Another interesting story from inside the testing system in @thesundaytimes today, this time reporting on issues at Randox, who seem to provide a quarter of current Pillar 2 capacity.
Tests are often delayed or voided, with other contracts taking priority over national testing!
As well as the UK government, Randox also has testing contracts with Premiership Rugby and Dubai.
Their tests are apparently given VIP treatment, while Pillar 2 tests from across the UK can wait days to be processed.
Insiders say Randox has taken on too much and can't keep up.
Underpaid staff are being asked to work 12 hour shifts to keep the lab running 24/7.
Randox admits its lab is running "at and beyond capacity" and receiving more tests from the UK government than its stated capacity.
This is clearly not sustainable.
Randox deny that their lab voids a particularly high proportion of tests.
But the government doesn't publish this data, and last weekend's ST story showed Randox second only to Manchester in tests voided (5%) and taking more than 24 hours to give a result (91%) on September 9th.
Without this internal data being published, it's impossible to say if that's their normal performance, or where and why tests are delayed or voided.
But Randox have certainly had numerous issues in the past.
In May technical issues at Randox resulted in 67,000 tests being flown to America for processing!
Almost 30,000 of these tests were voided in the process.
At the time we were only doing 50,000 tests a day.
The pause on using Randox swabs on July 15 precisely coincides with a sharp drop in Pillar 2 lab capacity, knocking up to 18,000 tests a day off available capacity.
Two days after Pillar 2 labs hit 100% capacity on August 22 this capacity returned.
This week sees the second "ARC Forum" in London, a right wing talking shop with overtones of Islamophobia, transphobia and climate change denial, funded by Paul Marshall and Legatum, who are also behind GB News.
Unsurprisingly there are a lot of familiar faces there... 🧵
Alan Miller from anti-lockdown turned anti-everything group Together is on a panel.
He was interviewed at ARC Forum by right wing channel Newsmax Australia, and was apparently "shocked to learn" that, according to them, Australia has no free speech and supports trans people. 🤷♂️
Toby Young founded Daily Sceptic, which like Together started out as anti-lockdown but then branched out into culture war outrage farming and omni-contrarianism.
It's still edited by a member of anti-vax misinformation group HART, who laundered their work through the site.
Struggling to get papers published? Why not start your own scientific journal? 🤷♂️ That's what the Great Barrington Declaration's authors have done.
Martin Kulldorff is editor-in-chief, and Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta are on the editorial board. But wait, there's more. 🧵
The editorial board of the GBD's journal also includes their Collateral Global colleagues David Livermore (ex-HART), Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson (whose recent work includes dumpster diving "studies" misrepresenting responses to FOI requests from random members of the public).
Other familiar names include Scott Atlas (former Trump advisor, and co-founder with Kulldorff and Bhattacharya of the "Academy for Science and Freedom"), John Ioannidis (who, like Gupta, underestimated covid's fatality rate) and Marty Makary (Trump's nominee to head the FDA).
BREAKING: None of this is true.
The father was 18 at the time of the Rwandan genocide, and living in Uganda.
He's also a Tutsi - the victims of the genocide, not its perpetrators.
And Keir Starmer didn't represent him.
Needless to say, former Brexit Party MEP turned conspiracy theorist Jim Ferguson gives absolutely no evidence to support these claims, which seem to be based on social media rumours that have been circulating for months.
Conspiracy X's meltdown over Trump backing mRNA cancer vaccines is a thing of beauty. 😆
🧵
Apparently the mRNA cancer vaccines are "all part of the depopulation agenda".
Conspiracy X went from "Make America Healthy Again" to "oh my God, Trump's trying to kill us all" so fast they'll get whiplash. 😆
And if you thought "the depopulation agenda" was wild, how about mRNA cancer vaccines as a CIA assassination tool to off people chosen for termination by AI, or to "shut off people's connection to God"? 🤯
As wildfires continue to burn in LA, Naomi Wolf has falsely claimed they were fueled by cloud seeding, and shared stories linking them to anything from 15 minute cities and a supposed "globalist deindustrialization plan" to the 2028 Olympics and space lasers. 🤨
Whenever there's a fire, conspiracy theorists always blame "directed energy weapons". Although often the videos they share show a far more plausible cause. In this case, it's a sparking power line banging against a tree amidst high winds...
One of the weirder conspiracy theories I've come across in the past is that there's a vast network of tunnels under LA used to traffick children to the stars, linked to the Getty Museum. 🤷♂️
Unsurprisingly QAnon types are linking the nearby Palisades fire to this bizarre story...
After the horrific attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, all the people you'd expect immediately blamed Islam and called for Muslims to be deported en masse for one man's crime. Just one problem... Apparently the suspect isn't a Muslim. 🧵
The apparent suspect in the attack on the Magdeburg market is a Saudi refugee who denounced Islam, accuses Germany of a "secret project to Islamize Europe", and regularly shared posts by far right accounts using similar language to the people who assumed he was an Islamist.
Even after the suspect's identity and beliefs were reported, racists and bigots on X were still blaming Islamists for the attack, or even claiming it was an attempt to "gaslight us" and "we all know why the terrorist carried out the attack".