Dr Steve James is a successful 48-year-old hospital consultant who lives in a £1.6 million home in London’s East Dulwich with his partner Johanne, a Danish pastry chef turned yoga instructor.
Dr James works as an anaesthetist at the nearby King’s College Hospital, supplementing his NHS income via private work at the London Bridge Hospital, where he charges £230 for a half-hour consultation, and £450 for 90 minutes of his expert attention.
At weekends, he and Johanne enjoy cooking, cycling and attending a ‘Meditation Centre’ near the River Thames run by a Buddhist organisation where he is a member of its board of trustees.
Last summer, they holidayed on a Danish island where Johanne runs spiritual wellness retreats via a company named Earth Women in which clients learn about ‘the deep inherent wisdom and power that we women are born with but rarely told about’.
Their household income is, further supplemented via Earth Women’s online shop, which Dr James has promoted on social media.
It sells a host of ambitious-sounding healthcare products, including a tea that purports to ‘support and calm the nervous system’, essential oils that ‘calm and regulate the hormones during menopause’ and £40 vaginal steaming kits that claim to ‘boost fertility’, ‘detox the womb’, and release stored emotions’.
Pro choice: Dr Steve James airs his views on vaccination to Sajid Javid at King’s College Hospital
In other words, the Cambridge-educated medic appears to enjoy a prosperous, but largely unremarkable, existence, save for the odd flirtation with New Age mysticism of the sort made fashionable (and highly profitable) by the Gwyneth Paltrows of this world.
Or at least, he did.
For this week, Dr Steve James was propelled to the front line of the most toxic — and perhaps least ‘Zen’ — controversy of our age.
He became an overnight hero of the global anti-vaxx movement after making critical remarks about vaccination to Health Secretary Sajid Javid during a tour of King’s College Hospital.
In a filmed exchange, Dr James told the politician that he was ‘not happy’ with new rules due to take effect in April that will require all patient-facing staff in the NHS to become fully vaccinated.
‘I’ve had Covid at some point. I’ve got antibodies. I’ve been working on Covid ICU since the beginning,’ he told Mr Javid.
‘I have not had a vaccination, I do not want to have a vaccination. The vaccine is reducing transmission only for about eight weeks with Delta. With Omicron it’s probably less.
New Age pursuits: Dr James and his partner Johanne
‘And for that I would be dismissed if I don’t have a vaccine? The science isn’t strong enough.’
The remarks contained a number of factual errors.
But that didn’t stop them going viral, clocking millions of views on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and delighting conspiracy-minded opponents of vaccination who have hitherto struggled to find qualified doctors who voice views they approve of.
‘Well done! If only more medical staff honoured their path instead of taking Pharma’s 30 pieces of silver and knowingly carrying out protocols that resulted in patients suffering and dying,’ read a typical response aired on the encrypted messaging app Telegram.
‘This guy is a hero for standing up to tyranny and [for] humanity in the fight of good versus evil,’ read another.
Since then, Dr James has enjoyed sudden celebrity. He was interviewed by BBC Radio Four and appeared on Good Morning Britain, and was commissioned to write for the Spectator magazine. On Instagram, where he began to post videos of himself delivering monologues to camera — sometimes in front of the Houses of Parliament — he’s quickly gained 40,000 followers who have posted thousands of messages praising him for, as one put it, ‘waking people up to this madness’.
He’s also received fierce criticism, particularly from fellow doctors.
‘A deluded, irresponsible and dangerous intervention,’ was how Dr Rich Breeze, an anaesthetist at University Hospital Lewisham in South London, described it.
‘Obviously when you have over a million people working in the NHS, you will invariably have some people who have crank views, but equally patients have to be able to trust their doctors to interpret data,’ added Dr David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist. Meenal Viz, a doctor based in the Midlands, tweeted: ‘Legitimate discussion. Legitimate setting. Legitimate doctor. Legitimate outfits. British accent. Regurgitates anti-vax sentiments. His opinion holds weight. It will be recycled and replayed for years, mostly out of context.’
A BBC News ‘fact-checking’ article meanwhile identified a number of errors in Dr James’s remarks to Mr Javid, including that his claim about vaccines only reducing transmission of the Delta variant for eight weeks was false.The study he was referencing found that the AstraZeneca jab was effective for 12 weeks, while other vaccines were effective against transmission of the variant for far longer.
Moreover, the BBC article read: ‘Research looking at an infected person’s chance of passing the virus on doesn’t tell the whole story — the vaccines can also reduce people’s risk to others by stopping them catching the virus in the first place.’
In response, Dr James has somewhat sheepishly accepted that he was mistaken to make the eight-week claim. He has further denied being an ‘anti-vaxxer’, arguing that he is merely opposed to a policy that ‘mandates medical interventions’.
During an interview with the website UnHerd, which has clocked up 170,000 views, he stressed that vaccines have made a ‘big difference’ to the pandemic and saved many lives. However, he added that he’s ‘happy to take the risk of having Covid’ on the grounds that his ‘risk profile is really pretty low’.
Dr James also said that forcing medical professionals such as himself to get vaccinated to do their job was deeply illiberal: ‘Let’s please respect the ability of every adult in the country to think for themselves.’
The problem, as he perhaps should have known, is that in making these arguments, he has provided grist to the mill of extremists with very questionable pedigrees indeed.
For example, in the UnHerd interview, Dr James name-checked what he described as ‘a group formed called NHS100k based on that idea that there’s 100,000 [unvaccinated NHS staff] out there at present. Some of those people are going to have a vaccine under coercion, and that’s not a good thing.”
NHS100k is, in fact, an anti-vaxx lobby group organising protest marches in Sheffield and Halifax this weekend.
On the surface, it’s largely anodyne, for example encouraging supporters to wear purple ribbons to demonstrate opposition to vaccine mandates.
But behind the
