight. The publicity department abandoned the book, and the rights department decided that they would not offer the paperback rights to the book to any of the country’s paperback houses. My literary agent at the time couldn’t believe this was happening because the paperback rights to my other books had always attracted healthy bids and some competition. She was even more startled when Sidgwick and Jackson told her that I could have the rights back and sell them myself. This was unheard of. My contract with Sidgwick and Jackson gave them a healthy percentage of the money received for the paperback rights. But S&J had mysteriously decided that they were so alarmed by the book’s contents that they didn’t want to have anything to do with the book’s future.

In the history of commercial publishing, no publisher has ever before or since turned down a decent chunk of money in such a way.

The only thing in the book that could possibly have caused this remarkable change of heart was a chapter dealing with AIDS, in which I demolished the popular establishment argument that AIDS was the biggest threat to mankind and would probably kill us all.

And so my agent sold the paperback rights to a paperback company called Mandarin for a decent sum and, apart from my agent’s commission, I kept all of that because Sidgwick and Jackson were now so alarmed by the book that they didn’t want any of the money. Mandarin printed and quickly sold out a paperback version of the book. But, curiously, they let it go out of print. (In 2023, I reprinted an edition of `The Health Scandal’ as a paperback.)

None of the original hardback or paperback editions of The Health Scandal were ever reprinted. But The Health Scandal is now available again and you can buy a copy via the bookshop on my website.

My next medical non-fiction book, called `Betrayal of Trust’, was rejected by just about every publisher in London – despite the fact that all my previous books had been commercially very successful. Most said they were worried about the legal consequences of publishing it. In other words, they thought they might be sued for libel. I didn’t think this was a serious risk because I had been very careful in compiling the book. I think they were told not to publish the book.

So I published the book myself, sold 10,000 copies of the hardback edition, reprinted it, sold that edition, printed a paperback edition, and sold all of those.

That was in 1994.

Ever since then, I’ve been censored, blocked, banned, and demonised.

And the censoring, blocking, banning, and demonising went up a couple of notches in early 2020 when I called the COVID-19 scare a hoax. The authorities didn’t like that very much.

Note: Both The Health Scandal and Betrayal of Trust are now available again as paperbacks, as are my first two academic books, The Medicine Men (1975) and Paper Doctors (1977). All are available via the bookshop on my website.

About the Author

Vernon Coleman, MB ChB DSc, practised medicine for ten years. He has been a full-time professional author for over 30 years. He is a novelist and campaigning writer and has written many non-fiction books.  He has written over 100 books, which have been translated into 22 languages. On his website, HERE, there are hundreds of articles which are free to read. Since mid-December 2024, Dr Coleman has also been publishing articles on Substack; you can subscribe to and follow him on Substack HERE.

There are no ads, no fees, and no requests for donations on Dr Coleman’s website or videos. He pays for everything through book sales. If you would like to help finance his work, please consider purchasing a book – there are over 100 books by Vernon Coleman available in print on Amazon.

Read the full article here

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