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“No-one is going to die of it (only with it).Flu diagnoses have been replaced by COVID.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.”
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.
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.
As @lukedepulford and @MsMelChen have pointed out, Pater Mandelson had deep links to the Chinese regime.
Over many years he's been the leading voice for the CCP in the UK.
A quick 🧵
For example, when warnings on Huawei's control of our telecoms infrastructure were mounting, Mandelson accused the US of “fomenting hysteria” and warned Europe not to join an “economic and technological iron curtain” around China. theguardian.com/technology/201…
He's always been quick to make the argument that we needed to get closer to an increasingly "preeminent" China:
There are so many explosive revelations here it's hard to know where to start. The bags of cash obviously take the headline but the behaviour of Ministers is the really shocking thing.
Quick thread:
1) There WAS political input into the evidence given and not given - so the government has misled parliament.
2) The 1 Sept meeting (which the government initially denied the existence of) involved all the most senior officials in Whitehall, including the Cab Sec.
Using Freedom of Information I've obtained new data on employments by nationality in each local authority.
It's the only solid data on where migrants have moved to since 2021.
It lets us estimate net migration to each area - & see how it's impacted rental costs & wages. 🧵
The census last ran in England and Wales in 2021, and the traditional source of more up-to-date data, the Labour Force Survey, has collapsed to the point where the ONS warn it can not be relied on to estimate the number of migrants in different places.
We already knew the share of employments held by people from outside the UK has increased from 15.4% to 19.5% in the last four years, with a big shift from EU to non-EU.
Should primary school kids be taught about polyamory, the fetish spectrum & how to get breast binders? Should we tell kids puberty blockers are “reversible” & risk free? Teach 8 year olds about masturbation?
My 2-part piece looks at how sex education in schools went so wrong 🧵
Problem 1: secrecy. You don't have a legal right to see what your kids are being taught, and Labour just voted down the creation of such a right.
Problem 2: too much too young - there is just too much age-inappropriate and sexualising content
Via FOI request I have obtained a large new dataset on the extent to which students at different universities & colleges pay back their student loans.
My new piece looks at the data in light of the revelations in the Sunday Times about fraud in higher education.
A quick thread:
The Sunday Times looked at the intersection of "franchised" degrees & the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS).
People may be surprised that in the first 6 months of this government, long after Brexit, over 180,000 people were given settled or pre-settled status under the EUSS:
How come this scheme is still going, long after the summer 2021 deadline? Applications have been allowed long after the deadline, including lots of repeat applications. People can come if they say they are in a relationship with someone who gains settled status, so 200,000 people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have gained settlement under the settlement route for EU citizens, along with 65,000 from Ghana and Nigeria.
The map below shows the share of child sex convictions where the offender's ethnicity wasn't recorded. The variation is huge.
It shows why Starmer is wrong to block a national inquiry & rely on local officials to investigate themselves.
And it points to a wider issue...🧵(1/6)
You might have thought that following 2020 and George Floyd there would be improvements to statistics on criminal justice and ethnicity.
But my new piece finds the reverse is true - we're becoming less and less likely to record the ethnicity of people convicted of crimes. (2/6)
Child sex offences are in the news, but they are just one offence type where ethnicity information has become less and less likely to be recorded. (3/6)