Neil O'Brien Profile picture
Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby & Wigston. Local news: https://t.co/Piu0iPMzMn Blog: https://t.co/eoYt58WNIB

Jan 20, 2021, 21 tweets

Another top covid-sceptic, Dr Clare Craig, has deleted all her tweets from last year.

Unfortunately for her attempts to cover her tracks... Google cached them, so we can take a look at how she’s used her professional qualifications to spread dangerous disinformation.

A thread:

On 18 October she claimed in a now-deleted tweet:
“No-one is going to die of it (only with it).Flu diagnoses have been replaced by COVID. This happens when you overtest people dying of respiratory failure until you get the result you are looking for.”

She also claimed in a deleted tweet: “the epidemic has passed. It’s over. We are now in the midst of a false positive pseudo-epidemic.” She added that, “The elderly are not catching it”

In a deleted tweet she stated: “There is no second wave. Yes there will be real winter cases but it will be a ripple.”

In deleted tweets she said the idea health services could be overwhelmed was “scaremongering” and claimed “The data is telling us this is not real anymore.”

She warned that "Rushing the vaccines through has the potential for being a murderous disaster."

On 18 September she claimed the majority of positive tests were false positives. She wrote in the Spectator:

“If the UK was completing 200,000 tests a day (which is around the number the government says it's currently carrying out), you would expect between 2,000 false positives a day. That accounts for the majority of our current positive results.”
spectator.co.uk/article/our-te…

On 20 November she told Talk Radio: “we are not in a pandemic” and insisted there was no risk of hospitals being overwhelmed.

She pushed the idea of a pseudo-epidemic deep into the second wave. In a blog of 28 November she was still complaining about a “pseudo-epidemic made up of false positives.”
logicinthetimeofcovid.com/2020/11/28/a-m…

She is now trying to downplay the problem in hospitals. In a (currently) still-up tweet from this year she tweeted: “18% fewer emergency admissions in Dec 2020 than Dec 2019.”

On 8 January she claimed there are “no excess deaths" and that it was just that "COVID deaths have replaced non-COVID deaths."

On 7 January she said “Latest excess deaths continue to be good news.”

(There is a page on "anti-virus" about why the claim there are "no excess deaths" is wrong)

covidfaq.co/Claim-There-ar…

When the new variant emerged she claimed its rapid growth rate was "not biologically plausible" and was a "laboratory artefact", caused by someone in the lab "shedding RNA all over the samples".

She said: "it's been around since September (and it didn't make much difference)"

On 10 January Clare signed a joint letter to the FBI and MI5 alleging a global plot by Chinese Communists. Co-signatories included David Icke collaborator Simon Dolan, conspiracy theorist Maajid Nawaz and Brian O'Shea, who advocated violence against “collaborator” politicians.

See:

And:

The fact someone with letters after their name was prepared to engage in this kind of motivated reasoning and campaigning matters, because her claims appeared in the media and were amplified by covid-sceptic journalists.

For example, a (now deleted) thread of 16 October in which she claimed “The vast majority of COVID deaths in England since July have been mislabelled false positive deaths” was picked up in national newspapers.

I see she has now removed the covid-sceptic smiley badges from her twitter profile.

But despite deleting her tweets, she can’t hide the dangerous disinformation she has done so much to spread during the pandemic.

She's used her professional qualifications to spread disinformation.

Worst of all, she is *still* pumping it out dangerous disinformation which still gets echoed in the media.

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