1/n @allisonpearson, columnist whips up a storm against a microbiologist, & threatens legal action, because his abject apologies, multiple, & deletion of tweets, weren't good enough for her.
2/n You might come away from these exchanges thinking that @allisonpearson is a vicious & vindictive person who can't handle disagreement. But that would be irrelevant to the question of how truthful she is. So let's look at that. #AllisonPearson. twitter.com/allisonpearson…
3/n @allisonpearson doesn't have a great record on truth regarding the lies thrown about autism being 'caused' by MMR vaccinations; she's listed by @spikedonline among "Gullible hacks: journalists duped by the anti-MMR campaign" spiked-online.com/2007/07/17/the…
4/n @allisonpearson doesn't think British hospitals, i.e. the NHS, can cope with the "influx of migrants". She leaves out all the migrants and so on, who actually worked or still work for the NHS, without whom the NHS would really be in trouble.
5/n @allisonpearson relayed an absolute lie about a photo, and told an absolute lie, when she claimed a photo of a sick boy in Leeds hospital was "100% faked". She deleted many of her own tweets then. Did she ever apologise? #AllisonPearson
7/n I'll add that the below is a direct lie too. @allisonpearson is yet once again downplaying deaths from #COVID19; but then, as we shall see, she has quite a record of nontruthfulness on COVID_19. Meanwhile, the UK hospitals are filling up badly.
8/n Before more recent lies: your reminder that @allisonpearson wrote this ("Is the Government going to go on pretending ...") in November. Now the UK hospitals are filling up again, & people will soon start dying again, from #COVID19.
9/n @allisonpearson directly claimed she did not post against "lockdowns, tracing and quarantine". As we shall see, that is simply grossly untrue. But here she is, posting against face-masks, in July. #AllisonPearson
10/n Remember, @allisonpearson expressly claimed she did not post against "lockdowns, tracing and quarantine". Here is #AllisonPearson directly relaying a fakenews photo (it's NOT of an NHS ward) & yet another lie about what #COVID19 will do to the UK
11/n @allisonpearson pretends that "Children are perfectly safe ... not affected by Covid". Either a direct lie, or just utter idiocy from #AllisonPearson, you be the judge. Children pass on #COVID19 to others, & they get it too; long-term effects unknown
12/n @allisonpearson expressly claimed not to be involved in a hate-campaign against the NHS. #AllisonPearson just retweeted these two bits of unbased drivel hating on the NHS *as a whole*.
So Pearson's direct claim might well be considered a lie.
12/ Your reminder: @allisonpearson expressly claimed not to post against "lockdowns, tracing and quarantine". Here she's posting directly against testing.
13/n @allisonpearson expressly claimed not to post against "lockdowns, tracing and quarantine". Here she's posting directly against lockdowns. And that just as the second wave *really* hits UK NHS hospitals.
1/ I'm going to tackle this one very directly & separately in public, because the target of @allisonpearson's hate campaign has expressed suicidal ideation. It has been suggested to me publicising his name is not in his interests.
2/ I *strongly* suggest that serving the victim's needs is best done by exposing @allisonpearson and her lackadaisical relationship with the truth, in the context of her spiteful attacks on the victim.
3/ If the only way to stop @allisonpearson's hate-campaign against him was by revealing his name (already published a whole lot of times by @allisonpearson, with 83.1K followers; I have 8.3K, a tenth), then I'll stick to what I've done. Let's NOT pretend my addition will hurt him
2/n Just an idle note on the irony: now that Brexit has happened, UK citizens may not be able to charge the NHS for costs of a knee-operation in Poland. Them's the breaks.
2/n You also all know I caught the smallest hedgehog twice, to weigh it. It was badly underweight, but I managed to get it up to above needed weight just before it disappeared into hibernation for the winter.
Reading through replies to this thread, I'm struck by how many:
— denigrate the specific vaccines, for murky purposes;
— simply have no & don't want understanding at all of vaccine safety & efficacy trials;
— are obsessed with "government", when in fact on this it did very well
also, not only an #ff for @clairlemon, but also an #ff for @ScepticalAussie, who is almost always right (except for the times she disagrees with me) & who knows how to find & present data well (& has much more patience than me).
For a while, I thought they might be doing it out of overpowering unconscious fear (surrender to the virus!). But now I think it's just a mixture of antivaxxers, and those who want to pretend the pandemic doesn't exist, because stupid politics.
Folks, now is NOT the time to relax. Get the vaccine as soon as you can, be very wary of the next 2 months anyway, they're going to be hell on the ICU's. Maintain all precautions until a fortnight after you & everyone around you got the vaccine (and better, the booster jab too).
Folks, pardon me harping on this, but every day seems to mark a new milestone in why you all should be taking the new #LondonVariant very seriously indeed, & why it needs tough suppression.
This may be a storm petrel, it may not be at all. The new #LondonVariant may be just making its presence more widely known among those under 65 by sheer force of more transmission, higher R0, or it may point to something else. Very indistinct as yet.
This is very true. Is it the new #LondonVariant? Is it just governmental mismanagement, including defunding the NHS for years, plus MSM press idiocy & misinformation from the likes of @IsabelOakeshott & @allisonpearson? Something else? Or a combination?
The warning that @zeynep writes here is very true. It may yet turn out to be a false alarm. But taking no new action would be completely disasterous if it turns out to be a real problem.